Pentagon Papers whistleblower calls on Biden to pardon Hale

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has called on the White House to pardon drone program whistleblower Daniel Hale on the eve of President Biden’s Summit for Democracy, which kicks off on Thursday.

Ellsberg was speaking in an interview with the BBC’s Razia Iqbal, broadcast as part of Blueprint for Free Speech’s annual Whistleblowing Awards ceremony this evening. Ellsberg received the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award, while Hale was awarded the International Whistleblowing prize.

“Daniel Hale deserves to be seen as a great a patriot as his ancestor Nathan Hale, the first American to be tried for giving secrets to Americans,” Ellsberg said.

Nathan Hale was executed for spying on the British for the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.

Ellsberg went on to underline the importance of Hale’s disclosures – which revealed that over nine out of ten people killed by the US drone program were innocent civilians.

“We think of the drone attacks as somehow precise and surgical. What he revealed was that, yes they don’t kill as many innocent civilians and bystanders as they would with an even larger warhead, but this doesn’t make this murder of non-combatants any less of a murder.”

He praised Hale for “revealing criminal behaviour by our government”, pointing out it was “absurd of course in any sense of the rule of law that you should be imprisoned for revealing criminality by your government or by anyone else”.

Hale is serving a 45-month prison sentence for his whistleblowing. He was prevented from making a public statement due to the conditions of his detention at the Communications Management Unit in Marion, Illinois. These facilities are typically used for inmates serving sentences for terrorism related offences, and communication with the outside world is severely restricted.

Ellsberg, whose famous Pentagon Papers disclosures had their fiftieth anniversary this year,  pointed to a recent exponential growth in cases brought against whistleblowers by the US government.

“President Obama, having come in promising a more open government, actually brought more cases against whistleblowers than all previous presidents put together,” he said. “He did that in two terms – Donald Trump prosecuted the same number in one term, and that included for the first time a journalist.”

He was referring to the decision taken by US prosecutors in 2019 to charge Julian Assange under the Espionage Act for publishing information he had received from whistleblowers about US military actions in Iraq.

A British High Court ruling is imminent on whether Assange will be extradited to the US.

“If [Assange] is extradited, and prosecuted and convicted, he will not be the last journalist. It will be the end of the First Amendment essentially,” said Ellsberg. “The Government lying is pretty much the same now as ever, I’m sorry to say. The prosecution of people to keep the secrecy is what has changed – especially since 9/11.”

Ellsberg was also charged under the Espionage Act when he leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers, a secret report on the Vietnam War that he had helped draft, to the press. The report revealed that successive administrations had grossly misled the American public about the US’s military and political involvement in Vietnam.

The case against Ellsberg collapsed when the government’s dirty tricks campaign against him came to light.

“Domestic crimes were conducted to shut me up against further information about Nixon. That included attempting to incapacitate me or assassinate me on the steps of the Capitol building on May 3rd 1972 in the midst of my legal proceedings and having heard me on illegal wiretaps,” he said. “Those same offences have been conducted against Julian Assange and should lead to the end of his prosecution, as it did mine.”

Ellsberg’s clarion call to Biden to safeguard democracy by celebrating rather than jailing whistleblowers and journalists for making disclosures that are manifestly in the public interest comes at an awkward time for the US president.

Biden’s Summit for Democracy, a global crusade for democratic renewal and a renewed struggle against authoritarian rule and the erosion of human rights, kicks off on Thursday. Meanwhile, Hale continues to languish in jail despite being hailed by media law scholars as “a classic whistleblower, who acted in good faith to alert the public of secret government policies that deserved to be debated by the citizens in a truly functioning democracy,” the Washington Post reported.

A personal friend, Noor Mir, said Hale was “very humbled and grateful” to receive Blueprint’s International Whistleblowing prize.

“I know that if Daniel were here in person he would obviously have a lot more to say,” he said. “As a member of his support team and as his friend, we hope that this award encourages other people who know the truth about crimes that are being committed by governments, about atrocities that are happening in the world, to tell the truth.”