Today is the first day of the court-martial of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who has refused to redeploy to Iraq on the grounds that the invasion and occupation are illegal. “As his court-martial got under way, military judge Lt. Col. John Head refused to allow almost all defense witnesses to take the stand. Head previously ruled that Watada’s attorney, Eric Seitz, could not debate the legality of the Iraq war in court” (AP).
This ruling makes it impossible for Watada to get a fair trial. What else would you expect, in Bush’s America.
The military oath taken at the time of induction reads:
“I,____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God”
The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) 809.ART.90 (20), makes it clear that military personnel need to obey the “lawful command of his superior officer,” 891.ART.91 (2), the “lawful order of a warrant officer”, 892.ART.92 (1) the “lawful general order”, 892.ART.92 (2) “lawful order”. In each case, military personnel have an obligation and a duty to only obey Lawful orders and indeed have an obligation to disobey Unlawful orders, including orders by the president that do not comply with the UCMJ. The moral and legal obligation is to the U.S. Constitution and not to those who would issue unlawful orders, especially if those orders are in direct violation of the Constitution and the UCMJ.
During the Iran-Contra hearings of 1987, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a decorated World War II veteran and hero, told Lt. Col. Oliver North that North was breaking his oath when he blindly followed the commands of Ronald Reagan. As Inouye stated, “The uniform code makes it abundantly clear that it must be the Lawful orders of a superior officer. In fact it says, ‘Members of the military have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders.’ This principle was considered so important that we-we, the government of the United States, proposed that it be internationally applied in the Nuremberg trials.” (International Law)
By ruling that the defense could not question the legality of the Iraq war, the judge is ignoring The Uniform Code of Military Justice. It is thus clear that the US military justice system is as rotten as the US legal system, with its handing of the Presidency to the losing candidate. Clearly the war is illegal, since under the US constitution, the UN Charter has the status of US law, and under the UN treaty, “pre-emptive” wars are illegal.
There is a Web site dedicated to Lt. Watada here.
(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)
Update [2007-2-7 21:21:45 by Alexander]:
Maybe not so rigged after all.
The judge has declared a mistrial. As far as I can understand what the issue is, Watada had signed a statement saying he did not redeploy, and the prosecution was using that as evidence that he confessed. But in court, it emerged that he did not think that admitting that he did not redeploy was a confession of guilt, since he did not think he was obliged to redeploy, since the order was illegal. So the judge threw the signing statement out. What I don’t undertand is why that required a declaration of mistrial. The only thing I can conjecture is that the signing statement was central to the prosecution’s case.
Mistrial declared in war objector court-martial
The whole thing sounds pretty strange to me. Is this the judge’s way to prevent a miscarriage of justice while covering his but?
This case never had any of the trappings of a fair trial. This was always about the military making an example of one man. A conviction was the one and only goal. Any manipulation of the system by the military was thought by them to be fair so long as a conviction was the end result. In this instance the means clearly do not justify the end. Shameful stuff this continues to be.
we could never allow a war that the President launched and Congress approved to be deemed illegal.
It’s not shocking at all that the subject is not permissable in courts-martial.
I’m pleased that I got a couple of comments to this, my first diary, including one from the Man himself.
Many of the comments at the cross-posted dKos diary were unreal. One said that no one has ever questioned the legality of this war (even though I was not merely questioning it, but outright declaring that it is illegal!). Another asked have I read the Constitution lately: it is the executive branch that declares war!
That place sure has become dysfunctional. (It was the marisacat affair that brought me here. I should have come here after I got banned last summer.) If you say something even a bit to the left of Hillary (not that you have to be left-wing to be against this war), you get numerous demands for arguments proving why various positions held by Dick Cheney are wrong.
welcome Alexander.
It’s illegal, but is it illegal in any sense that Kosovo was not also illegal?
I’m not talking good idea versus bad idea. I mean under internationa law and our treaty obligations?
so I was always against that war. I am not one of those “the war’s OK so long as our party started it” Dems, and I also don’t like the American style of war, substituting air power for troops on the ground.
I’m not meaning to be snarky here at all.
Do you think the people that made the decision to intervene in Kosovo deserve the same punishment as the people that made the decision to intervene in Iraq?
I ask that in both the legal and the abstract justice sense.
In the entire anti-war movement I have seem more sloppy thinking on this topic than any other.
And we are entering the realm of abstract speculation here. I haven’t delved into the NATO intervention at all deeply. I know Diana Johnstone has written a book about this, arguing that the Serbian “genocide” of Kosovars (?) was much exaggerated, but I have not read it. (Googling “Diana Johnstone Kosovo” brings up some articles though, so I suppose I should read them.)
What I do know is that civilians were killed through fairly indiscriminate bombing and civilian infrastructure destroyed through deliberate bombing. Since no NATO country was attacked by the Serbs, that means war crimes were committed. But then I don’t know if there is a single American president since Nixon who has not committed war crimes. (Carter and Ford are the only possibilities; I think the main bad thing Ford did along these lines is approve of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, but I’m not sure if that’s technically a war crime.)
Since it’s highly unlikely that Clinton and people from his administration are going to be brought to trial for Kosovo, I don’t think it’s worth theorizing about this too much. Personally, I don’t have much of a desire for Clinton being “brought to justice” (even though I don’t like him, because of his “centrism”), although if the world miraculously became a civilized and just place, so that if Clinton and his fellow decision-makers were brought to trial, I wouldn’t mind at all.
The war crimes of Bush and his administration are of a much, much greater scale that Clinton’s. Furthermore, they are guilty of numerous, massive crimes against the US government and American people. Therefore, although in principle Clinton should be brought to justice for Kosovo, the need to bring Bush, Cheney, et al. to justice is, I would say, incomparably greater.
I hope you won’t find my thinking here sloppy. If you do, please let me know.
BTW, Norman Solomon has a piece about this today in Counterpunch.
One reason I find this case of Watada very significant is that from the very start of the war, I was appalled that no servicemen, much less generals, refused to follow orders for a clearly illegal war. (I think that is directly analogous to the USSC decision installing Bush in the White House: clear norms of legality are routinely ignored by the powers that be in this country, and people of conscience are on the order of something like one in 100,000.) Now we know what would have happened to them if they did. Of course, if there were significantly more Watadas out there, the war would stop pretty quickly. (That is the purpose of this court martial, of course.) Solomon’s article suggests that a significant anti-war movement might be developing among military personnel and families, nevertheless. We shall see.
If you are for the US empire (which I am most certainly am not: one of the reasons I was against the intervention is that I am against the US being an empire), the US intervention in Kosovo was a good thing: it transformed NATO into an arm of the US empire (speaking roughly; before the collapse of the USSR, NATO obviously had a legitimate purpose).
The Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq on the other hand has significantly accelerated the decline of the empire, producing exactly the effect opposite to that intended by the neocons, which was to arrest it.
All that I am saying is that there is a case for looking the other way with Clinton, and that you don’t have to be an anti-war, anti-imperialist left-winger to make it.