The Ehren Watada story...Courage To Resist!... Part 2 of 3

The Ehren Watada story...Courage To Resist!... Part 2 of 3
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/786/1/


Watada's Story

A former Eagle Scout with a degree in finance, Watada volunteered
for military service after 9/11. His motives could hardly have been
more patriotic. For himself and his fellow soldiers, he said, "the
reason why we all joined the military" and "the commitment we made
to this country" is "to sacrifice everything--sacrifice our lives,
our freedom--to ensure that all Americans live in a country where we
have true democracy."

When he learned that he would be shipped to Iraq, Lt. Watada began
to read everything he could find about the war, on all sides, so
that he could better motivate the troops under his command. One of
the books he read was James Bamford's A Pretext for War. In a film
made about his story, In the Name of Democracy, Watada described
shock at what he learned: "Our country, and we as a military, had
been deceived. There's no other way of putting it. Whether they
misrepresented the truth, or they told half-truths or misled--it's a
lie." The Iraq War was "a war not out of self-defense but by
choice."

Watada is not a pacifist, and he based his stand not just on the
falsehood of the justifications for the war but on the usurpation of
legitimate constitutional authority by the officials in the George
W. Bush administration.

"There came a time when I saw people with power, and they held that
power absolute and they did not listen to the will of the people,"
he says in In the Name of Democracy. "That was the leadership of our
country. Those were the people who were in charge of our lives, and
yet they did what they wanted to do with impunity, and nobody was
willing to stand up and challenge them."

Watada offered to resign or to be deployed to Afghanistan; the Army
refused. He felt bound by his military oath to do what his
conscience abhorred. Then he had an epiphany: his military oath
actually required him to refuse orders he believed were illegal, and
his loyalty was owed to the Constitution, not to the officials who
were perverting it.

"I believe the only real God-given right we have is the freedom to
choose," Watada says. "And when we take that away from ourselves,
then we put ourselves in an invisible prison that nobody else
imposes on us except for ourselves. When you tell yourself again
that you do have a choice--I could go to prison for it, I could be
tortured, I could die for it, but I have that choice and I can make
it--then that invisible prison kind of lifts off, and you feel free.
I felt so free when I told myself that I have a choice."

On June 7, 2006, Watada issued a statement announcing his refusal to
deploy: "It is my conclusion as an officer of the armed forces that
the war in Iraq is not only morally wrong but a horrible breach of
American law. Although I have tried to resign out of protest, I am
forced to participate in a war that is manifestly illegal. As the
order to take part in an illegal act is ultimately unlawful as well,
I must as an officer of honor and integrity refuse that order."

Crucial to his argument was the unconstitutionality of the decision
to go to war. "We had people within our country with tremendous
amounts of power who were doing whatever they felt they wanted to,"
Watada explained. "There were no checks and balances like our
Constitution espouses."

His disobedience was also his duty under international law: The UN
Charter and the Nuremberg principles "bar wars of aggression." As
treaties, they are US law as well.

Watada was aware that imprisonment was the likeliest consequence of
his action. But he planned to put the war on trial in the process:
"I will try to argue the legal merits of the war: that it is
illegal, that it is immoral and that officers and soldiers of
conscience should not be forced to do something that is illegal and
immoral."

The Army charged Lt. Watada with failure to deploy to Iraq with his
unit and began court martial proceedings. There began the torturous
process that ended with Watada's recent victory--a process that
echoes the old saying, "Military justice is to justice as military
music is to music."

Watada and his supporters prepared to put the war on trial. But
Military Judge Lt. Col. John Head refused to allow Watada's
motivation for refusing the order--the war's illegality--even to be
considered. Judge Head maintained that when Watada stipulated that
he had disobeyed an order, he was actually confessing guilt, making
any defense irrelevant.

The court tied itself in knots trying to maintain the paradox that a
soldier has a duty to disobey illegal orders while Watada could not
argue that the order he disobeyed was not a lawful order.

When the judge called for the prosecution and defense lawyers to
request a mistrial on the grounds that Watada must have
misunderstood his own statement, both sides told Judge Head that
they disagreed with him. At that point the judge virtually
instructed the lawyer for the prosecution to ask for a mistrial,
which he immediately granted.

Judge Head proposed to retry Watada on the same charges. But, as
Watada's lawyer Eric Seitz said in a press conference after the
court martial, since both prosecution and defense had presented
their full cases, that would be an obvious breach of the
Constitution's safeguard against double jeopardy--trying anyone
twice on the same charges. The Army, Seitz said, should realize that
"this case is a hopeless mess."

Three military courts rejected Watada's double jeopardy claim; but
as soon as the case was appealed to a civilian court, US District
Court Judge Benjamin Settle issued a stay blocking the retrial and
charging that "the military judge likely abused his discretion." The
Army announced it would appeal but then did nothing for eighteen
months, leaving Watada in limbo. Finally, after a campaign by
Watada's supporters, the Obama administration's Department of
Justice nixed the Army's appeal. The Army threatened to court
martial Watada on other charges but finally decided to accept
defeat.

...to be continued in part 3
;-)


--
Each person has an individual responsibility to determine if his actions are moral, and
no government or army may ever take that responsibility away.

definition:
murder - the unjustifiable and intentional killing of people, NO EXCEPTIONS.
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