A soldier who deserted from the US Army in Iraq because he found the war morally objectionable – partly because of the treatment of prisoners – faces the same punishment as those who abused the prisoners at Abu Ghuraib. I turn to those more knowledgeable: Can he plead that he deserted because the orders were illegal?
Related Posts
Video of Christmas in Afghanistan
From my buddy doing the Circus/Unicycle program. [Below the fold to save on bandwidth.] Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, Unicycles
Independence Day
Happy 4th of July! 228 years old. Obligatory reading today are both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the US. There’s also a great op-ed in today’s New York Times talking about the relevance of the Constitution to today’s America. Current favorite president: FDR. Read something about his vision of America. Always remember Lincoln and what he had to say. Of course, now we are talking about a new type of slavery, a mental one. Where is our Thomas Paine?
Now you see them…
So there has been much ado about the arrest of Muslims related to terrorist charges. We all see the headlines. However, how many of them are actually holding up to close scrutiny? John Walker Lindh was plead out of the system. Jose Padilla was declared an enemy combatant once Ashcroft realized the evidence he had wouldn’t fly in the criminal justice system. Yaser Hamdi might be released after two years, with NO charges being brought against him. Brandon Mayfield was the latest Richard Jewel. Anybody know what’s going on with Lackawanna Six? Today’s news stories have to do with Michigan.…
2 thoughts on “Is it the same?”
Comments are closed.
With the caveat that I’m not familiar with the military code of conduct, I don’t think his claims are a defense to a charge of desertion. If he was given an illegal order,then there probably is a process to object to that order and refuse to carry it out. Deserting isn’t a legitimate option to an unlawful order and can cause serious consequences to military discipline.
The article also indicates that he now claims conscientious objector status against an ‘oil-driven’ war. To my understanding, that claim doesn’t give him conscientious objector status. To gain that status, one must object to war on any basis, and not pick and choose based on one’s view of the the political reasons for the war. In other words, one cannot be a conscientious objector only to this war, and perhaps not others.
Obviously you can’t have soldiers decide which wars they want to fight.
Thank you. That’s what I thought. It seems bad form on the part of the defense attorney to let his client run at the mouth. The story has been buried pretty far on most of the cable news outlets, so I wonder how much we’ll hear about it in the future.