Watada’s Victory Lets Military Off the Hook

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http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18100/26/

by Jacob G. Hornberger

It seems like the U.S. Military might be let off the hook by a federal judge’s ruling in case of Lt. Ehren Watada. The judge has issued a preliminary injunction enjoining the military from prosecuting Watada, pending whether the military can successfully show that the prosecution of Watada would not violate the double-jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Here is what is going on in this case and why it is so important.

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, Nazi officials were charged with the war crime of waging a war of aggression. What that meant was that the German government had attacked and waged war against countries that had not attacked Germany.

Watada ultimately came to the realization that the U.S. government was committing the war crime for which Nazi officials had been indicted and convicted at Nuremberg, to wit: attacking a country, Iraq, that had not attacked the United States. Once he realized that, Watada refused to blindly obey orders to participate in the war crime. He refused to deploy to Iraq, both on the legal grounds arising out of the Nuremberg proceedings and the moral ground that it’s wrong to kill people, even as a soldier, in a war of aggression.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government took the same position that the German government took — that soldiers cannot refuse to participate in a war, even if it is an immoral and illegal war of aggression being waged by their ruler. Whether the war is immoral or illegal is not an issue for the soldier, claim U.S. officials. Those are issues to be decided by their commander in chief. snip

So, why did I begin by saying that the federal judge’s injunction might have let the military off the hook? Because if Watada is convicted and his double-jeopardy claim rejected, when he appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court would be faced squarely with the crucial question: Are U.S. soldiers bound to obey orders to commit the war of crime of waging a war of aggression?

Are they duty bound to sacrifice conscience and reason when ordered to participate in the killing of people in a war of aggression? The answer might not be one that the president and the military would like. If the Court ruled for Watada, the ruling would obviously constitute one of the biggest transformations of the principles of military service in history.