Late in September, the very interesting case of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada quietly went away. Watada was the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq (early in 2006) on the strength of his convictions that the war was fraudulently launched and illegal, and that he would be committing war crimes if he were to follow orders.
The military charged Watada with two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer for public statements critical of the Iraq war and a count of missing movement for refusing to deploy. Trial of the charges ended in a prosecution-requested mistrial in 2007. The military's efforts to retry Watada failed on Double Jeopardy grounds. The Bush Justice Department took steps toward readying an appeal, but Solicitor General Elena Kagan decided not to pursue the matter earlier this year.
You can see Watada explaining some of the reasons for his actions in the clip available on the blog of the very wonderful Densho Project, an extraordinary online resource about the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II.
Watada's case invites thought about the role of individual conscience in military judgments and the compass of permissible public comment by uniformed soldiers during a war.
Some observers, noting Watada's Japanese ancestry, also saw connections between Watada's resistance and the refusal of hundreds of incarcerated Japanese Americans to comply with the military draft in 1944. Here is an interesting video of a conversation between Watada and a few of that earlier generation of Japanese American protesters.
The WWII-era resisters are the subject of my 2001 book "Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II." I myself see some important distinctions between Watada's protest and that of the incarcerated Japanese Americans in WWII. Among other things, the WWII resisters were civilians refusing the draft and not officers refusing orders; whatever one thinks of the merits of the grounds of Watada's and the WWII resisters' protests, it must be the case that an officer's freedom to refuse a government order is narrower than a civilian's. More importantly, the WWII resisters were not protesting the lawfulness or morality of the war against Japan; they maintained that the government, having stripped them of all of citizenship's benefits and privileges on the basis of their ancestry, lost the power to impose on them citizenship's greatest burden.
The Watada case ends with a whimper ... but there is much to think about here.
Some observers, noting Watada's Japanese ancestry, also saw connections between Watada's resistance and the refusal of hundreds of incarcerated Japanese Americans to comply with the military draft in 1944. Here is an interesting video of a conversation between Watada and a few of that earlier generation of Japanese American protesters.
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