Friday, June 09, 2006

Officer Refuses to fight in Illegal War

After Downing Street
First Id like to say that I prefer to link to more traditional media rather than to the actual liberal media. This is simply because society put more weight behind an argument from say the Washington Post than Daily Kos. But this is no different than giving more crediblity to CNN than Fox or any other right wing media. with the exception of Fox the News agencys still claim to be neutral and while they are not , they are still closer to the middle than blogsphere or news outlets dedicated to a particular side of the political spectrum. Why am I talking about media in a post about the first officer with the balls to say I have the legal right to refuse orders to Iraq because those orders are Illegal and I am allowed to refuse illegal orders. I bring up the media because while I didnt spend much time looking, the best information I could find on this particular event was of course from the liberal world. The rest of the media will simply portray him as a coward and a disserter instead of the dissenter that he is. The fact that as the officer says, he is doing this because he feels that he can protect the troops better by speaking out against the war than he can as an officer in Iraq. And its a valid point, although many will disagree. This officer will probably face a court martial, but while I know nothing about military justice i will assume that a court martial involves a court? I hope thats the case, because then he will have the chance to show that this war is illegal and therefor no one in the military needs to follow orders to go there. of course for that exact same reason no matter how compelling his argument they have to find him guilty and either kick him out of the military or put him in jail. It a powerful statement that everyone should listen too because he obviously feels quite strongly about this or he would not risk jail for it. I have the utmost respect for this officer.

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