JUST WHO IS LT. EHREN WATADA?
By Peter J. Swing
In June 2006, Lt. Ehren Watada publicly refused deployment orders to Iraq, becoming the first commissioned officer of the United States Army to do so since 1965. After battling the military justice system for more than a year, he currently faces six years in federal prison and a dishonorable discharge.
During this time, Watada’s family and friends have mobilized a national movement supporting his refusal and protesting the war, and he has become an icon for the anti-war movement, especially among Asian Americans. Watada’s refusal to be silent is the act of an Asian American who adhered to his convictions despite the risk of severe consequences.
‘These Roots’
Born and raised in the farming community of Fort Lupton, Colorado, Ehren Watada’s father, Bob, remembers growing up amidst racism as one of the few Japanese in Colorado.
“Imagine going into a restaurant and sitting in the corner and not being served,” Bob Watada said. “You could sit there for two hours, and they wouldn’t serve you, even if they served everybody else. After a while, we would just walk out.”
But he would not continue to walk out quietly for long. “I was always an activist,” Bob Watada explained. From protesting the war in Vietnam and joining the Peace Corps in the 1960s, he instilled these values, “these roots” as he calls them, upon his son.
“My father has always been very community-minded, sometimes putting community things before family things,” says the younger Watada.
Ehren Watada’s mother, Carolyn Ho, a Chinese American born in Honolulu, is a descendant of a Chinese migrant who came to Hawai’i in the late 19th century to work on sugar plantations. Ehren was born in Honolulu in 1978, and Ho describes her son as always determined and a bit precocious. “Every time kids would fool around during soccer practice, I would see Ehren with a serious look on his face, calm and composed,” Ho laughingly recalled.
Growing up, Watada was a Boy Scout, which he views as a precursor to the military. “The rank, the discipline, the patriotism, the ribbons, the merit badges – it’s very similar.” Watada attained Eagle rank by the ninth grade — an extraordinary feat for a 13-year-old since the average Eagle Scout attains his rank at age 16.
Being a Boy Scout was a primary motivation for joining the military. “The sense of adventurism you get from scouting is the same that you perceive in the military,” he says, “Also, there’s that really deep sense of service and giving something back.”
Final Score, 42-0
Watada played football on Honolulu’s Kalani High football team in 1996, an experience which tremendously shaped and informed his character today. “Unfortunately, or fortunately, however way you see it, I played on a team with one of the worst records in football on the entire islands,” Watada said. He recalls one particularly humiliating defeat early in the season: “We lost 42-0; we were just getting creamed. I was getting picked on because three or four of those touchdowns must’ve [been] scored on me. I was getting beat up.” At the time he was 5′7″ and about 150 pounds.
The entire game was both physically and mentally exhausting, Watada recalls. The other team members saw the defeat in Watada’s face and decided to exploit that weakness: “They were kicking the kickoff to me, when we hadn’t even practiced for that … [One time] I got hit so hard I went out of bounds on one play.” For the first time, Watada experienced a strong sense of despair and dejection. “I came out of that game really feeling humiliated and defeated,” Watada explains. “I was just broken inside and outside. During the period of that game and after it, I just lost hope in myself and what I thought I could do.”
He internalized all of the negative feelings that were attached to this game and later looked back to realize that it had a positive impact on the development of his character: “They could humiliate you; they could try to crush your will; they can beat up on you physically, but when you really lose is when you give up on yourself.” He has brought that outlook to his current situation facing the court-martial trial: “I think consciously or subconsciously that situation has carried over to how I carry myself now.
That’s how I can stay as strong as I have been throughout this very difficult ordeal. The Army can try to ostracize me, try to discredit me in the media. They can send me to prison and punish me. But whatever they do, I always remember the lesson that I learned: you aren’t defeated until you tell yourself you’re defeated.”
Watada still thinks about playing on that losing football team. “I always wonder if I had been on a team that had won every game. Maybe that experience of being defeated, being the underdog and trying to struggle, wouldn’t have built my character to do what I have done.”
Dawson’s Lieutenants
After graduating from high school and obtaining his degree in Business Administration at Hawai’i Pacific University, Watada enlisted in the Army.
His first duty station was Camp Stanley in South Korea, considered one of the most demanding stations in the Army. “They say that a year in Korea is equal to three years back in the States,” Watada said. “You train as if you were going to war any day.”
In Korea, he was driven by the strict battalion commander Lt. Colonel Matthew Dawson. “He would cuss and swear at us; he would get in our face,” Watada said. “Normally, battalion commanders don’t get too involved with their lieutenants; they focus on their captains. But it was his mission to make sure that he had the best lieutenants.”
Under Dawson, Watada learned the value of comprehensive knowledge. “He would force us to read every technical and field manual. He told us many times that if you didn’t know everything about your profession and your mission, then you would just be a failure,” Watada said. Dawson instilled in Watada the desire “to know everything there is to know” about his duty.
Watada’s lawyer attempted to contact Lt. Dawson to be a character witness in the trial; Dawson said he respected Watada’s decision but would not “go to war” with him. “He doesn’t agree with what I did,” Watada said. “And that’s fine. You have to look at the broader issue. We’re not just soldiers trained to go to war; we’re trained to defend our country and the Constitution.”
A note in Watada’s fitness report remarked that he possessed an “insatiable appetite for knowledge,” according to a New York Times story in July 2006, and Watada credits this to Dawson: “Some of what he instilled in me, I carried over with me when I redeployed back to the States. It was vital for me to find out everything there is to know. That’s what led to this questioning and trying to attain knowledge of what the hell we’re doing in Iraq.”
Transformation
In January 2005, Watada received orders to Fort Lewis, Washington, in anticipation of deployment to Iraq. Watada felt neither frightened nor anxious, but extremely unprepared. “I was detailed to be a fire support officer with an infantry company,” Watada explained.
Watada applied his “insatiable appetite for knowledge” to his future duties in Iraq. He felt it was his obligation and duty as an officer to know what to anticipate. “I did this to better prepare myself and my soldiers. That’s what I was taught in Korea.”
He haunted the Fort Lewis library, which contains an extraordinary number of military documents, archives and databases, and scoured volumes on military history, particularly in Iraq. “I read the history of units that have gone during the initial invasion to gain a broader knowledge of what I could expect,” he said.
At the time, it was more than the war that was making headlines; the Valerie Plame case, Supreme Court nominations and the country’s heightened surveillance, all questioned the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. “I was looking at who was trying to protect us,” Watada said. “Who is standing up and speaking out for the soldiers” I told myself that nobody is.
“I just felt so saddened by what was going on and so frustrated, so disheartened,” he continued. “And yet I told myself there was nothing I could do.”
Watada recalls one radio show that especially touched him. “This guy calls, and he was pretty hysterical. His brother was being sent to Iraq again, and he was really scared for him. He asked ‘Why isn’t anybody doing anything? Where are all the protests and the rallies like there was in the Vietnam War?’”
Watada reevaluated his stance on the war in Iraq. “I just snapped. I said, ‘I can do something about it.’ Though I may suffer for it, though it may just be a blip on the radar, at least I know that I can do something about it.”
After being denied two resignation requests, Watada publicly announced his refusal of deployment orders in Tacoma, Washington, on June 7, 2006. Two weeks later, Watada was officially charged with three violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice on six counts.
Peter Swing served as a nuclear, biological and chemical warfare defense specialist for the U.S. Marine Corps from 1998 to 2002 in the Middle East and Central America. He is currently the administrative coordinator for the AsianWeek Foundation.
Peter Swing served as a nuclear, biological and chemical warfare defense specialist for the U.S. Marine Corps from 1998 to 2002 in the Middle East and Central America. He is currently the administrative coordinator for the AsianWeek Foundation.
Ehren Watada: Free at Last
By Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith
On June 7, 2006, a 28-year-old Army lieutenant named Ehren Watada released a video press statement announcing that he was refusing to deploy to Iraq because the Iraq War was illegal and his “participation would make me party to war crimes.” After three years of trying to convict him by court martial, the Army has finally given up and allowed Lt. Watada to resign. Despite his direct refusal of an order to deploy, Watada did not spend a single day in jail.
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.
Deeper Questions Remain
Ehren Watada is now free to go on with civilian life. But as the Obama administration goes into arrears on its pledges to withdraw from Iraq, plunges further into quagmires in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and threatens to escalate conflict with Iran, the questions Watada’s action posed continue to haunt us. Here are a few:
Is there a right and obligation to resist?
Watada raised the fundamental question of whether authority–in the military or in society more generally–is something to be blindly accepted, or something to be subject to rational moral and legal examination. He asserted that “the American soldier must rise above the socialization that tells them authority should always be obeyed without question. Rank should be respected but never blindly followed.”
Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked in 2006, “Should people in the US military disobey orders they believe are illegal?” He answered, “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.” If so, what are the implications for soldiers, for the military and for the rest of us?
Should the military hear claims that orders are illegal?
Watada stated, “I understand that under military law, those in the military are allowed to refuse and in fact have the right to refuse unlawful orders–a duty to refuse. In a court of law they should be given the opportunity to bring evidence and witnesses to their defense on how that order was unlawful. In this case I will not be, and that is a travesty of justice.”
Should the law recognize selective objectors?
The Selective Service Act provides conscientious objector status to those who oppose all wars on grounds of moral conscience. But it takes the position that objectors can’t pick and choose their wars. Yet today there are strong moral grounds to oppose many, if not most, of the wars that occur, even for those who might admit in principle that some wars might be justified. Amnesty International takes the position that there is a right to such “selective objection” and that those who are punished for refusing to participate in a war they consider immoral are “prisoners of conscience.”
Watada recognized that “in opposition to my position, the argument will be made that soldiers don’t have a right to pick and choose their wars.” But, he maintained, “I would respond that it is not only our right but our constitutional and moral duty.” Is it time to recognize conscientious objectors to particular wars?
How can illegal wars of aggression be prevented?
There is currently a broad debate on torture in policy circles, the public and to some degree in the courts. But torture is only one war crime, and it’s not the most severe. Yet there is virtually no effort to question or establish accountability for the most important war crime by the United States in Iraq: illegal pre-emptive war.
As Watada said, “I think the greatest crime that the leaders of a country could commit–the leadership of a country–would be to take their people, their country, into war, based upon false pretenses.”
In a statement that won him an additional charge from the Army, Watada told a Veterans for Peace convention, “To stop an illegal and unjust war, the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it.” Is such action disloyalty, or a much-needed addition to our system of checks and balances?
The Army vented its own frustration at its failure to convict Watada by insisting that his resignation was “under other than honorable conditions.”
Lt. Ehren Watada honorably sacrificed much and risked more “to make sure that all Americans live in a country where we have true democracy.” The Army should honor him as a military hero.
