Daily Herald opinion: Unnerving overreach: Government intimidation not justified for lawmakers who spoke on service members’ duty
In a presidential administration that contends the nation is ravaged by crime and international threats, it is astonishing — not to mention unnerving — to find that the Department of Defense and Federal Bureau of Investigation have nothing better to do than consider action against military veterans who exercised their free speech rights to remind active service members of a legal obligation.
Yet, this is where we find ourselves in the thin-skinned, politically driven administration of President Donald Trump.
Trump’s response alone to a video in which four Democratic U.S. congressmen and two senators urged service members to disobey “illegal orders” was alarming enough. His invocation of the notion of sedition and the potential for the death penalty employed the type of hyperbole that disrupts passions, endangers lives and, as we said previously, fosters a dangerous climate of animosity and tension. But the actions of the DoD and FBI last week push apprehension to an even higher level.
The Department of Defense announced Monday that it was investigating whether the involvement of Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a combat veteran and former astronaut, qualified him to be ordered back into the service to face a court martial. As a retired senior officer in the Navy, Kelly was the only participant eligible by law to be recalled to service. According to reports, the FBI went through top security officials for the House and Senate to request interviews with all six lawmakers.
It would not seem that such investigations should take much time. Every schoolkid who has studied World War II knows the lesson of the Nuremberg trials of ex-Nazi leaders that “just following orders” is no legal defense for committing illegal acts.
More recently, the story of U.S. Army Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson is especially relevant. Thompson was a helicopter pilot flying a mission in South Vietnam in March 1968, when he noticed activity on the ground that worried him and landed to find U.S. military slaughtering unarmed civilians at the village of My Lai. When he confronted Second Lt. William Calley, who outranked him, Calley insisted he was “just following orders.” Thompson was undeterred and, according to his citation for a Soldier’s Medal, he “landed his helicopter in the line of fire between fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pursuing American ground troops to prevent their murder. He then personally confronted the leader of the American ground troops and was prepared to open fire on those American troops should they fire upon the civilians.”
Thompson proceeded up the chain of command to get a cease-fire order and evacuated injured civilians. The Soldier’s Medal awarded him in 1998 is the highest U.S. Army award for acts of heroism in a noncombat situation, and the citation goes on to declare that his “heroism exemplifies the highest standards of personal courage and ethical conduct, reflecting distinct credit on him, and the United States Army.”
If, then, a soldier’s willingness to fire on others to prevent illegal acts is officially recognized as heroism, how can a handful of armed services veterans in Congress reminding others in a social media post of their duty to disobey illegal orders be twisted into sedition?
And, make no mistake, actions like Thompson’s are a duty, legal as well as moral. In an article on the Nuremberg trials this month, The Military Times publication references the U.S. Manual of Courts-Martial, “which states that service members have a duty to disobey an order that ‘a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know to be illegal.’ ”
One can argue that the lawmakers had political motives in creating the video that drew the administration’s ire, but the routine attacks on Venezuelan vessels, numerous reports of excessive actions by ICE agents during the current immigration crackdown and administration efforts to resist the courts in deploying National Guard troops in American cities lend credence to the claim from Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, that the elected leaders were responding to concerns that service members may be “concerned I’m going to be asked to do something that I don’t know if I should do.”
Whatever the elected officials’ intention, however, investigating them for treason or any other crime because they stated inarguable facts is an extreme overreaction. Our top crime-fighting and defense agencies surely must have better things to do with their time and money.