11 ms·

People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war. They do not have

by enoch_r 13y ago

People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war. They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large. They do not have the right to expose classified information because they think it shouldn't be classified. They do not have the right to violate orders because they are stupid, or because they're bad policy. They do not have the right to make those decisions because, in the US, the military is supposed to be entirely subordinate to the laws enacted by our elected officials. Not "subordinate as long as it's for the best overall." This is a good thing--when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup. Obviously there are grey areas. After all, the Nuremburg trials punished people for violating laws that didn't exist during the commission of the crimes. If Manning had, say, only released extremely strong evidence of war crimes, I might agree that hiding that evidence was itself unlawful. But he didn't--he released a giant trove of classified diplomatic cables and military logs. These may have been unnecessarily classified, but were not unlawfully classified. Releasing them put Manning firmly in the "violating lawful orders" camp.

chris_mahan 13y ago
The US government, through various means, seems to be intent on removing from public discourse the very information needed for those in uniform to properly assess the legality of their orders. Also, in case they forgot, the Constitution is the Law, and if Manning saw that the government was violating the Constitution, I don't think it's wrong for him to expose such wrongdoing. That's the very definition of whistleblowing. And, to those who claim that he should have pursued his whistleblowing through established military channels, I would reply that the US government, the Military, as well as other agencies, seem intent on keeping the truth from the American People, so it is entirely reasonable to expect that the military and other agencies in the government would attempt to disallow the whistleblower's efforts. update: fixed typo.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  OK, and what unconstitutional activity was revealed by the release of many thousands of State Department cables? I mean, it's all very well to say that Manning saw the government was violating the Constitution, but I would like some specific examples of what he revealed. Abuses such as the operation of Abu Ghraib were not exposed by Manning. Manning joined the Army in late 2007/early 2008, by which time the US had been involved in what a lot of people (including myself) consider to have been an illegal war in Iraq for 4-5 years; one in which the existence of appalling human rights abuses such as torture and extraordinary rendition were well documented, and which by then was well understood by the public to have been predicated on faulty intelligence. It seems to me that if you have a negative view of war and militarism, then you should probably not join the organization involved in fighting that war in the first place. You could serve your country perfectly well and without taking part in military aggression by, say, joining the Coast Guard. Frankly, I think the only reason Manning has hero status on HN is because he was a computer nerd, and so other computer nerds are willing to suspend their critical faculties because they can identify with him. I can identify with him up to a point, but not to the point of wanting to join the army 5 years into a clusterfuck like the Iraq war run by an administration that had tossed things like the Geneva convention out the window.
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    Well, that's the million dollar question isn't it? Should the State be allowed to keep this much stuff secret and still expect the Voting Public to accurately measure the effectiveness of government officials?
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      No, that's a totally different question. I asked what unconstitutional activity was revealed by all of those state department cables that were leaked. As best I can ascertain, the answer is 'none whatsoever.'
      - chris_mahan 13y ago
zeteo 13y ago
>when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup I'm not disputing that Manning broke the laws of the military. But calling his actions an incipient coup is laughable. In a world in which the worst offenders at Abu Ghraib got ten years (and were released much sooner), sentencing him to 35 years (as a deterrent!) is a disgrace. I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.
- rayiner 13y ago
  What did manning release that was an actual war crime?
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    I imagine they'r referring to the video of a helicopter shooting someone in Iraq who turned out to be holding a camera rather than a rocket launcher, which Wikileaks released under the title 'Collateral murder.' If you ask me the real war crime is that the administration we had at the time went to war in Iraq in the first place, based on an apparent mixture of personal animus between Presidents Bush & Hussein and an alarmingly thin piece of social engineering by an Iraqi criminal/defector known as 'Curveball' who wanted to (at best) destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime or (at worst, but quite understandably) evade prison in Iraq. This entirely optional conflict led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, or by some counts >1 million, while (IMHO) significantly prolonging the war in Afghanistan by turning that theater into a sideshow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm I don't think Manning's information releases revealed very much about the war in Iraq other than to shed light on this particular helicopter incident which I think falls rather short of being a war crime, although I do think it was worth bringing to public attention. On the other hand, I see no public benefit whatsoever in teh release of all the State Department cables, and as far as I can make out Manning took them and Assange released them just because they were classified by default. When their full contents became available because of carelessness with the crypto key outcome was some diplomatic red faces but there sure wasn't any big reveal of criminal activity.
tbrownaw 13y ago
Doesn't it seem a bit dumb to require them to refuse unlawful orders, but also forbid them from determining for themselves what is "unlawful" so they have to rely on their superiors (who are the ones giving the orders in the first place)? Or they can be stuck with "my government says this order is lawful (and will do bad things to me if I refuse it), the people we're fighting say it's unlawful (and if they win will do bad things to me if I don't refuse it)".
- Perceval 13y ago
  Manning didn't refuse an unlawful order. Nor did he reveal other soldiers executing unlawful orders. Manning broke the law to reveal an indiscriminate collection of State Department cables.
  - tbrownaw 13y ago
    eh, so what if we're off-topic a bit?
- mpyne 13y ago
  They are not forbidden from determining that a given order is lawful or not. However they are trained that the presumption is that a given order is lawful unless it's clearly contrary to the Constitution, law, regulation or policy. As we phrase it in the Navy, no sailor has ever been court-martialed for following a legitimate order, but the same cannot be said regarding mutiny. In short if you want to challenge an order go right ahead, but realize that your ass is going to be put on the line and even the Supreme Court will be biased on the military's side regarding it, if previous experience is any judge.
frank_boyd 13y ago
Also, the name of the rat is: Adrian Lamo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo
drblast 13y ago
When you join the military, you take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies "foreign and domestic" (emphasis mine) That's first. Obeying lawful orders is second. It's debatable how this oath applies in Manning's case, but I think it's rather telling what order the things you are swearing to uphold come in. When I was in the military my interpretation was that anything I was ordered to do that was contrary to the Constitution was an unlawful order. If I were taking the oath seriously, that would have required active dissent, not just ignoring the order. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/oathofenlist.htm http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/oathofen...
- Perceval 13y ago
  What happens when every soldier feels within their rights to determine who the domestic enemies of the Constitution are, and takes unprecedented action against those enemies? Did Manning reveal anything that was prima facie unconstitutional?
  - LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
    If the US wasn't breaking its own Constitution all the time, this wouldn't be even a problem. PRISM for that example breaks 4th, 5th and probably 9th Amendment. That's about a third of the Bill of Rights. Each and every NSA employee is under Oath to protect the Constitution. And then a person who tries just doing that (Snowden) is the one called traitor! If not for things like PRISM the military and other branches of the Government wouldn't need to worry about soldiers/their employees reporting unconstitutional actions of the Government. Because it seems they break the law all the time, yes, that's a problem. The Governments problem not whistleblowers.
    - bwaldrep 13y ago
      That was not the question. The question was if Manning specifically released ANY evidence of unconstitutional activity. The answer seems to be no.
VikingCoder 13y ago
"They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large." What you should say is, "They will be prosecuted if they unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order, even if they think it is better for humanity at large." And I would add, "And sometimes duty to humanity will compel them to accept that they will be prosecuted, and they have to unilaterally decide what is right." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov
grey-area 13y ago
People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war. So if they witness a crime, they should speak out. Manning did release evidence of several crimes leading up to and during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: The cheerful murder of Reuters journalists and later innocents who came to help by that helicopter crew The purchase of child prostitutes for entertainment by Dyncorp The illegal collection of DNA from UN officials and representatives (straight from Dr. Strangelove!) etc. Now as you say he also released a lot of other material, which wasn't directly related to any crime, so he should expect to be punished for that indiscriminate release, and it weakens his case, but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups. I don't think he deserves 35 years for that, compared to the 6 months sentence of Sgt. Sabrina Harman who tortured and abused detainees, it seems disproportionate.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups. The chain of command issuing the unlawful orders and participating in the coverups is unlikely to agree that revealing those things is in the "public interest". Which is kind of the fundamental problems that whistleblowers always face (whether or not formal protections are in place) -- the people deciding whether or not to punish them (or whether or not the protections apply) are often the people on whom they are "blowing the whistle", or at least people with shared interest with the targets of the whistleblowing. This is mitigated when there is involvement of an independent actor in the process, but in the case of military trials that are completely within the military chain of command within the executive branch, that kind of independence is hard to find.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President. Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court. In the actual military the untoward influence (real or perceived) of the convening officer on the outcome of the case is a B.F.D., just witness all the sexual assault/harassment cases that were being upended by Obama's condemnation of servicemembers who engage in them. In fact SECDEF himself had to issue a memo saying, in effect, that the POTUS expects trial members/judges to use their own independent judgment when considering the facts of a case, just as specified in the M.C.M. You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, which is a completely separate chain of command from the one that was issuing orders relating actions in Iraq of Afghanistan.
baddox 13y ago
Having the "right to refuse unlawful orders" clearly implies that military personnel have some authority to evaluate the legality of orders.
- mpyne 13y ago
  They do have the right to do so, and in fact we expect them to independently evaluate it. But much like a court of law, the presumption is that the order is lawful if given by proper authority, and the servicemember must then prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the order is unlawful, and be willing to take the risk of court-martial if they are wrong. It also somewhat depends on the community you're in. Enlisted nuclear technicians on submarines probably disobey an order every other day at least, to keep an EOOW (or ENG) from doing something stupid to their nuclear propulsion plant.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup. No, we call it a mutiny. A coup is specifically when the action they take involves displacing the lawful government, not merely disobeying its orders. There's a pretty giant difference.
choarham 13y ago
Endless war

by enoch_r 13y ago

chris_mahan 13y ago

The US government, through various means, seems to be intent on removing from public discourse the very information needed for those in uniform to properly assess the legality of their orders. Also, in case they forgot, the Constitution is the Law, and if Manning saw that the government was violating the Constitution, I don't think it's wrong for him to expose such wrongdoing. That's the very definition of whistleblowing. And, to those who claim that he should have pursued his whistleblowing through established military channels, I would reply that the US government, the Military, as well as other agencies, seem intent on keeping the truth from the American People, so it is entirely reasonable to expect that the military and other agencies in the government would attempt to disallow the whistleblower's efforts. update: fixed typo.

anigbrowl 13y ago
OK, and what unconstitutional activity was revealed by the release of many thousands of State Department cables? I mean, it's all very well to say that Manning saw the government was violating the Constitution, but I would like some specific examples of what he revealed. Abuses such as the operation of Abu Ghraib were not exposed by Manning. Manning joined the Army in late 2007/early 2008, by which time the US had been involved in what a lot of people (including myself) consider to have been an illegal war in Iraq for 4-5 years; one in which the existence of appalling human rights abuses such as torture and extraordinary rendition were well documented, and which by then was well understood by the public to have been predicated on faulty intelligence. It seems to me that if you have a negative view of war and militarism, then you should probably not join the organization involved in fighting that war in the first place. You could serve your country perfectly well and without taking part in military aggression by, say, joining the Coast Guard. Frankly, I think the only reason Manning has hero status on HN is because he was a computer nerd, and so other computer nerds are willing to suspend their critical faculties because they can identify with him. I can identify with him up to a point, but not to the point of wanting to join the army 5 years into a clusterfuck like the Iraq war run by an administration that had tossed things like the Geneva convention out the window.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Well, that's the million dollar question isn't it? Should the State be allowed to keep this much stuff secret and still expect the Voting Public to accurately measure the effectiveness of government officials?
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    No, that's a totally different question. I asked what unconstitutional activity was revealed by all of those state department cables that were leaked. As best I can ascertain, the answer is 'none whatsoever.'
    - chris_mahan 13y ago

zeteo 13y ago

>when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup I'm not disputing that Manning broke the laws of the military. But calling his actions an incipient coup is laughable. In a world in which the worst offenders at Abu Ghraib got ten years (and were released much sooner), sentencing him to 35 years (as a deterrent!) is a disgrace. I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.

rayiner 13y ago
What did manning release that was an actual war crime?
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  I imagine they'r referring to the video of a helicopter shooting someone in Iraq who turned out to be holding a camera rather than a rocket launcher, which Wikileaks released under the title 'Collateral murder.' If you ask me the real war crime is that the administration we had at the time went to war in Iraq in the first place, based on an apparent mixture of personal animus between Presidents Bush & Hussein and an alarmingly thin piece of social engineering by an Iraqi criminal/defector known as 'Curveball' who wanted to (at best) destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime or (at worst, but quite understandably) evade prison in Iraq. This entirely optional conflict led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, or by some counts >1 million, while (IMHO) significantly prolonging the war in Afghanistan by turning that theater into a sideshow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant) http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm I don't think Manning's information releases revealed very much about the war in Iraq other than to shed light on this particular helicopter incident which I think falls rather short of being a war crime, although I do think it was worth bringing to public attention. On the other hand, I see no public benefit whatsoever in teh release of all the State Department cables, and as far as I can make out Manning took them and Assange released them just because they were classified by default. When their full contents became available because of carelessness with the crypto key outcome was some diplomatic red faces but there sure wasn't any big reveal of criminal activity.

tbrownaw 13y ago

Doesn't it seem a bit dumb to require them to refuse unlawful orders, but also forbid them from determining for themselves what is "unlawful" so they have to rely on their superiors (who are the ones giving the orders in the first place)? Or they can be stuck with "my government says this order is lawful (and will do bad things to me if I refuse it), the people we're fighting say it's unlawful (and if they win will do bad things to me if I don't refuse it)".

Perceval 13y ago
Manning didn't refuse an unlawful order. Nor did he reveal other soldiers executing unlawful orders. Manning broke the law to reveal an indiscriminate collection of State Department cables.
- tbrownaw 13y ago
  eh, so what if we're off-topic a bit?
mpyne 13y ago
They are not forbidden from determining that a given order is lawful or not. However they are trained that the presumption is that a given order is lawful unless it's clearly contrary to the Constitution, law, regulation or policy. As we phrase it in the Navy, no sailor has ever been court-martialed for following a legitimate order, but the same cannot be said regarding mutiny. In short if you want to challenge an order go right ahead, but realize that your ass is going to be put on the line and even the Supreme Court will be biased on the military's side regarding it, if previous experience is any judge.

frank_boyd 13y ago

Also, the name of the rat is: Adrian Lamo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo

drblast 13y ago

When you join the military, you take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies "foreign and domestic" (emphasis mine) That's first. Obeying lawful orders is second. It's debatable how this oath applies in Manning's case, but I think it's rather telling what order the things you are swearing to uphold come in. When I was in the military my interpretation was that anything I was ordered to do that was contrary to the Constitution was an unlawful order. If I were taking the oath seriously, that would have required active dissent, not just ignoring the order. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/oathofenlist.htm http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/oathofen...

Perceval 13y ago
What happens when every soldier feels within their rights to determine who the domestic enemies of the Constitution are, and takes unprecedented action against those enemies? Did Manning reveal anything that was prima facie unconstitutional?
- LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
  If the US wasn't breaking its own Constitution all the time, this wouldn't be even a problem. PRISM for that example breaks 4th, 5th and probably 9th Amendment. That's about a third of the Bill of Rights. Each and every NSA employee is under Oath to protect the Constitution. And then a person who tries just doing that (Snowden) is the one called traitor! If not for things like PRISM the military and other branches of the Government wouldn't need to worry about soldiers/their employees reporting unconstitutional actions of the Government. Because it seems they break the law all the time, yes, that's a problem. The Governments problem not whistleblowers.
  - bwaldrep 13y ago
    That was not the question. The question was if Manning specifically released ANY evidence of unconstitutional activity. The answer seems to be no.

VikingCoder 13y ago

"They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large." What you should say is, "They will be prosecuted if they unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order, even if they think it is better for humanity at large." And I would add, "And sometimes duty to humanity will compel them to accept that they will be prosecuted, and they have to unilaterally decide what is right." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

grey-area 13y ago

People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war. So if they witness a crime, they should speak out. Manning did release evidence of several crimes leading up to and during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: The cheerful murder of Reuters journalists and later innocents who came to help by that helicopter crew The purchase of child prostitutes for entertainment by Dyncorp The illegal collection of DNA from UN officials and representatives (straight from Dr. Strangelove!) etc. Now as you say he also released a lot of other material, which wasn't directly related to any crime, so he should expect to be punished for that indiscriminate release, and it weakens his case, but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups. I don't think he deserves 35 years for that, compared to the 6 months sentence of Sgt. Sabrina Harman who tortured and abused detainees, it seems disproportionate.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups. The chain of command issuing the unlawful orders and participating in the coverups is unlikely to agree that revealing those things is in the "public interest". Which is kind of the fundamental problems that whistleblowers always face (whether or not formal protections are in place) -- the people deciding whether or not to punish them (or whether or not the protections apply) are often the people on whom they are "blowing the whistle", or at least people with shared interest with the targets of the whistleblowing. This is mitigated when there is involvement of an independent actor in the process, but in the case of military trials that are completely within the military chain of command within the executive branch, that kind of independence is hard to find.
- mpyne 13y ago
  The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President. Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court. In the actual military the untoward influence (real or perceived) of the convening officer on the outcome of the case is a B.F.D., just witness all the sexual assault/harassment cases that were being upended by Obama's condemnation of servicemembers who engage in them. In fact SECDEF himself had to issue a memo saying, in effect, that the POTUS expects trial members/judges to use their own independent judgment when considering the facts of a case, just as specified in the M.C.M. You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, which is a completely separate chain of command from the one that was issuing orders relating actions in Iraq of Afghanistan.

baddox 13y ago

Having the "right to refuse unlawful orders" clearly implies that military personnel have some authority to evaluate the legality of orders.

mpyne 13y ago
They do have the right to do so, and in fact we expect them to independently evaluate it. But much like a court of law, the presumption is that the order is lawful if given by proper authority, and the servicemember must then prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the order is unlawful, and be willing to take the risk of court-martial if they are wrong. It also somewhat depends on the community you're in. Enlisted nuclear technicians on submarines probably disobey an order every other day at least, to keep an EOOW (or ENG) from doing something stupid to their nuclear propulsion plant.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup. No, we call it a mutiny. A coup is specifically when the action they take involves displacing the lawful government, not merely disobeying its orders. There's a pretty giant difference.

choarham 13y ago

Endless war