ZenMode
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Already answered that question.
U.S. destroys Venezuelan vessels | Trump declares airspace over Venezuela closed
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ZenMode
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Beside the point. The point is that actions like that, as I have said multiple times, only continues to raise the political temperature and results in violence and people being killed, like members of the national guard.
ZenMode
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So your preference is to NOT remind military members that they have an obligation to ignore illegal orders and allow them to become military criminals at risk of prosecution?
ZenMode
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First, yes, for reasons already mentioned.
Second, how poorly would you, other posters here and Congressional Democrats have to view our military personnel to believe they've "forgotten" they are not only obligated to operate within the confines of the Constitution and any unconstitutional actions are punishable under the law?
Is this the United States military or some redneck militia?
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evrheel
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So your argument is that an illegitimate war is a better way than an illegitimate attack. Why?
ZenMode
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Not even close.
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Im quite sure I view everyone in uniform more highly than you. My military connections run deep. My father was a DI in the Army and my father in law is a retired Chief Master Sgt in the Air Force. I don't think people in the armed services need a reminder of their oath. I do think that in the current environment of rampant retribution and lawlessness, they need a reminder that their current chain of command is not the only consideration. I think we all need a reminder that the current folks aren't always going to be there.
And I think your position is disingenuous and patently insulting to military members.
You're so confused ,how do you know?
ZenMode
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I don't know how you can say you think highly of everyone in the military and then assume that they need forgot the oath that they all took.
My position is that the military personnel don't need a reminder of the oath they took and that Congress putting out a message that implies the military is committing crimes is how we end up with National Guard members being shot and killed.
The CIC using the NG for political puppet shows and Potemkin Village events is how they got shot. Even the ones he doesn't endanger are ripped from their lives. Add to that, the sorry bastard is ripping off their families, their employers, their friends and their communities to puff up his ego. That is the real story and you're almost as worthless and stupid as he is for trying to sell this gold plated shit heap.
ZenMode
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There are lots of real stories.
There is no link between the benign statement put out by members of Congress, all of whom were veterans, and the attack in DC. None, whatsoever. I understand that you desperately want there to be a link, because you can't seem to fathom the idea that Bone Spur in Chief was wrong in calling for the execution of political opponents, but I assure you, there is none. I would ask that you kindly cease presenting your delusions here as fact. We can all see through them.
Funny, isn't the commander in chief of the military the same guy who made fun of POWs and who called our WWI casualties losers? I wonder who has more respect for the military, the guy that said all of those things and then used bone spurs to get out of military service, or 6 distinguished veterans of the military.
ChileG
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sringwal
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https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...ting-military-duty-to-disobey-unlawful-orders
The Duty to Disobey Unlawful Orders Was America’s Idea
...There’s another, and more historical, way to grasp how right the senators are, and how wrong Hegseth and Donald Trump are. And for that I turned to Techau, who used to be a speechwriter in the German defense ministry (he’s now at the Eurasia Group). The speeches he wrote included addresses given by the German defense minister when she oversaw the swearing-in of German recruits in the Bendlerblock.
The Bendlerblock is a complex of buildings in Berlin. It was the headquarters of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht during World War II, and the site where, on the second floor, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators plotted to kill the Fuehrer. It is also where — in the courtyard, lit by the headlights of trucks — they were executed by firing squad when Operation Valkyrie failed on July 20, 1944.
Starting in the 1950s, the West Germans erected a plaque, memorial and museum in the Bendlerblock, which was by then in West Berlin, not far from the Wall. After reunification, the German defense ministry made the Bendlerblock its second headquarters (the other remains in Bonn). And on July 20 of most years, newly minted soldiers, sailors and airmen take their oath to the German constitution on the parade ground, right next to the memorial to Valkyrie.
Over the years, I’ve seen Angela Merkel and other grandees of German politics (including Annegret Kramp-Karrenberger, for whom Techau wrote) in attendance. This year the current defense minister, Boris Pistorius, addressed the troops and, like his predecessors, explicitly placed the modern German army in the tradition of the heroes commemorated behind him.
At a time when freedom, democracy and the rule of law are again threatened at home and abroad, Pistorius said, the plotters of July 20, 1944, exhort modern Germany’s “citizen soldiers” always to heed their conscience, always to think for themselves, and always to protect human dignity, enshrined in article 1 of the postwar constitution.
This embrace of the July 20 legacy was far from obvious in the early years after World War II. Turning Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow and the other plotters from traitors (a word Trump used for the six senators) to heroes required a huge rethink of war, morality and law, not just in Germany but in the world. This legal and ethical revolution, as it happens, was led by the Americans.
Its forum was the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, and its mentor was Robert Jackson, an American supreme court justice whom Harry Truman appointed to lead the world’s first international tribunal for the purpose of prosecuting “crimes against humanity,” starting in 1945. The three other Allied Powers initially had different ideas about retribution against the Nazi leadership. But Jackson and Truman insisted on a demonstration of due process to lend credibility to new global norms, subsequently called the Nuremberg Principles.
In Principle IV, Jackson and others established that “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility.” This invalidated the “just following orders” defense that all the Nazi defendants attempted.
It also set the precedent for the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949 and later its Additional Protocols, which emphasized individual responsibility in war and the duty to disobey unlawful orders. And it became the foundation for all subsequent tribunals against war crimes, such as those committed in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda. It also led to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which the United States midwifed in the 1990s but later turned its back on.
The norm also applied in domestic law, at least in liberal democracies. Germany most explicitly spells out the duty to disobey unlawful orders (nobody has ever questioned the duty to obey lawful ones, obviously), while France, Britain, Israel and other Western countries have analogs.
So does the US, where the Uniform Code of Military Justice stipulates that service members must obey lawful orders, while surrounding laws clarify what is unlawful. That definition includes any order “that directs the commission of a crime (for example, an order directing the murder of a civilian, a noncombatant, or a combatant who is hors de combat, or the abuse or torture of a prisoner).” In one famous case, for example, First Lieutenant William Calley testified that he was only following orders from his captain during the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam — and was nonetheless convicted of murdering 22 infants, children, women, and old men.
Nobody is suggesting that invoking the memory of Stauffenberg to inspire modern soldiers also equates their superiors to Nazis. The point of the exhortation is to take the most extreme situation imaginable and pose a simpler question, one that Kramp-Karrenberger (in words written by Techau) put to the recruits: In the midst of an inhumane dictatorship, a reign of terror, a war of aggression and genocide, “what would I have done?”
The situation in the US today is completely different. and yet some American service members are asking themselves similar questions, not least about the US strikes against boats of civilians who are suspected, on unclear evidence, of smuggling drugs. (In October, the admiral who was to oversee this campaign stepped down, less than a year into his three-year term.)
Elissa Slotkin, the senator who organized the video, also worries about troops deployed in American cities. In a committee hearing earlier this year, she grilled Hegseth about whether he would obey presidential orders to shoot at protesters (an order that Trump considered giving in his first term to one of Hegseth’s predecessors). The secretary made light of Slotkin’s questions and avoided answering.
“We know you are under tremendous stress and pressure right now,” the senators say in their video to service members. Which is why they found it necessary to restate the law of the land. Slotkin considers it “most telling” that the president believes this reminder should be “punishable by death.”
Fortunately, such threats from on high seem to be inspiring more courage than fear so far. “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” says Senator Kelly, who as an aviator had a missile blow up next to his jet and, with his wife, knows political violence all too well.
The obligations of warriors in a republic are clear. They are to be loyal not to any individual leader but to their country’s constitution, and to obey lawful orders while disobeying those that are manifestly unlawful. Reminders of this bounden duty are anything but “insurrection.” At times, they amount to acts of the highest patriotism — and even heroism.