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RAF doctor disobeyed Iraq orders
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4905672.stm
The Allies, after WWII, did not take "I was just following orders" as an excuse to the prosecution of Nazis ... so why is this guy being prosecuted for something he objects to?
Flt Lt Dr Malcolm Kendall-Smith was based at RAF Kinloss in Scotland
An RAF doctor has been found guilty of disobeying orders at a court martial after he refused to serve in Iraq.
"This is on the basis that ongoing acts of aggression in Iraq and systematically applied war crimes provide a moral equivalent between the US and Nazi Germany."
The Allies, after WWII, did not take "I was just following orders" as an excuse to the prosecution of Nazis ... so why is this guy being prosecuted for something he objects to?
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Cos they are a bunch of liars,thieves and killers
Quite.
Your damned if you do follow orders. Damned if you don't.
Fucking suck job, eh?
A doctor however is fair game to be made an example of.
I say good luck to him. Fucking shame others didn't have the balls to do the same.
He’s served in Iraq twice, I don’t particularly buy his story of him suddenly reaching a U-turn through personal research – if he’d stuck to the ‘illegal war’ line all along instead of inventing an excuse when he got fed up I’d have more sympathy for him.
You join the armed forces and you can’t pick and choose which orders to obey. There are many excellent benefits to joining the armed forces but the major drawback I guess is that you do have to obey orders – and you may be deployed to serve in conflicts overseas.
The armed forces do a fantastic job and are unsung heroes for the most part, this government doesn’t give them the support they deserve – but if you accept that the present government is the legitimate government of the UK and has the right to rule then it’s right to order the armed forces into combat must be accepted.
Talk of whether the Iraq war was legal or not according to the hazy minefield of international law is frankly irrelevant – our government as democratically elected by the British people is accountable to the British population only – and if the government that the British people have endorsed wishes to declare war it may do so.
Teegan however made a good point earlier. Is the excuse "I was just following orders" always acceptable, or only sometimes?
Personally I see nothing wrong with a soldier objecting to obey certain orders- especially when the legality and morality of them are so debatable as the war on Iraq.
Except it doesn't.
The war crimes trial established many precedents - for this case the relevant ones are
1) Senior military officers who have access to political decision making are considered part of that decision making and cannot claim they were just obeying orders.
2) Officers and ORs cannot claim that when they committed a crime in war that they were following orders eg the shooting of prisoners, refusing to treat enemy wounded etc.
3) Anyone outside the political decision making chain cannot be held accountable for the decision to go to war (otherwise it would have been legal to shoot any German who took part in the invasions of Poland, Holland, Denmark, the USSR etc) and in fact refusal to do so can be punished. This is to protect the majority of soldiers who do not have access to the full facts and are cannot be expected to make an informed decision on the legality.
He's got very little defence. Even if the war is illegal, he's not covered as even in his defence he's not claiming he was involved in the decision making. If he was Sir Michael Jackson he may have a case, but he isn't - he's a junior medical officer.
In fact if we had any guts we'd charge him with war crimes as his refusal to go to Iraq probably constitues a refusal to treat enemy wounded.
Because they're not the same. Though I suspect if it was the other way round you'd be complaining that officers get prefertial treatment and other ranks are prosecuted.
The SAS trooper did his duty, returned and informed his officers that if given an order to return he was likely to disobey. He was out of the SAS and returned to unit within hours, at which point he resigned and left the army. At no point did he disobey an order.
The Crab MO refused a direct order.
Funnily enough the British armed forces are rather against the view that servicemen cannot put themselves above the democratic Government. It's been elected, the armed services haven't.
Anyway its pretty irrelevant. The only legal judgement, from the Attorney General, has come to the conclusion the war is legal. Screams in The Guardian editorials and on forums cannot change that.
Though I suspect your view might be different, if he was being deployed to Venuezala to support Chavez against the US.
Well you’re clueless if you think an armed forces can operate functionally on the basis of soldiers being able to pick and choose which orders they obey.
Nobody is saying it’s ideal, lots of people in the armed forces have already served a couple of times in Iraq and are having to go back. Many of them have young families – but very few try and shirk their duty as this doctor is attempting to. I’m surprised that your disagreement with the war in Iraq appears to be translating into support for anarchy in the forces.
the guy didn't want to quit the RAF because he's against war, from an interview he seemed he was happy to be involved in conflicts, he just wouldnt take part in an illegal invasion......
the ethical dilemma must be enormous - following orders ALWAYS or not if you think you are doing something illegal under international law
joining the army means you are willing to forego the moral side of things in general HOWEVER reufsing to go due to legal ethical reasons is perfectly valid
that's why the nazis got done for 'only folllowing orders'
of course soldiers have to accept orders in general practice, it is how the army operates, if they ask you to go a rape a woman and shoot her child would you do it? of course fucking not
so would you excuse soldiers who rape and pillage under order? or kill thousands of people in concentrations camps per day? because they followed orders
following orders is obligatory up to the point where you 'believe' you are breaking international law, i believe this is in the geneva convention or something along those lines
"The "just following orders" defense against war crimes charges has been thoroughly discredited. It's not a defense." the nuremberg principals - http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-nurem.htm
this means if you believe you going to be commiting a warcrime or doing something illegal under international law you should drop out
Let us also remember the man in question was most certainly not ordered to do anything as bestial as to "rape and pillage". To imply that following orders in the RAF is equal to blind obedience is dangerous, wrong and utterly foolish.
It is if you are going to get shot or hanged for not obeying orders.
NO THEY DIDN'T!!!!
Refusal to obey an order for ethical reasons is no defence unless the order itself is illegal (ie the shooting of prisoners). The War Crimes tribunals after the war made clear that individual soldiers are not to be charged with taking part in an illegal war. And that in fact if they refuse to obey orders they can be prosecuted. This is to the reason why Hauptman Muller who drove his tanks into Poland is not charged with war crimes, whereas Goering and the High Command were.
Yes and as that's an illegal order under British military law not only is he under no compunction to do so, he's actually under a compunction not to shoot and rape them and to take steps to stop others doing it - even at the risk to his own life.
But the taking part in a war is not the same.
If Allies and German soldiers alike had told their officers in WWI to go fuck themselves and charge each other's machine gun nests if they wanted, the most pointless war in history would have ended early millions would have lived.
Same in many other situations, past and recent.
Idealist position of course... at least in WWI you could argue that common soldiers did not have a clue of what was going on due to lack of information and general awareness of international affairs. No such excuse nowadays.
Otherwise you could argue that no regime, from Saddam to the Nazis to Mugabe, ever did anything wrong when they tortured and killed all those people.
Ha ha.
As for the idea that if the majority told them to get stuffed, the war would have ended, maybe there is some truth in this. Apply it to a more modern scenario. Imagine that pointless, wasteful ID cards become compulsory. Imagine then that the masses tell Charles Clarke to piss off by refusing to get these cards. What would they do? Arrest the millions of people? Oh aye? And where would they put them - in our dangerously over-crowded prisons? Of course not. No, the scheme would collapse. But that is precisely the point. One man's stand cannot make a difference. It can raise awareness, but it cannot bring about huge changes. Whereas if the whole of the military establishment told Blair where he could shove his nasty, grubby, illegal war, that occupation could come to an end much quicker than it is likely to be.
Since this discussion has already descended into a debate about the war itself – rather than the original discussion about somebody shirking their duty I’d like to point out that there was nothing immoral about removing Saddam. Iraq is messy and mistakes have been made but ultimately America and Britain did the right thing.
And it’s absolute bollocks to say that the war was ‘undoubtedly illegal’ – international law is hazy at best and the only legal judgement concerning the war concluded that the war is legal. Further, even if it was illegal according to international law I don’t believe an elected British government should have to seek permission from the UN to act.
Frankly, I can't even begin to understand how anyone in their right minds could possibly question that the war as as illegal as hell.
As for claiming that "an elected British government should [not] have to seek permission from the UN to act", are you now saying that Britain is somehow above international law? I expected that sort of contempt from George Bush and the neo-conservative nutters in the White House, but not from Tony Blair! Every single day, I regret more and more my initial support for this disgusting war.
This man is not refusing to be part of th einvasion but he is refusing to help save lives of both his fellow soldiers and civilian wounded by not going to Iraq. He is a doctor after all, not a special forces officer or a green berret or anything like that.
Finally, Soviet troops raped and murdered hundreds of German women and Children during their invasion of Germany out of hatred for what the Nazis had done to the Russian people. And Thousnads of SS officers and troops never got put on trial or punished as they were just soldiers following orders.
Meh. I'm apparently a neocon. I support a ‘hawkish’ foreign policy. Although many Democrats and Republicans do. And lets not forget some of the best responses to the anti-war crowd has come from figures on the left, Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen instantly come to mind.
Oh dear.
There's a reason why the Hitchens brothers are talking again now.