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Mark Kelly, an O-6 Navy captain

 
 
 
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lostone

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is now the target of the Right Wing attacks on UCMJ? For suggesting that military personnel can refuse to obey orders that they deem to be illegal? If not, is the whole of the UCMJ meaningless, sanctimonious preaching?

How far down the hole into Nazism can they go? Peasants obey orders, and kill on demand.

Did the Nuremburg Trials really establish for military personnel to dissent and reject order from what they believed to be illegal orders? Ike and Truman thought that they did, and were more than simple posturing. Or were they also just posturing?

Even the infamous Lt Calley never reay got much punishment

AI Overview



Yes, Lieutenant (Lt.) William Calley served time, but almost all of it was under
house arrest rather than in a military prison stockade.
He was found guilty in 1971 of the premeditated murder of at least 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre and was originally sentenced to life in prison.
However, the sequence of his confinement and sentence reduction was as follows:
  • Initial Confinement: Immediately following his conviction, Calley spent only a few days in the stockade at Fort Benning, Georgia.
  • House Arrest: President Richard Nixon intervened and ordered Calley removed from the stockade and placed under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning while his appeals were ongoing.
    • Sentence Reduction and Parole: His life sentence was reduced to 20 years, then further reduced to 10 years by the Secretary of the Army. He was paroled in November 1974 after serving approximately three-and-a-half years of confinement, nearly all of which was under house arrest.
Despite a federal judge overturning his conviction in 1974 (a decision later reversed by an appeals court), Calley never returned to a standard prison facility after his initial few days, serving the remainder of his time under house arrest.
 
First, I don't support Kelly getting into any kind of trouble. As a non-combat veteran, I also agree that we were instructed not to obey illegal orders. Here is how I was trained: if I were to _believe_ (i.e. I could even be mistaken) I was ordered to do something illegal, I was to respond something to the effect of "Sir, respectfully, I cannot obey that order because I believe it is illegal" or "Sir, respectfully, I cannot obey that order because I believe it violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice."

Second, I think we have to add context to this in three ways:
  • (a) in the advertisement, there is an implication that Trump is engaging in illegal and unconstitutional orders.
  • (b) Kelly is subject to military law and regulation and as such military courts with special rules where findings are based on preponderance of evidence, not a burden of beyond reasonable doubt.
  • (c) Trump has been engaging in purges of the military and creating pressure.
The confluence of all these things says that they can find some fine print in military regulations and probably individual military judges who are cultists who will agree with their (mis)interpretation of the fine print. Two examples: conduct unbecoming of an officer; reducing morale of the troops. They could give him a court martial.
 
I recall being lectured on UCMJ, illegal orders, and the Nurenburg trials in Naval boot camp long ago (1963), but I did not recall the exact details of how they told us to respond to what we deemed to be an illegal order...your memory is better than mine, and I am grateful to you for refreshing my memory.

Kelly was a Naval Captain, just one step lower than an Admiral, a much higher rank than an Army Captain, so I presume he is very aware of what UCMJ specifies and Naval legal procedures. OTOH, Trump and Hedgpeth have clearly shown us that they are quite willing to piss all over military traditional boundaries in order to force their POV on all military personnel and will try to crush anyone at any level who tries to get in their way.
 
It’s never just soldiers “following orders.” There is always a totalizing ideology behind it, a racial hierarchy, and a bureaucratic machine that rewards atrocity. Those orders come from somewhere. By the time a soldier receives them, the country is already cooked. And while we sit here worrying about our soldiers following illegal orders and wondering if we might become victims, the rest of the world is looking at us like, “bitch please. We’ve been shit on for years."
 
Kelly: I've had a missile blow up next to my airplane. I've been nearly shot down multiple times. I've flown a rocket ship into space four times, built by the lowest bidder. But I'm not going to be silenced here. Is it stressful? I've been stressed by things more important than Donald Trump trying to intimidate me into shutting my mouth and not doing my job. He didn't like what I said. I'm going to show up for work every day, support the constitution, do my job, hold this administration accountable. Hold this president accountable when he is out of line. That's the responsibility of every U.S. Senator and every member of congress. He's not going to silence us.
 
Enlisted personnel take an oath to "obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over them" IAW the UCMJ. Basically it's don't make any close judgement calls, defer to higher authority. And to do so without any mental reservation, i.e., your half baked political views. Any enlisted person with a sense of self preservation isn't going to play you make the call unless the order is bliningly illegal.
Officers have no such obey statement in their oath and this is intentional since just after the civil war. Officers "discharge the duties of their office", omitting any obligation to obey orders of the president. When in doubt ask the JAG officer. This is their job.
 
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