Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Illegal War?

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

FORT LEWIS -- The lawyer for an Army officer from Honolulu who refused to deploy to Iraq said military prosecutors don't want 1st Lt. Ehren Watada to have the chance to defend himself by arguing that the war in Iraq is illegal.

"They're claiming that the only real issue is whether or not an order was given to Lieutenant Watada, which he refused to carry out and whether he made certain statements to the media," Eric Seitz said Tuesday, two days before a pretrial hearing at Fort Lewis.

Watada's court martial is to begin Feb. 5 at Fort Lewis. He refused to deploy to Iraq on June 22 with his Fort Lewis-based unit because he believes the war in Iraq is illegal.

...

Watada initially was charged with missing troop movement, conduct unbecoming an officer and contempt toward officials. While the Army later dropped the contempt charge, it added another specification of conduct unbecoming based on comments Watada made in Seattle during the national convention of Veterans for Peace.

Watada's lawyer claims that the war is illegal based upon international law because it's a "war of aggression". This echoes what the former secretary-general of the United Nations had to say about it. Authorities in the U.K., Australia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Japan disagreed. They said the war was backed by international law.

Looked at another way, the war in Iraq is nothing but an extension of the first gulf war. In that war, waged against Iraq because of their invasion of Kuwait, coalition forces led by the U.S. stomped Iraq's military. When that conflict "ended" Iraq agreed to cease-fire terms negotiated in Safwan Iraq on March 1, 1991, and then violated just about every one of them. On that basis alone the war in Iraq was justified.

Watada claims that the war "violates our democratic system of checks and balances." That didn't match up with his reasons for enlisting in the Army in the spring of 2003. At that time he supported the war based on the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now he claims that "we have been lied to and betrayed by this administration."

It's fairly easy to debunk both of those charges. First of all, in October of 2002, the United States Congress gave authorization to the administration to go to war in Iraq. The authorization passed the House by a vote of 296 to 133 on October 10, 2002. It passed the Senate without amendment by a vote of 77 - 23 on October 11, 2002. The president signed it on October 16, 2002. That pretty much knocks the "violates our democratic system of checks and balances" charge out of the water.

The war in Iraq is a legal war. Watada's next claim, that "we have been lied to and betrayed by this administration" doesn't bear up under scrutiny either, unless a lot of people outside the administration were complicit in the lie. Watada claims that his feelings about the war changed as he read up on the war and became convinced that there was "intentional manipulation of intelligence" by the administration.

You'd think we could lay this charge to rest by now, but it keeps coming up again and again. Sen. Harry Reid has said that in the coming year "We're going to find out how intelligence was manipulated, taking us to war."

The thing is, the issue of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction goes back well past 1991. We know that at one time he did have them, because we know that he used them. We know that he continued to work on them after 1991, or that the world believed he did at any rate, and that this was the general consensus before George W. Bush was even elected.

As an example, here's a quote from Nancy Pelosi, speaking on December 16, 1998: "As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."

Now how the heck did president Bush (or Karl Rove) manage to manipulate the intelligence on WMD's in 1998, nearly three years before his inauguration? For that matter, how did they manipulate the intelligence on WMDs carried out by UNSCOM and reported in 1998?

"Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. Based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors] suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production." —Ex-Un Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter in 1998

It's plain to me that Watada's defense, based on the assumption that the war is illegal, or that the administration lied us into the war doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The war in Iraq is a legal war. Lt. Watada was given a legal order to deploy, and chose to disobey that order. He then made several statements in the press that qualified as "conduct unbecoming an officer".

He deserves to be court-martialed.

Trackposted to Rightwing Guy, Pet's Garden Blog, Perri Nelson's Website, third world county, The Random Yak, Faultline USA, The HILL Chronicles, Blue Star Chronicles, Stuck On Stupid, Wake Up America, Dumb Ox News, Conservative Cat, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Also linked to NWBloggers.com and Leaning Straight Up.

Month of Apple Bugs

From Information Week:

The Month of Apple Bugs project kicked off Monday by posting a zero-day vulnerability in Apple's QuickTime media player. It also posted an exploit that could be used by attackers to compromise, hijack, or infect computers running either Windows or Mac OS X.

...

An Apple spokesman declined to confirm the vulnerability, or, if it was legitimate, when the flaw might be fixed. In an e-mail, he said that "Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users. We always welcome feedback on how to improve security on the Mac."

...

Apple's QuickTime was last in the news during December, when a bug in the player was exploited by fraudsters on MySpace. That vulnerability remains unpatched.

LMH expects to see more QuickTime attacks now that his newest flaw has gone public. He said, "It's a matter of time to see this getting abused in the wild."

Apple says they have a "great track record" of fixing bugs, but they still haven't fixed the last one reported in QuickTime. Will we see one of those "I'm a Mac - and I'm a PC" commercials with the "Mac" guy having sniffles now?

I doubt it.

Trackposted to Rightwing Guy, Pet's Garden Blog, Perri Nelson's Website, third world county, The Random Yak, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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