Demon Princess PNW News Productions Presents:

Our country’s first military objector to refuse to be deployed to Iraq is stationed in Washington state, & a Tacoma, Washington Methodist Church offers a safe haven for others. Other war resistors apply to Canada for asylum.

It’s looking more & more like Vietnam everyday.

Better late than never re bringing the news to your attention, Demon Princess says that one of our local papers, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported last week that we in the Pacific Northwest have been honored with the first Iraq war objector.

“Lost in the media frenzy over the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, First Lt. Ehren Watada, of Fort Lewis, opened another front in the conflict over President Bush's war of choice in Iraq. At a news conference in Tacoma a few hours before al-Zarqawi's death, Watada announced his refusal of orders to deploy to Iraq on grounds that the war is illegal as well as immoral.

"’An order to take part in an illegal war is illegal in itself,’ he said. ‘I felt it was my obligation as a leader to speak out against the willful misconduct at the highest level of the chain of command.’
“Watada is the first soldier to resist the war based on the Nuremburg Principles pioneered by U.S. prosecutors during Nazi war crimes trials after World War II and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (and the United States) in 1950.

“Those principles hold soldiers, as well as heads of state, liable for "crimes against peace" (planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression or conspiring to do so), war crimes (violating "the laws or customs" of war) and crimes against humanity. A key phrase reads: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relive him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

Hear that, George?

Watada, we note, is originally from Hawaii—a “local boy.” People there cheered him for his actions, too.

He faces a court-martial, up to two years in prison for missing movement by design, a dishonorable discharge, and other possible charges. And he has a fan club: http://www.thankyoult.org/

In other regional news, George himself was here in town to fund-raise for Dave Reichert, a freshman in Congress.

I didn’t see the news report about it, but I’m told by a reliable witness that George got rained on.