Just following orders

I want to link you to an article about the Watada case called "Standing at the Gates of Fort Lewis: Worlds Collide at the Watada Court Martial". What I particularly want you to see is this paragraph about the so-called obligation to follow orders:

I commend people, however, to watch the actual videotaped testimony of the trial of Adolph Eichmann in the French documentary by Eyal Sivian, The Specialist, and to read Hannah Arendt's classic book about his trial, A Report on the Banality of Evil. Eichmann, a low ranking transportation officer in the German army during the Second World War, was responsible for coordinating train traffic throughout the German Reich so that Jews could be sent to death camps. After the War, he was kidnapped by Israeli operatives in Argentina and put on trial in Israel for his life in 1961. His defense was that he did not make the policies of war or genocide, he was merely following orders that he was duty bound not to disobey. Eichmann protested that he had merely had a desk job. He denied having personally killed anybody. He had not gassed anyone nor burned any bodies in any oven. He explained that orders could not be disobeyed in the Third Reich and that conscience played no role in the matter. Eichmann explained that passing along an order from Hitler to the lowest level officer was a matter of absolute duty, an obligation that no one could even contemplate questioning. Eichmann was a pathetic, bureaucratic little man. And he was a war criminal who merely followed orders. He was hanged. He was hanged like the other war criminals previously convicted at Nuremberg whose defense of "merely following orders" garnered no sympathy from the world or the judges of their war crimes.

Lt. Watada was right not to obey the order to deploy to Iraq. I hope he inspires many more military people to question the legality of our Iraqi adventure.