We understood it is a soldier’s duty to disobey such laws when they conflict with moral law or natural or “higher” law.




by Lawrence Rockwood

A Socialist Webzine Exclusive

Starting on Friday, December 16, at Fort Meade, Maryland, the US Army held a week long pre-trial hearing of PFC Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accusing of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks. On Saturday, hundreds of supporters, many bused in from Occupy Wall Street, rallied and marched between the gates of Fort
Meade to encourage Manning and even sang for him on his 24th birthday.


A number of speeches were broadcasted at this event. Former Army Lieutenant Dan Choi, the gay activist who was discharged from the military for revealing his sexual orientation, honored Manning as a gay soldier who shared the integrity all the those who openly challenged the Army’s former “Don’t Ask / Don’t Tell” policy, the integrity of revealing the truth whatever the cost. Veterans like lifelong activist John Penley who also faced imprisonment and extended solitary confinement for his anti-war stance during his enlistment in the Navy during the Vietnam War, spoke of Manning as being emblematic of the greater anti-war movement. A member of Manning’s defense committee called Manning one of the central inspirations of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring where thousands have turned their arrests into opportunities to place their own counties on trial for the failure to hold to democratic values.

This Article 32 hearing was the military equivalent of a grand jury hearing whose purpose is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence and law for the case to proceeding to a court martial, the military equivalent of a criminal trial. Two miles within Fort Meade, PFC Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, was utilizing all the usual legal maneuvers associated with any high visibility trial. However, in addition, while crowds at the gate continued to hail him as a hero who released classified information as a whistleblower exposing war crimes, Coombs in his closing arguments on Wednesday described PFC Manning in a very different light than his defenders at the gates. As a disturbed soldier, who was psychologically troubled and disaffected by military policy, he argued that the Army had no right exposing Manning to classified information in the first place.

Besides these two radically different defenses of Manning, there was a third. Among the demonstrators who stood out among the demonstrators at the gate in defense of Manning were three career military professionals, three “lifers.” A retired Navy Lieutenant Commander. A retired Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer, and myself, a former Army Counterintelligence officer with 23 years of uniformed service who was
also court martialed for exposing human rights violations being hidden by America’s trillion dollar secrecy industry.

We understood that IF this soldier was guilty of the charges against him, he was justified in his conduct, not as an anti-war gesture, not the act of LGBT personal integrity, nor even as a pro-democracy activist, but as a military professional. We were aware that in the German city of Nuremberg after World War II the American military led an effort to try senior German officers for obeying, not violating, their country’s national security laws. We understood it is a soldier’s duty to disobey such laws when they conflict with moral law or natural or “higher” law. We remembered that our own military executed officers and soldiers for failing to make choice that PFC
Manning made when faced with low level classified documents revealing the highest levels of criminality imaginable. In the case of Nuremberg, the defenders were under the illusion that the usual following of orders under “good order and discipline” trumped the affirmative just war obligation for soldiers to prevent war crimes to include torture and genocide. In the case of PFC Manning, the prosecutors are under the illusion that the security classification of rather low level secret material trumps the affirmative just war obligation to expose war crimes. We, as life-long military professionals, understood Manning’s prosecution was nothing other than the historical inversion of the Nuremberg Precedent.

Nothing demonstrated the stress created by this internal institutional contradiction than an incident on Monday in which Former Army Lieutenant Dan Choi, a Manning supporter, was thrown out of the hearing for wearing his dress uniform and had his rank symbolically torn from his uniform in an act of severe disrespect. Soon after, famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was thrown out of the court house for introducing himself to Manning. These actions are without historical precedence as experienced by this author at his own court martial, but are consistent with the torturous treatment that Manning has received at the hands of his captors. Even the war criminal Lieutenant William Calley who murdered hundreds of civilians at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 was allowed to greet supporters during breaks in his court martial.

With the last day of the hearing, December 22, as expected, it is almost a certainty that the hearing officer will recommend proceeding with the court martial of PFC Manning. In the court martial expected to start in the spring, let us hope demonstrations on his behalf continue and that every voice in defense of this soldier is heard.

At the OWS general assembly, the support for paying for a bus to take demonstrators to Fort Meade was unanimous. As revolutionary democratic socialists, we are committed to the rule of law as a foundation of social justice, but only as that law is founded on the basis of moral law. Natural law theorists from St. Augustine in the 4th century to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have argued that an unjust law is not a law the needs to be obeyed. That is the significance of the court martial of PFC Bradley Manning. Manning’s attorney, in his closing argument, alluded to this truth when he said that “in the end, history will be the judge of my client.”

Captain Lawrence P. Rockwood, PhD, US Army (dismissed), OWS Protester and Arrestee, Chair, Socialist Party of New York State




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