Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the first US soldier to go public with his refusal to fight Bush's war in Iraq, was convicted of desertion on May 21 and sentenced to a bad conduct discharge and one year of hard labor. Tod Ensign, the director of GI support organisation Citizen Soldier, was part of Camilo's legal team. He spoke with the US Socialist Worker's Eric Ruder the day after the verdict.
Mejia participated in the invasion of Iraq. After a two-week furlough last October, he refused to return to his unit because he believed the war was unjust. "I have no regrets — not one", said Mejia, before the jury handed down his sentence.
Several weeks before his trial, Mejia said, "No soldier should go to Iraq and give his life for oil. I have witnessed the suffering of a people whose country is in ruins and who are further humiliated by the raids, patrols and curfews of an occupying army. My experience of this war has changed me forever."
Can you describe Camilo's trial?
Given that Camilo was tried in a special rather than general court, he received the maximum punishment. But in my view, an important struggle was won when the decision was made not to take Camilo to general court, because that would have meant the possibility of a five-year sentence and a dishonourable discharge, which is virtually impossible to upgrade.
Yesterday, I picked up a copy of the base newspaper. And this week, at Fort Stewart, which is a pretty big base ... they list 17 desertions or absents without leave (AWOL) in one week.
Does the military want this conviction to intimidate other soldiers who may share Camilo's criticisms?
Certainly. He was tried by a jury composed of career infantry commanders. These are colonels and majors, and these people run infantry units. And they're sitting there looking at a guy who's very credible, very intelligent, very sincere, very conscientious. And they're thinking that this is their worst fear — that in their unit, they have this problem.
Are they going to allow this guy to walk free, or just give him a bad conduct discharge and no jail time, or just three months? Are they going to do that? Given their institutional interests — that is, to field an infantry — the answer is no.
The military court didn't allow your defence team to present its case. Why not?
We offered former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who in the last 30 years has also had extensive experience in international human rights practice, as a witness.
The judge would only allow [Clark and similar experts] to testify very briefly — and only with respect to the government's motion to suppress all of our evidence.
The judge granted the government's motion that no evidence could be offered — or even courtroom reference could be made — to international law defences or duties that Mejia might have had under international law.
But in this area, Mejia's case is particularly strong. Mejia was at Al Asad — which is another detention centre like the Abu Ghraib prison — where he witnessed the abuse and sleep deprivation of detainees in May 2003. The detention centre was controlled by three interrogators, who were in civilian clothes and operated with pseudonyms. One of them called himself "Rabbit" and one called himself "Whitey".
They were in charge and telling the troops which detainees "to soften up", which meant 24 to 48 hours of sleep deprivation. They would take unloaded pistols and pull the trigger with the gun on the detainee's temples. They would pound the walls with sledgehammers, and they would constantly wake them and make them walk around.
Mejia was very upset by this. Right now, the government is trying other soldiers for criminal offences related to torture, and here's a guy who is saying that he would not go back and do that. Yet he is being tried for his refusal to return. This is a clear paradox.
There's no question that this treatment by US troops is illegal. You can read about it every day in the newspapers, and no one denies that these are violations of the Geneva Conventions.
The other piece of what Mejia saw is something that's now coming out in newspaper accounts about the role of private contractors. They've identified at least two of these outfits that had Pentagon contracts to conduct interrogations.
The Geneva conventions were written in such a way that you can't turn people over to a third party and escape your responsibility for proper treatment. Rumsfeld says stuff like, "Hey, they weren't soldiers. They were just working by the hour". What? Do they get $5 a fingernail?
This is really dark and cynical, and in my view, a real step backwards — employing these kinds of mercenaries for torture.
The judge wouldn't allow the jury to hear a word of this evidence. He cut us off before we even had a chance to present our case, much less to prove it. That's just contemptuous treatment.
Even before the torture revelations, Mejia had opposed the war on the grounds that it was immoral, a war for oil to benefit corporations. Was he able to express any of this?
During his time on the stand, he was questioned about the basis of his views. But the judge also ruled from the bench that he would not be allowed to reprise his conscientious objector application, and that's where he had put a lot of those statements ... So a little of this got out, but certainly not what we had wanted.
[The judge and the prosecutor] wanted to [restrict the case to whether] on October 16, he didn't appear at Baltimore airport to get on his flight back to Iraq. To them, that's the case.
Kangaroo court is not too strong a statement. It was a trumped-up, closed, pinched-off hearing. The problem is that you have no other forums — you can't go to federal court and say that we're not going to get a fair hearing here. The military has total authority over these cases.
There's been a treaty for about 150 years between the US and Costa Rica, and Camilo is a citizen of Costa Rica, as well as Nicaragua [but not of the US]. The treaty provides that neither country's citizens shall be subject to compulsory service in the other nation's military.
We have a fairly strong legal argument that once they extended Camilo past his April 2003 discharge date — which they do to thousands of soldiers through stop-loss orders — this was compulsory military service. And under the terms of the treaty, he could not be subjected to it. They had to release him from the military.
But the judge ruled that when you enlist, you agree to be bound by the possibility of stop-loss orders in a national security crisis. The language now exists in the enlistment agreement — their lawyers have gone in there and cleaned that up.
What does Camilo's case say about the opposition to war and occupation among soldiers?
I'm surprised by the desertion numbers listed in the base paper — those are higher than I expected. Obviously, not every one of those people is a Camilo Mejia. Some of them may have left because their girlfriends threatened to leave with their kids, or their mother had emphysema and can't get to work anymore — these are some of the reasons that people go AWOL.
But I'm sure that among those 17, there are people who in various ways came to the conclusion that this really isn't something that they want to do. What I'm saying is that there's latent opposition, and there's active opposition — just like during the Vietnam War.
Sometimes, people romanticise the Vietnam [War] GI movement, but having been part of it and having talked to hundreds of GIs over the years, some of those GIs were hanging in coffee houses to get dates — or whatever. All I'm saying is that resistance takes many forms.
At this point, the potential for it is there, and the advantage that we have today is that because of the internet, among other things, we are much more able to communicate and spread ideas.
The downside is that there really is no existing structure out there that allows soldiers to feel supported — to feel part of something larger than themselves — which is necessary to political consciousness and political activism. That's a real deficit.
The coffeehouse movement [in the Vietnam War] did offer — in its limited way — a place for GIs to go, a certain amount of counseling and support, and even legal help. And of course, it fed ideas — literature tables, bookstores and all kinds of stuff.
But that does not exist now. There's nothing at Fort Stewart that would even begin to offer GIs that. That's something that the anti-war movement, such as it is, has to address, and we have not done that.
I get a lot of calls from AWOLs — or more often, AWOLs' families — who want to know what they can do. And the problem is that these are tough fights. This case took a lot of resources and energy and people.
The resistance is there, the potential is there, and the GIs themselves are there, voting with their feet. But we haven't in any way formed a movement that can be called a GI movement. There are many individuals trying to do so, and maybe there are nascent formations on some bases — I don't know, and I don't want to present myself as an expert on this point. But having been here in Fort Stewart for the past week and seeing what I've seen, we have a ways to go.
[abridged from US Socialist Worker. For the full interview, visit <http://www.socialistworker.org.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 2, 2004.
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