Rationale to disobey illegal orders has solemn history

By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

“Stauffenberg pointed the way: if your obedience requires you to do criminal, unhuman things, you are no longer bound by your oath. A soldier’s final benchmark must always, in the last instance, be his conscience, not his orders.” That’s what Jan Techau, a friend of mine with a special vantage on this matter (more about Stauffenberg in a minute), told me when I asked him what he thought about a controversy now raging in the United States.

It’s about six members of Congress who used to serve in the military or the CIA, and who made a video in which they remind active service members that “our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders.”

The American president responded to their video by accusing the six of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” His department of defense — or of “war,” as he prefers — is already going after one of them: Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a retired naval aviator and former astronaut. The FBI has opened investigations into all six. They report receiving all manner of threats.

Many Americans, and especially those who have taken similar oaths, find this reaction “really disgusting, and frightening.” That’s what Rachel VanLandingham, a former military lawyer to top generals, told me. She thinks that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, “should be impeached for his abuse of power; threatening to court-martial a sitting senator for simply re-stating the law.” According to her, that “reminder to disobey unlawful orders needed to be said, given the current abuse of the military by this administration (ordering them to commit murder in the Caribbean with the boat strikes, for example).”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-rationale-to-disobey-illegal-orders-has-solemn-history/