{"id":314276,"date":"2025-11-23T22:45:55","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T22:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/business\/legal\/what-my-lai-simple-justice\/"},"modified":"2025-11-23T22:45:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T22:45:55","slug":"what-my-lai-simple-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=314276","title":{"rendered":"What, My Lai? | Simple Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"


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To those of us who did not have the experience of serving as a Judge Advocate General officer in the military, the video made by members of Congress<\/a> may seem like an invitation for soldiers and sailors to decide for themselves what orders are illegal and should not be carried out. David French, however, was a JAG and explains that, while the video may not have provided a good explanation, the procedures and law are not quite so mysterious.<\/p>\n

Notably, Trump, who called it seditious and punishable by death, was neither a member of the military nor a lawyer. French began by giving two examples<\/a>, the order to bomb Iraqi insurgents in a farmhouse and the order to kill a prisoner who committed an atrocity. As to the first, David calls the question one of \u201cdistinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

You\u2019ve been briefed over and over again about the law of war, and you\u2019re worried that there might be civilians in the house. You can\u2019t see any, but you don\u2019t know for sure. A legal principle called \u201cdistinction\u201d requires you to discriminate between military and civilian targets, and you\u2019re worried about who might be behind those walls.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you, the person dropping the bomb, have concerns, you question whether there are civilians in the house.<\/p>\n

\n

The response is immediate. \u201cWe\u2019ve got the JAG (military lawyer) in the TOC (tactical operations center), and you\u2019re cleared to engage.\u201d That response tells you that a legal analysis has been done, and the lawyer thinks the strike is acceptable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This involves an element of trust, that what you\u2019re being told is accurate and that the JAG approved the strike, as well as the legitimacy of the JAG\u2019s legal analysis, that the JAG isn\u2019t rubber stamping the strike, but has made the analysis upon which you\u2019re relying. But his point is that the procedure has been used and the strike has been ratified. So you pull the trigger.<\/p>\n

But what about killing the prisoner?<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t fight a war \u2014 especially a counterinsurgency like the one we faced in Iraq \u2014 if every soldier acts as an independent legal check on every order he or she receives. Individual service members don\u2019t have sufficient knowledge or information to make those kinds of judgments. When time is of the essence and lives are on the line, your first impulse must be to do as you\u2019re told.<\/p>\n

But not always. In the two scenarios above, the pilot should drop his bomb, but the platoon leader should refuse the order to shoot the prisoner.<\/p>\n

During the Vietnam war (lower case, since it was never declared by Congress to be a war), Lt. William Calley was ordered to clear a village. And he followed orders.<\/p>\n

\n

The legal difference<\/strong>\u00a0between those two scenarios can be explained in a case called\u00a0United States v. Calley<\/a>, the best-known case to emerge from the Vietnam War, a conflict that also contained both conventional and counterinsurgency elements. First Lt. William Calley Jr. was facing charges related to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and he presented a classic military defense \u2014 that he was following orders to clear the village.<\/p>\n

In response, the Court of Military Review said that \u201cThe acts of a subordinate done in compliance with an unlawful order given him by his superior are excused and impose no criminal liability upon him unless the superior\u2019s order is one which a man of\u00a0ordinary sense and understanding\u00a0<\/em>would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful, or if the order in question is actually known to the accused to be unlawful.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, leaving it to the discretion of \u201ca man of ordinary sense and understanding\u201d might not seem to most to be a sufficiently clear line. After all, most of us believe ourselves to be a person of \u201cordinary sense and understanding,\u201d and therefore any decision we make, whether to comply or not, will satisfy this test, known as the \u201cmanifestly unlawful\u201d test.<\/p>\n

\n

As Maj. Keith Petty, then an Army judge advocate, explained in an\u00a0excellent summary of the law<\/a>\u00a0in a 2016 piece in Just Security, this is called the \u201cmanifestly unlawful\u201d test, and \u2014 as Petty described it \u2014 the rule means that \u201cthe legal duty to disobey is strongest when the superior\u2019s order is unlawful on its face.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shooting a prisoner, for example, is unambiguously illegal. Bombing a home that is thought to contain insurgents is not.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What is clear, coming out of the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi high command following World War II, is that \u201cjust following orders\u201d is not a defense. While the high command alone bears responsibility for commencing illegal aggression, the soldier bears responsibility for how he executes his orders in the field.<\/p>\n

\n

This means that when it comes to the decision to initiate hostilities, the responsibility rests with the senior leaders of the nation (in this case, ultimately, with President Trump). At the same time, however, members of the military bear responsibility for how they conduct those operations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem, of course, is that not all scenarios fall nicely within the parameters set forth by the two examples David provides. In the course of executing orders, innumerable scenarios arise which could implicate illegality, and troops are not in a position to make complex legal determinations as to whether their execution of orders are lawful or illegal.<\/p>\n

\n

Even if the facts are clear, the law is often complex. Do we really expect individual pilots or sailors to know that the statutes Trump is relying on to designate various narcotics gangs as international terrorist organizations\u00a0do not also contain<\/a>\u00a0an authorization to use military force?<\/p>\n

Do we expect individual pilots and sailors to know when criminal activity rises to the level of a true military threat under international law?<\/p>\n

No, we do not.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We do, however, expect that our leaders, the high command, will make the distinction.<\/p>\n

\n

Trump has put the military in an impossible situation. He\u2019s making its most senior leaders complicit in his unlawful acts, and he\u2019s burdening the consciences of soldiers who serve under his command. One of the great moral values of congressional declarations of war is that they provide soldiers with the assurance that the conflict has been debated and that their deployment is a matter of national will.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Congress has not authorized the military to bomb ships in international waters. The Justice Department has fashioned a classified memo saying this is lawful, but it is subject to Trump\u2019s twin directives, that the OLC memo should accept the facts as Trump says they are and apply the law as Trump says it should. But neither Trump, nor the OLC \u201cgolden shield\u201d of a legal opinion authorizing the action, changes the law as it is.<\/p>\n

\n

So here\u2019s the bottom line: No legal opinion can compel any member of the military to commit \u201cmanifestly unlawful\u201d acts during a war. But when it comes to the decision to begin an armed conflict, the responsibility doesn\u2019t rest with individual soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines; it rests with Trump and his most senior military and political advisers \u2014 the men and women who ordered them to fight.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Does this clarify what the members of Congress meant when they restated the law that troops must not obey an illegal order, or how it should apply to the circumstances before us? Probably not, but that\u2019s the nature of law at a time \u201cwhen the president [orders] it, that means that it is not illegal.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Discover more from Simple Justice<\/h3>\n

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To those of us who did not have the experience of serving as a Judge Advocate General officer in the military, the video made by members of Congress may seem like an invitation for soldiers and sailors to decide for themselves what orders are illegal and should not be carried out. 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