Heroes aren't born, they are made.
They are made by the situations around them and the times they live in.
There is a history of civil disobedience in this country. You can go back to the movement against slavery, to Thoreau's protest against the Mexican war, to the abolitionists, white and black, who violated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and rescued slaves from the police and from their 'masters.' A long tradition in American history of people being willing to violate the law, commit civil disobedience in order to make a declaration of what is right and what is just.
[. . .]
That's what civil disobedience does: It makes a point more powerfully than a petition or statement or letter to your congressman. It's a way of dramatizing a principle that you want to uphold, dramatizing a grievance that you want to point to. So it has always been an important and necessary tactic in any social movement, and one that has at certain times in history been effective in arousing other people to a cause.
-- Howard Zinn, speaking to David Barsamian in Original Zinn: Conversations On History and Politics, pp. 63-64.
In that historical tradition comes Ehren Watada. He didn't set out to do anything heroic (and would no doubt reject the label of hero). He didn't even set out to oppose to Iraq war. He signed up with the military. He wanted to serve and felt that was the way to do so.
He served in Korea. By the military's standards, he served quite well. He didn't go and brag about that. As his mother, Carolyn Ho, has noted, she wasn't even aware of the praise he'd received until after he took his stand.
When he was informed he would be deployed to Iraq in June of 2006, he was also advised that, as an officer, it was his duty to study up on the country. He would be responsible for answering questions from those serving under him and for explaining the purpose of the mission. (Something the Bully Boy still can't do.) So Ehren Watada studied and researched and learned what the domestic media oh-so-slowly began to admit, that the war was based on lies. No WMDs. No link to 9-11. No immediate threat. No impending mushroom cloud.
It is an illegal war. It is an illegal war that has continued to be executed in an illegal manner with the US administration refusing to honor the legal obligations they hold as an occupying power. Abu Ghraib was a war crime. One of many.
With his realization of the realities of the illegal war, Watada had two choices, ignore the realization or act upon it. He decided to act upon it. He told his mother on January 1, 2006 that he had decided not to deploy. As she has admitted, she was against the decision. She was against it because she knew the abuse, scorn and much more that would be heaped upon her son.
But he stuck with his decision and informed the military of his decision. He attempted to work out an arrangment privately for months -- serving in another theater, resigning his commission, etc. The military was giving mixed signals, indicating that they might be receptive to some agreement. As revealed in his court-martial (which began Feb. 5th at Fort Lewis), one of the military's big problems with him was that he went public. He only went public after months of attempting a private resolution. He only went public the month he was to be deployed.
Now Teen Dumb Ass calls Ehren Watada a "liar," a "coward," "pansy," and much more. Indicating that her level of education is as sorely lacking as her level of comprehension. Watada did not refuse to go to Iraq out of a fear of being injured or dead. One of the 'solutions' the military offered him early on was a safe desk job. If fear was the thing motivating him, he would have grabbed that offer in a second.
If he was a coward, he wouldn't have been able to publicly speak out as some people who do know the facts at play publicly disagreed with him (some with very strong language) and as a lot of dumb asses (we're sure they aren't all English majors, most of the English majors we know are very smart) decided that their version of events was more important than the actual facts. Though 'freeing,' that approach doesn't meet any journalistic standards.
But there are a lot of Dumb Asses, junior division and adult, who want to lie and spin. Which is why the mistrial's implications have barely been covered by most of the media. The court-martial of Ehren Watada was important going in. It became even more so, and historic, as a result of Lt. Col. John Head's decision to call a mistrial over the objections of the defense. Judge Toilet may very well have set Watada free.
Now if you hide behing Eugene Fidell, who was clearly an advocate for the court-martial of and imprisonment of Watada, you can obscure the issue. If you ignore legal experts like Michael Ratner and Marjorie Cohn while presenting Fidell as "objective" and "disinterested," you can certainly obscure reality.
Eric Seitz, Watada's civilian attorney, stated that Ehren Watada could not be court-martialed again, that by declaring a mistrial, Judge Toilet laid the groundwork for double-jeopardy should the military attempt to court-martial Watada again.
Somehow he was considered non-objective or not qualified to speak by the same press that avoided consulting the expertise of the likes of Cohn and Ratner. Seitz was Watada's civilian attorney. The military also appointed one of their own to be part of Watada's defense team.
That would be Captain Mark Kim. John Catalinotto (Workers' World) noted (and few others have) that Kim "agreed with Seitz's interpretation of military law." Now imagine if the media wanted to explore that?
Captain Mark Kim is in the military, has a career in the military, and even he agrees that double-jeopardy will now be at play. It's probably easier to obscure the issue by going to an advocate for court-martial and imprisonment like Fidell than in seeking out Kim who is sharing an opinion that won't win him popularity points with the top brass of the military.
Regardless of what the outcome had been (and many expected the outcome of the court-martial to be a conviction), Watada's stand was heroic. That was obscured with Dumb Asses like Tom Zeller Junior (New York Times) who offered that Watada was a "deserter" which only proved that Zeller can't follow basic facts and has trouble with terms and meanings. (Watada did not desert. He refused deployment and continued to serve on the base -- as he continues to do now after the court-martial.)
At any time, Watada's stand deserved note. Someone speaking out and taking a stand despite the fallout that might result is a very brave, very heroic act. Coming, as it did, when the Democratic Party, as a whole, can only find their spines if the action to be taken is "symbolic" and "non-binding," someone taking a real stand matters even more.