My guest, Lieutenant Ehren Watada, is the first American commissioned officer to publicly refuse to go to Iraq.
Why did you refuse to deploy to Iraq with your brigade?
I began to look at the nature of the insurgency and its causes.
And I came to the counclusion that I could not, as an officer, as a soldier who has sworn an oath to protect the Constitution, the safety and the welfare of the American people, and uphold the treaties and laws that we were all beholden to, I could not condone or enable the leadership within the government who were enacting these illegal and immoral policies in Iraq.
And to me, that is a basic violation of our separation of powers, when you have one branch of government in order to gain an authorization of force, um, to invade another sovereign country.
p.27
The intelligence was not bad, it was intentionally falsified to fit the policy.
