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Watada supporters denounce war as illegal

TACOMA, Wash. — More than 400 people turned out at a forum Saturday to hear the Iraq war denounced as a violation of international and U.S. law.

The event at the Tacoma campus of The Evergreen State College was organized by supporters of Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division soldier from Fort Lewis who faces a court-martial next month for refusing to deploy with his unit to Iraq.

An Army judge last week ruled that Watada can’t defend himself in court by challenging the legality of the war.

Watada, who received a standing ovation, told the audience he thought the judge’s decision was “a travesty of justice,” and that he hoped “the truth can be brought out to the American people.”

The event, dubbed the “Citizens Hearing on the Legality of U.S. Actions in Iraq,” was scheduled to continue Sunday.

The chairman of the hearing, David Krieger, a peace activist who was a juror in the 2005 World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul, said organizers “make no claim to impartiality, only to truth.”

Witnesses made statements and then answered questions from a “citizens panel.” Among its members were a Seattle woman whose cousin was killed in Iraq, veterans from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, a Seattle high school student, a Methodist minister, and a Longshore union member.

Speakers included Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing government lies about the Vietnam war.

Ellsberg, 75, said Iraq, more than Vietnam, “is clear-cut aggression, a crime against the peace.”

“This war is almost unique among all wars,” he said. “We haven’t really had such a clear-cut challenge to us as democratic citizens and what to do when our country is engaging in such clear-cut aggression.”

“The majority of the country is against this war. To oppose it incurs no risk,” Ellsberg said. “The only risk is in taking steps to stop it.”

Another witness, former Navy Lt. Harvey Tharp, said he worked on Iraqi reconstruction efforts in the first year of the war but later resigned rather than participate in electronic intelligence gathering.

“It’s up to each service to decide how to handle these,” he said of his resignation. “If the Navy had decided otherwise, I would have been in Lt. Watada’s shoes.”