Jailed for telling the truth about Iraq

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Matthew Norman

Britain has just held a show trial, said Matthew Norman in the London Independent. A “preposterous kangaroo court-martial” sentenced Flight Lt. Malcolm Kendall-Smith to eight months in prison for refusing to return to Iraq. Kendall-Smith is “neither a coward nor a conscientious objector.” After all, he served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. His refusal to deploy once again to Basra “goes to the heart of the most contentious issue Britain has faced in decades”—the legality of the Iraq war. Kendall-Smith, like U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and millions of other thoughtful people, believes the invasion was in violation of international law. That means that, according to the Nuremberg Principles, Kendall-Smith had an obligation to refuse to participate, even though he was defying a direct order. “To me, this is an act of heroism.” The military judge, though, saw the lieutenant not as a hero, but as a “showoff, a troublemaker, and a wannabe martyr.” Not that we should be surprised. How could a military court packed with “serving officers” possibly find their superior officers and their government guilty of breaching international law? The conflict of interest should have relegated the case to a civilian court, so that a jury of Kendall-Smith’s peers could have decided “whether it was he, or the order he disobeyed, that was criminal.”