A Trickle That Could Become a Flood [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

04-30-05, 05:31 AM

Sadly, the international news media is buying their publicity for lack of a better explanation from credible U.S. government sources.

However, deserters who fled to Canada seeking political asylum since 9/11 are facing an uphill battle from moderate and conservative Canadian politicians who aren’t accepting their argument that they will be persecuted if they return to the United States to face the music for their perfidy. But even if they were to be expelled – which many sympathetic Canadian officials say is not very likely – it won’t happen any time soon. There is a long and cumbersome appeals process that must be followed and it has barely begun.

Also in the deserter’s favor is Article 85 of the UCMJ that says the maximum punishment for desertion in time of war is death. Canada has a longstanding policy of refusing to extradite fugitives to countries where they may face the death penalty. One Canadian legal expert said despite numerous public utterances from U.S. officials that deserters are in no risk of facing that ultimate punishment, the Ottawa government will still decline to extradite them.

In Toronto, the deserters are led by 26-year-old poster boy Jeremy Hinzman of Rapid City, S.D., a former 82nd Airborne Division rifleman who spent seven months of 2002 and 2003 scrubbing pots and pans in Afghanistan while his unit searched out and annihilated Al Qaeda terrorists.

Hinzman allegedly submitted an application to the Army requesting Conscientious Objector (C.O.) status in August 2002 when his unit was alerted for deployment to Afghanistan. The Army claims it never received the application, so he resubmitted it on Oct. 31, 2002, only a month before his unit was scheduled to ship out. At a brief hearing in Afghanistan six months later, officials determined that the soldier was ineligible for C.O. status, he says.

After Hinzman returned from his seven-month tour, he discovered his unit was going to be deployed to Iraq. In the interim, the Army had returned him to duty as his company’s armorer. It was too much to bear and Hinzman fled to Canada to become its first American deserter to go there since the Vietnam War. Unlike the 50,000 deserters and draft dodgers from the Vietnam War that preceded him, Hinzman asked for asylum as a political refugee, something an American has never before asked the Canadian government. Political refuges status is usually granted to people who face death or torture if they are returned to their native land.

But the political climate had changed there since the 1960s. On March 24, 2005, Canadian immigration authorities denied Hinzman political asylum as a refugee in Canada, a circumstance that Jeffrey House, his draft-dodging American-born lawyer, laments.

House said he is convinced that Hinzman has a strong case for refugee status and should eventually be granted it based on provisions of the Geneva Conventions on War and the Nuremberg Principles, which maintain that it is a soldier’s obligation to disobey illegal orders or to participate in war crimes. House argues that the U.S. war on Iraq, being neither defensive nor approved by the United Nations, is illegal. Therefore, orders to fight in Iraq are illegal and soldiers who refuse those orders are obeying both international law and U.S. law since Congress has ratified these international laws and treaties, he adds.

Hinzman and his family now live in Toronto where he works as a bicycle messenger when not expressing his anti-war views under the guidance The War Resisters Support Campaign.

Zaslofsky said the Army made the former paratrooper work in the Afghani mess hall to degrade and humiliate him while he waited for officials to decide whether or not he was eligible for conscientious objector status. Army officials counter that Hinzman spent his combat tour scrubbing pots in accordance with regulations that prevent soldiers from being sent into combat while their application for conscientious objector status is evaluated.

Zaslofsky said Hinzman subsequently deserted because he is a victim of lies and deceit that began at the hands of Army recruiters who somehow convinced Hinzman that joining the Army’s three-time volunteer elite airborne reaction force was merely a ticket to a college education. After 9/11, Hinzman – a holder of the Expert Infantry Badge and an airborne-qualified infantryman with more than two years of active service was “shocked” to discover he would have to go to war, Zaslofsky added. The final blow fell after Hinzman returned from Afghanistan and discovered he was going to be deployed to Iraq, he said.

Instead he chose to become the first post-9/11 U.S. war resister ever to apply for political refugee status in Canada – and the first to be denied that status – Hinzman is appealing the decision. No Canadian decision is expected before September or October, House said.

In the meantime, a small but steady trickle of deserters is showing up at House’s office door. The attorney also represents Brandon Hughey, 18, an Army tank driver from west Texas who showed up in Toronto on March 4, 2004. In May 2004, David Sanders, 19, a U.S. Navy cryptologist from Arizona, surfaced in Canada and sought House’s counsel. And then Dan Felushko, a U.S. Marine with dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship, simply moved home to Toronto with his Canadian wife and stayed put. Under Canadian law, he is free and clear, House said.

House also represents Army Spc. Clifford Cornell, 24, from Arkansas, and Spc. Darrell Anderson, 22, from Kentucky. Anderson, who fought in the Iraq war, was injured and awarded a Purple Heart. He is quickly supplanting Hinzman as the war protestor’s new poster boy because of his combat wounds. Anderson says he does not want to return to Iraq where he might have to kill innocent civilians for “oil and money.”

Another veteran of Iraq, U.S. Army Specialist Joshua Key of Oklahoma, arrived in Toronto with his wife and four children last summer. His arrival was celebrated with a large color photo of the entire family on the front page of the Toronto Star newspaper on the same day that Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin was meeting President Bush at his Texas ranch. Key is also House’s client.

Martin, a liberal and a critic of the Iraq war, has since left the door open for more American deserters to come to Canada by refusing to completely close it. Days after meeting with Bush in Texas, Martin announced that Canada “does not discriminate” against Americans seeking asylum in Canada because of “a person’s war service.”

At this point, officials are unsure whether the U.S. military’s tacit “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward absentee personnel is merely masking the problem, or encouraging others to walk out on their obligations. But if the U.S. intervention in Iraq drags on with no end in sight, it would not be surprising if today’s trickle of deserters leaking into Canada ultimately becomes a flood.

http://www.sftt.us/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Defensewatch%20Special%2015.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=1&rnd=78.2461993009736

Ellie