One Obeyed An Unlawful Order – The Other Disobeyed A Questionably Lawful One – They’re Both Locked Up

In Prison For Disobeying A Lawful (?) Order - Lt. Colonel Terry Lakin

: In Prison For Obeying Unlawful Order – Corey Claggett

Private First Class Corey Claggett, United States Army, has been sitting for the past four years in administrative segregation (read that: Solitary Confinement) at Leavenworth Prison, for obeying a direct and apparently unlawful order from his superior officer to kill two suspected al Quaeda terrorists in Iraq.

Lt. Colonel Terry Lakin sits in prison, doing six months and forfeiting his retirement benefits, for disobeying what he believed was an unlawful order vicariously issued by his Commander In Chief Barack Obama – who has yet to prove his Constitutional eligibility to hold office.

Diana West, who has written extensively about the Leavenworth Ten, military enlisted and commissioned personnel who are now locked up in prison for war-time killings that got them Court Martials when they returned home, presented a post today on the case of Private Claggett. West includes a video presentation by his lawyer that is well worth your time. But be prepared to feel more than deeply disturbed as you hear the attorney, Tim Parlatore, lay out the cold, hard facts of the Claggett case – and what has happened to his client at the hands of the United States Army:

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1626/Free-PFC-Corey-Claggett.aspx

“…I’ve never highlighted the details of PFC Corey Claggett’s case only because I didn’t know them. I do now and they are harrowing. To date, Corey has served more than four years in solitary confinement for following an unlawful order to kill two al-Qaeda suspects (His superior who ordered the killings is free on parole, and the man who killed a third one is not only free but has been promoted. Details here.) That means that without clemency, Corey Clagget has 14 more more years to go on this diabolically harsh and unjust 18-year sentence…”

My father was in combat in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations during World War II. He came home wearing an Asiatic campaign medal with two Bronze Stars attached. He would talk only very reluctantly about what he saw and did in Burma’s jungles between January of 1944 and August of 1945. My knowledge of his experience is sketchy at best. He wanted to forget about it and he sometimes became angry with me if I brought it up in our conversations. He’s been dead now for five and one-half years and he took most of the terrible secrets with him when he left us.

One thing of which I am certain is that Dad did not ever need to fear coming home to be Court Martialed and sent to prison for killing the wrong person in a combat zone during battle. His job was to facilitate the killing of as many Japanese soldiers as possible and come home to my mother. And a lot of civilians died during those battles. It’s an inevitability of war. From December 8, 1941 to August, 1945 it took the United States and our allies three and one-half years to completely destroy the Japanese and German war machines. World-wide, an estimated fifty-five million people died.

Now we send our best and bravest to fight this nearly ten-years long war in a Stone-Age country, against an enemy that has never been properly named, with no definable victory in sight, with rules of engagement that do not allow our troops to return hostile fire without permission from their superiors. And our Military Courts lock up the men who kill the enemy, while terrorists who have killed Americans are released to go home.

If you can make any sense of this mess, you’re smarter than I am. But those ten Leavenworth prisoners should be released to go home to their families. What in Hell are we doing?

About John L. Work

John Lloyd Work has taken the detective thriller genre and woven an occasional political thread throughout his books, morphing what was once considered an arena reserved for pure fiction into believable, terrifying, futuristic, true-to-life “faction”. He traveled the uniformed patrolman’s path, answering brutal domestic violence calls, high speed chases, homicides, suicides, armed robberies, breaking up bar fights, and the accompanying sporadic unpredictable moments of terror - which eventually come to all police officers, sometimes when least expected. He gradually absorbed the hard fact that the greatest danger a cop faces comes in the form of day-to-day encounters with emotionally disturbed, highly intoxicated people. Those experiences can wear a cop down, grinding on his own emotions and psyche. Prolonged exposure to the worst of people and people at their worst can soon make him believe that the world is a sewer. That police officer’s reality is a common thread throughout Work’s crime fiction books. Following his graduation from high school, Work studied music and became a professional performer, conductor and teacher. Life made a sudden, unexpected turn when, one afternoon in 1976, his cousin, who eventually became the Chief of the Ontario, California, Police Department, talked him into riding along during a patrol shift. The musician was hooked into becoming a police officer. After working for two years as a reserve officer in Southern California and in Boulder, Colorado, he joined the Longmont, Colorado Police Department. Work served there for seven years, investigating crimes as a patrolman, detective and patrol sergeant. In 1989 he joined the Adams County, Colorado Sheriff’s Office, where he soon learned that locking a criminal up inside a jail or prison does not put him out of business. As a sheriff’s detective he investigated hundreds of crimes, including eleven contract murder conspiracies which originated “inside the walls”. While serving on the Adams County North Metro Gang Task Force and as a member of the Colorado Security Threat Intelligence Network Group (STING), Work designed a seminar on how a criminal’s mind formulates his victim selection strategy. Over a period of six years he taught that class in sheriff’s academies and colleges throughout Colorado. He saw the world of crime both inside the walls and out on the streets. His final experiences in the criminal law field were with the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office, where for nearly two years he investigated felonies from the defense side of the Courtroom. Twenty-two years of observing human nature at its worst, combined with watching some profound changes in America’s culture and political institutions, provided plenty of material for his first three books. A self-published author, he just finished writing his tenth thriller.

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