Posted on 12/06/2004 10:25:17 PM PST by Former Military Chick
No one ever said military life was easy or predictable, and Iraq and Afghanistan have only made it harder. Still, it was only a matter of time before someone sued the Pentagon over it. This week, that's precisely what happened.
Eight servicemen filed a lawsuit yesterday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to challenge the Pentagon's stop-loss policy. The Pentagon, which has been using stop-loss to retain enlistees beyond their intended periods of service, defends the policy as a means of keeping unit cohesion and maintaining overall manpower levels. But the servicemen are saying stop-loss violates their enlistmen contracts and deprives them of liberty without due process. The plaintiffs are David Qualls, a 35-year-old Guardsman from Arkansas and one-time Army enlistee, and seven servicement identified only as John Doe. All eight are posted overseas. Six of them, including Mr. Qualls, are in Iraq.
Legal experts say the case has little chance of succeeding, just as in the Vietnam era similar suits challenging the Pentagon's deployment decisions failed. In the most significant of these, the 1968 Supreme Court decision Morse v. Boswell, the court handed down an 8-1 decision against plaintiffs from a Vietnam-bound Army reserve unit who claimed the Pentagon had not trained them adequately for service. That suit, like most of the era, was largely symbolic.
Experts say Qualls v. Rumsfeld is much the same: a symbolic strike against a war and the policies that underwrite it. To judge by the suit's pushers, that's probably correct. Among the plaintiffs' lawyers is Jules Lobel, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a left-wing outfit that is also scurrilously seeking to label Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a war criminal for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
(Excerpt) Read more at insider.washingtontimes.com ...
Does the constitution provides the courts to have jurisdiction over the military?
Is it not within the purview of the Commander-In-Chief's area of jurisdiction?
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