Military Resistance and Military Law (Video Panel Discussion)

Transcription

James Branum:

So we just want to welcome everyone who’s watching us live or is watching us in recorded form later, and there we have someone joining us as we speak.

So want to welcome everyone who’s joining us along the way for our CLE presentation on military resistance and the law. This program comes to you by way of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, as well as our cosponsors with the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. We also have a lot of involvement in today’s program from our friends at Courage to Resist, so I want to thank them as well. Before we get started, a few housekeeping issues. If you are an attorney taking this for CLE credit, be sure and fill out the registration form that’s on the website. We’ll have a link to this on the video that should pop up in the screen about right here that you can use, but please fill out that form. And then the tuition to take this course if you’re doing it for CLE credit is $50, we’ll have information on how you can pay that as well.

For everyone else, you are very encouraged to make a donation of any amount to help us to put on more of these programs. And we’re letting in a few more people, which is awesome. Let’s see, any other housekeeping issues? I’ll also mention that you’re encouraged if you’re not speaking to use the mute function of course on Zoom. If you have questions, put them in the chat if possible. We’ll have some time too, in case your chat isn’t working, that we’ll take questions verbally as well. But along the way if a question pops in your head, go ahead and put it in the chat right away. And the reason for that is, I’m today serving as an MC person and I’m thinking about the whole scope of the thing as we’re allocating time. So because of that, if you get a good question, it’ll help us in shaping what the later parts of the program will be. So go ahead and post those questions as they come up.

So I thought before we get into the meat of today’s program I’d ask our participants or our speakers today to give a short introduction. So I’ll start with myself. I’m James Branum, I live here in Oklahoma City. I’m on the steering committee at the Military Law Task Force and am also part of the Courage to Resist collective. And my experience in military law as an attorney has been mostly working with representing people, mostly active duty folks, seeking an early discharge for a variety of reasons ranging from PTSD, physical health issues, but also often issues of resistance to war, of having a conscientious objection to war or having other forms of objection to war or a specific war. So that’s been the bulk of my legal practice. So let me hand it off to Kathy, could you give a quick introduction of yourself?

Kathleen Gilberd:

I’m Kathy Gilberd, in San Diego. I’m a legal worker and the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force. And I’m in the middle of dental work, so excuse me if my voice is a little weird. I like to say that I am a veteran of the Vietnam era G.I. anti-war movement civilian support side, never having been in, but having done work with service members around anti-war and other issues since 1970. Enough to get a few gray hairs. And I could pass it on to Stephanie.

Stephanie Atkinson:

Hi, everyone. My name is Stephanie Atkinson, I am a former Army reservist. I enlisted when I was in high school, served six years in my contract, I was activated for the Gulf War, refused to go. And I have been on-again, off-again working with people on issues of counter recruitment advocacy, along with James and Jeff at Courage to Resist. Helping with counter recruitment in schools, just getting those issues for teenagers to think about whether they want to enlist in the first place. A little bit of, an ounce of prevention, and just counter recruitment and anti-militarism in general. I will pass it to Jeff Paterson.

Jeff Paterson:

Right. All right. I’m trying to cohost and change the scenes. But yeah, Jeff Paterson here. I don’t know, I joined the Marine Corps when I was 18 years old, back in 1986, because I thought I wanted to, I don’t know, serve my country and kill bad people to some degree, to be a badass. Four years later I had changed my mind and I was looking forward to just finishing the last few days of my contract, and no harm, no foul kind of thing on the moral injury side of things. The Gulf War kicked off, I was stop-lossed, I was ordered to go to Iraq. I made a life altering decision to publicly refuse to do that, and my general experiences during that time of being able to secure legal and political and community support led me years later to help found Courage to Resist. Which, going on 20 years now, supporting persons of conscience within the U.S. military. And that’s what we’re still doing, and we look forward to talking about it more today, thanks. I don’t know who else is on your agenda, James.

James Branum:

I think that’s it. So here I thought it was interesting, thinking about the four of us speaking today, that we all in different ways impact three major eras of G.I. resistance. I think about Kathy Gilberd, that your work in working with anti-war service members began in the Vietnam era. Jeff and Stephanie both came of age as participants in it during Gulf War I. And then all of us, all four of us in various ways have been involved in supporting resistance and conscientious objection of all kinds in the most recent era, for lack of a better word, I think of Iraq War I and Iraq War II, I don’t know what the best terminology is. But from each of these three eras, we as a group have seen or participated in it in various ways. And so I’m curious, if we’re about maybe at 10 minutes we don’t have a ton of time, but could we as a group talk about that history and why it’s important and why that history is relevant today? And I know I’ve sprung this on you, but I think it’s a good question.

Jeff Paterson:

Well, I guess I’ll jump in. To me, I was vaguely aware of the resistance within the military to the Vietnam War, because I was still serving with Vietnam veterans on active duty and they still had stories of what they went through. And it was those stories and also stories of active duty Marines I was serving with who had just come back from, specifically El Salvador, working embassy duty in San Salvador, and being part of what I would say extralegal activities against the FMLN, the communist rebels at the time in El Salvador. And that really got me politically disengaged from my perspective of wanting to kill bad guys, or I never imagined us not being the good guys I guess, and that really shook up my worldview.

So the Vietnam resistance, it was there, and I always thought that people were yelling at me, in the Marine Corps aspect, because they saw me as unreliable. And I think I reminded them of some of the war resisters that they still hated from a decade previously. So I think it was that distrust and hatred against me that made me embrace that role to some degree a little bit later on, so I thought that was interesting. But as far as history, that’s when my knowledge of history begins I guess, is the late ’80s, and looking backwards a decade to that. So one thing, an aspect of self-reflection I guess, is I took on the overtly political resistance upon myself, and in a very grandiose way, saw myself as helping hopefully start an anti-war movement against that war, the Gulf War in 1990.

And in a very minor way, I think I was successful, which is amazing because I had no business having any illusions that that would happen, so I was very happy by that. But then I also overly took that experience and tried to apply it to other people who weren’t in that same position. So what I’m getting at is, if you’re an attorney, working with resisters is a three-way street, it’s you, and it’s what the resister is hoping to achieve in that context, and if they want advocacy, working with that advocacy organization or person. And to make this really work all three parties have to be on the same page.

James Branum:

Yeah, and I’ll echo that a little bit, that I think on the attorney side of things, finding a good working relationship with the support and advocacy groups is really important. One of the very practical things is just for the clients to be able to afford representation often as necessary, but I think it goes beyond just that, it’s also a matter of social support. I think for a lot of lawyers, myself included, one of the more exhausting parts of the work is often how much our clients want to rely upon us for emotional support. And that goes with the territory to a part, but at the same time, I think there’s an important principle of having objectivity as an attorney. And if you get too much into that emotional support role, it can impair your ability to be the advocate that your clients need you to be, and so I think that having awareness of that’s important. Stephanie, do you have your hand up?

Stephanie Atkinson:

I do, I just want to chime in on a couple of things that both you and Jeff said. Jeff absolutely had an impact, because back in the… What was that? Late ’80s, early ’90s, there wasn’t social media, there wasn’t the internet, I actually read about Jeff in a small newspaper, an alternative press newspaper. And I had a very similar situation, I was approaching the end of my contract, and while my experience was less political than Jeff’s, it was very similar. For me it was the evolution of the conduct of who we represented ourselves as when we traveled. I went to Japan, I went to South Korea, I was activated to go to Honduras but managed to get around that, and it was just seeing that we’re not always the good guys.

My political opinions and experience formed very gradually so that hopefully by the time I was able to get out, I could just walk away, no harm, no foul, but I also was stop-lossed. And I just wanted to say that reading about Jeff led me to find the courage to resist, just say that, right? And the advocacy position that James describes, the emotional identification, actually is something that I do. It resonates with me because it feels like working with resisters and people who are trying to get out for whatever reason. And it’s very broad, I’ve met people who are extremely religious, who their resistance is based in their faith, people who their resistance is based in personal experience. It’s just so broad, there’s no right answer. And I don’t ever try to judge someone based on that, because our experiences are our experiences.

But for me, I struggle a lot, I tend to get on the advocacy and the very personal issues, identifying with people, and I’m a little… No, I’m a lot less effective, right? In the advocacy position and what James does in remaining objective. A little bit of burnout for me, it’s a periodic transition for me. I really try to help people who don’t understand what the heck’s going on, like, “What do I need to do?” There’s just so many nuances. But that’s not always a tenable place, so just want to throw that in there, that advocacy does matter, you do matter, your small actions. The sustainability of that is a little bit difficult.

James Branum:

Absolutely.

Kathleen Gilberd:

I had the pleasure last week of being on a panel with other folks who were active providing civilian support for G.I. anti-war activists during the Vietnam War. And about half of the panel consisted of us civilian types, the other half of people who were active while in the military. And their consistent position was that they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did without civilian support, ranging from legal support to that personal support you’re talking about, to the political coffeehouse and underground newspaper support that civilians helped to provide. And we forget about that sometimes, that that ability to provide support to service members is a critical element for them to be able to do the things that they need to do in order to speak out or to resist. I guess I’m lobbying for people to do more of that on the civilian side.

James Branum:

Absolutely. And I’ll mention, we’re going to talk more about the support elements towards the end of this presentation, so we’re going to come back to this because it’s a really important one. But I just want to express my appreciation of people like Stephanie who are in this role, but also to encourage more people for this, because it’s really needed. And again, it keeps people like me sane. I also have gone through times of burnout, and one of the elements I’ve learned being on the other side of that has been I just have to have stronger boundaries and I have to keep my role more clear. So because of that though, the positive of that is it brings in more people.

Anyway, so we’ve talked some about this history and its current relevance, we could talk a lot more about that, but I just wanted have a little bit of that to take us to the next part, which is the legal piece. And so Kathy Gilberd and myself are going to be unpacking this some, particularly looking at some of the key regulations and laws that are a factor. One thing I’ll mention as an attorney, a disclaimer I give to all of my clients on the first call I make with them is to say, “As an attorney, I can’t advise you to break the law. But as an attorney, I am allowed to talk to you about the ethical, moral… All the other consequences related to breaking the law.”

That means we can talk about the issues without saying that people should take illegal actions, and so it’s a very delicate dance. But throughout this, knowing what the ground rules are, what are the boundary lines the military says a service member absolutely can do and should not be punished for, is a first step. Another step is to say, “What happens when a service member decides, ‘I will go outside of those boundaries’?” That’s a whole different set of issues, and so I think we might start with talking about those boundary lines. So Kathy, I want to hand it off to you, and then if we talk through the regulation I can always put that on the screen, so just let me know.

Kathleen Gilberd:

Okay. Well, I thought I would talk about a couple of regulations. Service members are routinely told they don’t have any rights, “The Constitution doesn’t apply because you signed this contract.” But the reality is that through political struggles and cases and the development of a body of case law, the Department of Defense was pushed and required and forced to acknowledge a number of political and constitutional rights for service members. Most of them are outlined in Department of Defense Instruction 1325.06. Those of us who are older may remember that as DOD Directive 1325.6, but it now has grown up. It’s called Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces, and James has put it on the screen.

The instruction is interesting, it sets out rights in the negative, “You cannot do these things.” And if you read underneath what you cannot do, you’ll find the broad areas of things that you can do, but it leaves the reader with a very negative impression, “Sure enough, I have no rights.” The current instruction is also supposed to be used against right wing extremism, white nationalism and so on. And to some extent, it does offer areas of active engagement in right wing activities that people cannot do, but it has traditionally been used against leftists and is, in this current period, still being used against G.I.s who are taking an anti-war or a pro-service member’s rights position.

Briefly put, G.I.s do have a right to engage in protest activities or demonstrations so long as they’re off duty, out of uniform, not appearing to represent the military in any way, and not in a foreign country. And here’s the kicker, not in a situation where violence is likely to occur or where a breach of the peace is likely to occur. How do we ever know in advance of a demonstration whether the police are going to incite violence? We don’t. So it makes a risk for any service member, but it also sets out clear protections where there is no violence. G.I.s have the right to speak out publicly about political issues. Again, if it’s public, they need to be off duty, out of uniform, and you’ll notice that generals don’t seem to get this part, they are not supposed to appear to represent the military when they’re making statements, generals don’t get this part either. And they can’t violate a UCMJ or regulations, or for instance, disclosed classified information.

But with all of those exceptions, all those negatives, service members are allowed to speak at demonstrations or to the press or in other public settings. By the way, these are all in enclosure three of that DOD instruction. It also allows G.I.s to sign or circulate petitions, again, off duty, out of uniform, not appearing to represent the military. And the content of course is also important. Some of you may remember the appeal for redress that Jonathan Hutto and other anti-war activists developed some years ago. They spent weeks developing language that would not violate any regulation and that would not appear to be against a separate DOD instruction preventing unionization or collective bargaining on behalf of service members. And I’m sorry, I don’t have that the cite for that, maybe James does. Additionally, the 1325-

James Branum:

I’m sorry, Kathy, what was the cite you were needing again?

Kathleen Gilberd:

The unionization regulation.

James Branum:

Oh, I’ll find that.

Kathleen Gilberd:

Okay, thank you.

James Branum:

It’s not in here, it’s someplace else.

Kathleen Gilberd:

So 1325.06 also says the G.I.s can possess literature but not distribute literature on base. And the military has consistently held that having two copies of a single document means you’re distributing it. There’s a wonderful story about distribution of materials, which was in Iwakuni during the Vietnam War, a group of G.I.s working with their local coffeehouse decided to hand out, on the 4th of July, copies of the Declaration of Independence. They were busted for doing so because they were distributing unauthorized literature. We need to remember that a lot of this is up to the command, the command decides what is and isn’t authorized, what is and isn’t a danger of violence, what does and doesn’t fit within this regulation.

These days a lot of political activity happens not out in public but on social media, and there is a separate DOD instruction which covers the rights of service members and the prohibition against service members using social media in certain ways. This is DOD Instruction 5400.17, promulgated in 2022 and then updated this January. It has a subsection eight, which talks about the use of personal, nonofficial social media. And much of this is going to sound familiar to folks from the rights to protest or to speak out, people have to distinguish themselves from official military positions. The instruction actually recommends that they publish a disclaimer saying these are their own opinions and not those of the military.

James Branum:

By the way, let me interrupt real fast and just mention that if you have a client who is going to do this on a regular basis, maybe who will be writing a blog or writes lots of letters to the editor, I encourage folks to have this disclaimer written up in advance and to include it every time you submit a piece, or every time you talk to a reporter. I’ve had cases where a reporter leaves it off of the op-ed. We’ve asked them to include this disclaimer, they leave it off, but my argument has been, we still have proof that we sent the reporter an email asking for the disclaimer to be added. And so if the military later comes against my client, we can say, “Look, it’s not our fault the reporter screwed it up, but we asked for this disclaimer to be included.”

Kathleen Gilberd:

Thanks. I’m going to stop pretty quickly, but I want to go back to the instruction on dissent for a minute, because in its new iteration as an instruction it has some really scary language about what commanding officers can do when the dissent they see is legal. They don’t have to wait for a service member to step over the line, instead commands have discretion to look at legal activity and decide that it might lead to illegal activity. And in those cases, they can counsel service members, investigate the service members, or this one is really scary, subject the service members to an involuntary mental health evaluation. Counseling by the way, for folks who aren’t familiar with military stuff, does not mean psychological counseling, it means that your first sergeant sits you down and yells at you about what you’ve done wrong, tells you to straighten up and act right or you’re going to be punished. Or you’re going to be discharged, or you may lose other rights. And then you have to sign an acknowledgement that you’ve been counseled.

These are not good things to have in one’s service record if one wants to advance in the military, and they can even affect the character of discharge. So commands seeing perfectly legal activity can either reinterpret it as illegal, or can take what amounts to punitive administrative actions for legal activity. This is scary. This is what really taught me the meaning of the phrase, a chilling effect, because a service member confronted with that, knowing that following the instruction, being compliant to its requirements, can still get them in trouble and can still adversely affect their career or their life in the military, that does keep people from stepping out. But I should turn this over to James and let you talk, I’ve gone on at length here.

James Branum:

No, you’re fine. Stephanie, you had a comment though.

Stephanie Atkinson:

Yeah, I just want to say briefly that this is the kind of thing that when we talk to potential recruits or people who have just recently enlisted, part of the reason they may have enlisted would be to get the benefits that are so heavily advertised by military recruiters, like, “We’ll pay for this and your schooling,” and blah, blah, blah, blah. And not realizing how much that is contingent upon a perfect service record, right? So the onus is on the soldier to never challenge or advocate for themselves. In any event, it’s very rare that anybody skates through without getting written up, nobody, very few people. And that is so arbitrary depending on the mood of the command. You can have a command that will excuse… We’re seeing people who commit acts of violence and finding out that they’re members of the military, right? In recent shootings, and it’s like, that doesn’t foster itself.

There’s just a great big gap in between the influence of the command and the individual soldier, and the self-advocacy, the onus to take on the command, it really requires a lot of an individual soldier. It’s not an easy task, everything’s weighted against them. I put in the link, our podcast on Courage to Resist about Captain Alan Kennedy, he is an officer and a lawyer who recently encountered these very things that we were talking about in a Black Lives Matter protest and has had influence on changing policy. So I just wanted to throw that out there, that if you’re a young soldier and you’re thinking about benefits in the future, weighing on the entire time of your service contract is really not messing up. And not messing up is so arbitrary, it’s really difficult.

James Branum:

And I’ll mention that what makes Alan Kennedy’s case so noteworthy is the fact that he’s a lawyer. So he came into that struggle with an awareness and understanding that very few service members have. Which makes it frustrating, because many cases that I would say are as deserving of legal attention as his was, but those folks, it won’t ever happen because they’ll do small little things along the way that sabotage it from the beginning. In Kennedy’s case, he’s approaching this as a lawyer from day one, which makes a big difference. Well, this is really a good point, piggybacking a little bit off of what Stephanie just shared, I actually want to share… I’m going to do Share Screen for this as well. This is from an article that just recently came out on the MLTF website, The Right of Dissent and Protests in the military by David Gespass, and he really pinned down…

He had one perfect paragraph, I’m just going to read it because it’s so good. He, at the beginning, talks about the DoDI dissent regulation that Kathy just read from and we discussed, but then he goes on to say, “But there are some things that you should know that provide guidelines. Be aware, for instance, that the UCMJ makes these things criminal for members of the service. Solicitation, Article 82. Contempt toward officials, Article 88. Disrespect toward superior commissioned officer, Article 89. Insubordinate conduct toward warrant officer, non-commissioned officer or a petty officer, Article 91. Failure to obey order or regulation, Article 92.

“Improper use of countersign, Article 101. Aiding the enemy, Article 103B. Provoking speeches or gestures, Article 117. And just to be sure, General Article 134, which makes anything else that might adversely affect good order and discipline or bring discredit to the armed forces. The latter is evidently something Congress and the president have reserved for themselves, any of those things are illegal. And by the way, you have not only the right but the duty to disobey illegal orders, though whether or not an order you disobeyed was illegal will likely be decided by your court martial. Happy to clear all that up for you.”

Well, what David expressed well in that paragraph is a bit of the complicated nature of military cases, because while this DoDI I would argue does provide some protections, it says that service members are allowed to do certain things. At the same time, there are all these other… In these cases, just the things that David mentioned in that paragraph, these are UCMJ provisions, provisions of federal law. And if you think about it, if you translated this into a civilian context, how many of us have at some point or another been disrespectful to our boss at work? Most of us, if we’re honest, we’ve at least done that a few times.

Most of us at some point or another have had contempt for our elected officials. Anyone who’s worked in a corporate environment who has to deal with key cards and all that at some point or another has borrowed someone else’s key card because you forgot yours back at your desk. These things in the civilian world, which are minor issues at best, in the military are crimes. Provoking speeches or gestures, that’s a crime. And then the general article, which basically says that anything that might in some way reflect badly on the military, in some way you can be punished for. Now, the good news is there are some limitations on some of these provisions. One of course, as David mentioned in the article, was the duty to disobey illegal orders. We’ll talk more about that in a second.

The other one is there are some constitutional limitations. One of the issues from a constitutional standpoint is the issue of unconstitutional vagueness. The idea that a criminal statute must be very specific so that a person knows that if you read this law, you would know what conduct is prohibited. If a law is so vague, you can’t tell if you’re following the law or breaking the law, it’s unconstitutionally vague. And so for instance, the general article, as it’s written could be applied in many circumstances. Practically speaking, not very much anymore, because I think the JAG Corps knows if they make too much out of the general article, at some point a Supreme Court’s going to step in and say, “No, that’s unconstitutionally vague.”

And then of course the other limitation we spoke of a moment ago was the defense of disobeying illegal orders. The problem with that particular defense is that… Sorry, my stupid… Okay, there we go. The problem with that particular defense is that it is at the risk or at the liability of the person raising the claim. Which means that, let’s say your commander says that you’re to shoot these people and you disobey that because you believe it’s an illegal order, what the law says is that your judgment of that decision can only be in the end decided by a court martial. In other words, it will not be ever really asserted clearly that you’ve disobeyed the illegal order, that your commanders told you to, say, shoot civilians or any number of other things that would be clearly illegal. The problem again is you really don’t have that right until it’s protected in the court martial.

Another issue is that there’s often defenses that are found in the law and other scenarios which rarely have been recognized in the military. One of the best examples is the necessity defense. In theory, the necessity defense says that if the harm that comes from following the law is greater than the harm of breaking the… I’m getting that turned around. Basically, that if the law… Well, I’ll do it by analogy. If you run a stop sign but you’re trying to save someone’s life getting them to the hospital in a hurry, that would be an example. The necessity is, “I must get this person from point A to point B, there’s a life at stake.” In the military context that theoretically exists, in practice though, the problem is so often the military gets to define what the necessities are.

So I raised all this to say that this is in some ways a very discouraging area of law, because there are many scenarios that you’re not going to win if you define winning as acquittal. If you define victory as your client getting a good discharge, that may not be possible depending on what specific free speech actions, specific acts of resistance your client is going to engage in. And so the first piece of that to me as an attorney is, first of all, making sure our clients are fully informed about the consequences of their actions. Which means that we need to be very clear about not only what is theoretically possible but what is likely going to happen. And having the understanding and awareness of that range so our clients can be fully informed.

Another factor in many cases is being aware that our clients are not isolated individuals but they’re in a social context, and that social context may have coercive elements to it. In some scenarios that means, of course, as an attorney going above and beyond to make sure our clients are making decisions on their own capacity that are good for them. Not being bullied into a course of action or not taking a course of action because of the influence of family, of friends, or a military command that’s trying to be coercive. And also, while I don’t think this happens, I think still their clients to be aware that even supportive activist organizations, they have their agendas. And our clients need to know that and to make sure that they align with someone whose agendas align, but they need to know that everybody has a bias, everyone has interest at stake.

As an attorney, our job is to keep putting our clients back in the driver’s seat, and so to recognize all these circumstances in our client’s life, but in the end to say, “You’re my boss, what do we do here?” And to keep coming back to that place again and again. So there’s a lot more we could say here but I thought we might have a few minutes here for some questions before we move on to some discussions of the practical effects, or not effects but the practical aspects of supporting and defending resisters. So from the legal side of it, are there any questions, comments that folks might have?

Jeff Paterson:

James, I have a question.

James Branum:

Sure.

Jeff Paterson:

So this is Jeff Paterson. My question is, is it realistic, pragmatic, even possible for an active duty service member to assert their rights in any meaningful way within the military and still hope to continue having a future or some kind of career in the military? My assumption is you assert your rights and that’s it, so I’m looking forward to what you’ve got to say.

James Branum:

Kathy can probably also jump in on this one as well, but I would say that it depends. It depends on the exact nature of how they’re asserting their rights. It depends a lot on the service member’s record prior to asserting the rights. For instance, and I’m going to use the language of the military, if a proverbial shitbag soldier asserts their rights, is that going to work out so well? Almost certainly not, because they’ve already built up a reputation that the deputy command doesn’t like them. On the other hand, if a trusted member of the team starts pushing back, it’s going to be harder to immediately dismiss them. I think another issue is isolation, if the service member has a supportive community around them to weather all the crap to get there, that makes a big difference. If they do not, if they’re very isolated, that’s another factor.

A lot of times in the military though, occasionally people get pushed all the way to the point of being kicked out, or being pushed to the point of having to take a more direct act of resistance. More often what happens when someone asserts their rights is they start catching crap, and they start catching crap. And they start catching this low level abusive stuff, but often not stuff that gets written down. By the time it gets written down, by the time you get a counseling statement, it’s at a higher level. But often what happens is people can’t weather that first stage, and that’s one of the things we can have those frank conversations with clients about to prepare them like, “Look, you know if you do X, Y, and Z this is what’s going to happen. Are you cool with that? Can you handle that? What’s your plan when that happens?” And having those conversations. Stephanie.

Stephanie Atkinson:

Yeah, I just wanted to throw in that resistance has changed considerably, not only since Vietnam, but also since Jeff and I, our era. I think most notably of Garett Reppenhagen writing a blog from within Iraq, right? Isolated, yeah, very isolated, there’s no way out of that situation, and the risk and also the release of having the internet and social media and blogs and how that has totally reshaped resistance. You could have soldiers in the field writing about their experiences on a daily basis, and then you’re in a culture where you are just going to have to deal with the duress of what is summarily a hostile workplace that your command or your colleagues are creating for you. It’s a bullying situation. So I think it says a lot too about the individual soldier, it’s like, at what point is it worth it, you’re trying to sustain individually within your unit and also, you are deployed? So those are extra considerations in all of this as resistance continues to evolve.

James Branum:

I think another factor…

Kathleen Gilberd:

They’re really important… Oh, go ahead.

James Branum:

Go ahead.

Kathleen Gilberd:

They’re really important considerations. I think as the general rule that people who speak out, make reports, make whistleblower complaints, report sexual harassment, should expect that that can be career ending. And every client needs to know that that’s a significant possibility in the military. But in addition to the factors that James talked about, I think a real strong element of surviving that sort of political activity is how much outside support there is. Whether that is from the public, whether it’s from congressional offices, whether it’s from other service members, that can prevent the low level harassment and the punitive action or administrative action that ends careers.

I got to tell a non-resistance story. I had the honor of working with one of the first victims of the military’s original policy on AIDS. And at that point, people came to the military’s attention when they had full-blown AIDS. And the Navy and the other services decided that they would simply discharge these people for homosexuality instead of medically retiring them. We lost at the administrative hearing, we lost on appeal, we filed in federal court and the Navy caved. And then within a year DOD changed its entire policy to protect people against that sort of discharge. Our co-counsel happened to be in a gay bar in DC with a JAG who worked at the Pentagon, and they had both had a few, and the JAG said, “What really changed that around was that we were getting calls from congressional offices and reporters every day about Brian Kennedy’s case.” That level of public pressure can take all of the pressure or a good portion of the pressure off of a service member. So, sorry to tell my tale.

James Branum:

No, it’s a very good example. What I tell my clients is, “Press attention, media counts.” It’s a two-edged sword, it can help you, it can hurt you. It’s not always easy to know which it will be, but there is… And again, I’m hoping Jeff and Stephanie can talk about this more as well, that if it’s done well and with clients going into it fully informed about what the possibilities are, but also fully informed on who it is that should be talking to the press and what messaging is used and all of those things, it can really make a big difference. But again, there’s also cases where definitely there’s backlash, and sometimes that has… I would say rarely if ever is it my first tool we use in a case, but there are cases where it absolutely is helpful.

So I think this is probably a good point for us to transition a little bit in our conversation to talking more about the practical aspects of supporting resisters. And I’m thinking about, as we’ve talked about, legal support, but also all of the other components of, how do we help people to make it through this time? And ideally too, I think a piece of it that I’d love to see more of, I don’t know what the answer is yet, but how do we help people to transition after the resistance to civilian life, if that’s possible? Are there good ways to get people plugged into activism in sustainable ways? I don’t feel like I know the answer to that one at all. To start with though, maybe a good starting point would be to talk through the relationship between the support side and the legal side. And I know, Kathy, you’ve seen this going back since the Vietnam era, of movement and the legal components working together. Do you have any thoughts, or others have thoughts, about how that can best happen?

Kathleen Gilberd:

This may be a little tangential, but one of the issues or tensions that arises in any political case where there are legal people with their agenda and political people with their agenda and a client with her agenda is, who’s in charge of the message? One of the things about the Military Law Task Force as opposed to some other legal organizations that I won’t name is a decision on our part that the clients are in charge, in the driver’s seat as James said. There are organizations that have clients sign in advance an agreement about who’s in charge of press, and it’s not the client.

If there is a tension there, it needs to be resolved in favor of the client or there’s a real likelihood of the case exploding somewhere along the line. I have run into cases where G.I.s were wrongly informed that going public was going to get their conscientious objection case speeded up considerably. So they went UA, spoke to the press, then discovered that there might be other implications that their counselor had not told them about. Things like that, when legal advice or information gets skewed by a political agenda, or when the client’s interests aren’t first, really do a disservice to the client, the movement, all of us.

James Branum:

I think the positive is I have not heard of those kinds of incidents happening in a long time. 10, 15 years ago there was I think much more of a danger of that, I don’t think as much today. But I’ll also mention that’s frankly why I’ve worked with Courage to Resist for so long, because I don’t have to worry about courage to resist taking my client’s message and twisting it in a way that the client isn’t comfortable with or that goes against our legal strategy. And I have had those issues with other groups, it gets very complicated, for sure. Working with activists, it’s like the old metaphor, it’s like trying to herd cats, they’re going to go their own…

So I think to some extent, as an attorney, particularly some of my clients who are new to activism, I do feel like it’s my job to be a little bit of their tour guide, their orientation to activism. To say that, “Activists are people just like you, they have their own impulses, their own motivations, and if you know that you don’t put them on a pedestal. You don’t also distrust them, but you treat them like human beings,” it can be a very positive, warm relationship, but knowing that I think can help. So Jeff and Stephanie, what are thoughts you would have, particularly as far as tips for… We expect most people watching this are lawyers or G.I. rights counselors, what tips do you have for them as far as working with the support side, but also just more generally?

Jeff Paterson:

It’s a tough one, James. I’ve run into bad advocates, I’ve run into great advocates. I’ve ran into great lawyers, I’ve ran into terrible lawyers. I’ve had amazing clients, I’ve had terrible clients. And sometimes it’s not static, I’ve had resisters come forward with, “I want to accomplish this,” you start down that path and they change their mind or they learn new information. Or they have family pressures, or the realities of prison, and then all of a sudden you’re trying to change tracks but you signed up for something else, so that’s a tough one. Political advocacy, advocates in general, they have their missions, I don’t know, right? It sounds self-serving, but look at what the mission is of that organization, and does your primary objective align with that? Are you willing to… Courage to Resist, we very much agree with MLTF in putting the resister first and what they’re trying to accomplish first. Not because we’re enlightened, but because if you do anything else it leads to disaster. So there’s no other good way to do it.

And again, there’s these regulations about not telling people to go AWOL, you can’t tell people to go AWOL or whatnot. Well, you shouldn’t do that anyways, because again, it leads to disaster. These are people that are trying to navigate a situation and you should be limiting yourself to just giving them the best information possible, letting them make their decisions. And if they end up in prison, you certainly don’t want them to have you to blame for that. What I would say with Courage to Resist is I don’t think we’ve ever lost a case, meaning that the outcome…

I don’t know, but the outcome we hope is never worse than it would’ve been if we didn’t get involved. And almost always the outcome is better, and often significantly better. And I start off with the Pablo Paredes case and the Stephen Funk case that launched us almost 20 years ago. Very public resisters that spent relatively small amounts of time in prison and are still involved in political activism today. To Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who was the first officer to refuse to fight in Iraq, very public international attention, never spent a day in prison despite that, now has a successful career as a nurse.

Two, I’m certain that we saved the life of Chelsea Manning, who faced the death penalty and now lives near me and has a great streaming career on Twitch and authors and whatnot. So in part, we’re very good at cases that are lost causes and making them not lost causes. And also, the opposite side of that sword you’re talking about, James, is pressure on the military and saying, “Well, if you don’t do this thing we have this backup plan of public pressure.” Well, that line only works if there’s actually the possibility of public pressure. So we’re trying to back up your claim of the possibility of public pressure and making that real when it’s appropriate. So that’s what I’ll say.

James Branum:

And I would definitely agree with you, the threat of public attention is often the most effective thing of all. And I would say in the last five years in particular, I think I’ve only had to go to the press twice. I’ve threatened to go to the press probably a dozen times, and the threat was always the last thing that convinced a difficult command to back down. So it’s definitely a tool. That said, it requires a lot of skill. I would recommend, from the attorney side, if you’re looking at an organization to work with, having conversations about who in the organization can help with media stuff. But also knowing as an attorney… I do think you still need to be present to some degree in the media arena, meaning you need to, at the very least, be reviewing. If your client or your defense effort is putting out a statement about the case, you need to read it. You need to make sure that it would not have any legal complications.

You need to give serious thought to who talks to the press. For instance, is it better for the client to talk themself? Pretty risky. What about could we have the spouse of the client, the parent of the client? Should the lawyer talk? Should the support campaign? Should other people talk? Less risk if they talk. On the other hand, the client themselves may be more compelling. There’s some complicated analysis there. I’ll give you another scenario though, this goes back to what we talked at the beginning about the DoDI, the Department of Defense instruction. One of the things that I’ve encountered in the past was maybe I had a client who wants to talk to the press and they say, “Okay, I’m going to do it.” And I say, “Okay, we’re in the U.S., no problem. We’re not on post, no problem, and you’re not in uniform.” And then I look and they’re still wearing some piece of their uniform.

It might be their boots, it might be something silly, but I have seen the military come after people saying that, “You made a protest while in uniform because you had one piece of your uniform on.” So they need to be completely in no way wearing any component of their uniform, and I’m serious about that, that’s the kind of silliness that the military loves to jump on. But we know that, we know that going into it, and so we can coach our clients. And if they’re the ones to talk to the press, they need to be completely out of that uniform. We can get that accomplished.

I think another piece on the media side is storytelling. And this is one thing I’m maybe, in this presentation, making a pitch for people we need more of in the movement. We need more people that can help service members and veterans to tell their stories effectively, either through written forum, whether through video presentations. Stephanie is someone who does have a lot of gifting in this area, we just need more Stephanies in the world, because these stories need to be heard.

Stephanie Atkinson:

Thank you.

James Branum:

People with experience with video, audio, all of those things, we need more of those folks. And especially it’s about helping empower these people to tell their stories, because they’re important stories. And beyond just the legal impacts of the case, it also can have, in a good way, a contagious effect. It may encourage others to resist when they hear these stories, and it can be deeply, deeply affirming for the person going through it to be heard. Even if they’re not being heard by the military, if they can be heard in other contexts, it can be really, really helpful.

So I want to open it up here. I know some folks here live may have questions or comments, if anyone would like to speak or have a question or comment, feel free to unmute yourself or use the Raise Hand function. And then after that we will have some closing remarks, I want to give some space for discussion. Well, one thing that I’m curious about is the future. I think for a lot of us who are involved in this work there’s a lot of question about… We’ve seen things change over time, we’ve seen what worked in the Vietnam era not working in different time periods. And it feels like even now the jump from the current generation to the next generation, there’s even more changes happening, so I’m curious if folks have thoughts on that. Chris, do you have a comment on that or do you have another question?

Chris Lombardi:

I have a different question. I know a little bit of Stephanie Atkinson’s work with recruits, and I wanted to ask her to articulate that. I know she’s been working with sexual harassment with recruiter abuse, and I want to hear more about that.

James Branum:

Excellent, excellent. Okay, so we’ll talk about the future of the movement and then let’s talk about recruiter abuse. So on the future of the movement, where do we see things evolving and changing? The internet has definitely been a changing force for quite a while now, pretty dramatically. I think a challenging aspect of that, think about for instance, we talked about earlier, Garett blogging from a war zone. I think now one of the challenging things is, frankly, the algorithms are stacked against people telling stories sometimes, that’s a problem. Certainly seeing that the movement aspects are so different, 15 years ago, we had several active G.I. coffeehouses, those don’t exist anymore. Courage to Resist is still here, About Face, VFP, there’s other groups out there, they’re doing aspects of this work, the G.I. Rights Hotline. But I do wonder, just what does the future hold? What do we need to be prepared for?

Stephanie Atkinson:

I want to jump in on that. I want to say that technology is both isolating and reaffirming. And the pre-internet style of communication, the possessing literature to distribute, that just doesn’t happen as much anymore. Now it’s going to be within the subtlety of being part of a group, I know one of the offshoots of Veterans for Peace was a Discord gaming group called Gamers for Peace. And that was and still is a group where it’s not just soldiers, but it’s veterans, people considering enlistment, people from everywhere who are coming together over the commonality of a game but they hold similar feelings about resistance to the military.

And that’s a place where people are going to open up, they may be on a ship in the Philippines playing a game with somebody who’s in a bedroom or their basement or whatever, that is the new place where people are going to connect. Because that’s the only… The formality and the civil context of seeing a flyer at your local food co-op or something is rarer now. And for this whole generation of future enlistees we have to think about where they’re coming with their resistance, because it’s just in a totally different environment that we don’t necessarily see if we’re not functioning in that space. I don’t know what else to say about that.

James Branum:

I think the only thing I can say confidently about the future is that it sure feels like a moving target. It feels like the assumptions that I made 10 years ago, where I thought things were going really, have not played out. And so I think it’s hard to prepare for possibilities we can’t foresee, but it sure feels like that. I think an ongoing need organizationally is going to be keeping organizations like the MLTF, Courage to Resist around, so that when the next major flare-up happens, the capacity is there. I think that’s an ongoing issue, and how do those organizations continue to be effective and continuing to do what they’re doing in between the flare-ups? By the way, in the chat Chris Lombardi said, “Yay, Discord’s pretty amazing. I’m in one connected with military history podcasts.” So Stephanie, we had a question about the recruiter abuse and the activism about that, and would you like to share a little bit about that?

Stephanie Atkinson:

That’s one of our current cases. Will you shut me down if I…

James Branum:

Yeah, yeah. Anything that’s been shared in the press accounts is okay to share.

Stephanie Atkinson:

Okay. Currently I’m currently working with James and Jeff and Courage to Resist on helping a person who’s doing a discharge upgrade as a result of being the victim of a military sexual trauma, in having been assaulted by a recruiter. I went to try to help that person tell a story. Things unfolding in real time, that’s the thing, the moving target, right? And we’re trying to anticipate… That’s my dog coughing, he does not have COVID, sorry about that. But I think about when Jeff made his decision, that’s in real time, right? You’ve got a guy who’s made a decision and you’ve come to the place where you’re going to sit on the tarmac and hope that they don’t just load you on the plane.

Because after Jeff did what he did, after I did what I did, we started to notice that the military is paying attention, right? They’re paying attention to what resistance is doing, and you are making those decisions in real time, often without full awareness of maybe what the impact might be. And I think right now, being an advocate for someone is talking about all the potential things, good and bad. It’s like, “You say that you want to go public with this, but this is the consequences of what can happen. You can expect that there might be harassment from people that you don’t know because it’s the internet, and everybody’s watching this and everybody has an opinion.”

I think that a younger generation of people are a little bit more resilient with that because they have control. With everybody who’s got an Instagram account or Facebook account or have been doing this since they were kids, that there’s this control over perception and image, and really driving that. And for people who are more savvy, that’s a good thing. For people who are less savvy like myself, it can be a disaster. I haven’t always been really good about advocating for myself, and so I don’t want to forensically look at my own personal experience and think, “Well, that could have gone better, that could have gone worse.” I just have to accept it in its entirety. And then I got a lot of really good lucky breaks just because I was doing things before the military caught onto them.

It’s a whole different ball of wax now, the military is becoming more savvy about how to work with the media and being more on the edge and anticipating that. But I think that with this MST case, going on the offense, it’s really up to the individual client. They have to think about the fallout that they’re going to get just by being public. I don’t know what specific questions you have regarding this case, Chris, if you have more questions about this and if James could speak to that. But from my point of view, I’m trying to be a one-on-one advocate to this person saying, “I know that you have an attorney that’s going to help you with this. How can I help you with the more nuanced stuff of things that you might experience? Fallout from just random strangers being like, ‘Oh, I saw you,’ and you have no clue who this person is, but they’re saying, ‘Oh, I saw you on TV and let me tell you what I think about you.'”

That’s some really vulnerable stuff for people, that suddenly you go from just being a normal person to, you are not a normal person. Or you’re having to defend and chronically talk about your case even when you don’t necessarily want to, this is a big deal. And being savvy and providing our clients with just a reality check about, “These are all the things that can go right, these are all the things that could go sideways, we don’t know ourselves.” And always being candid and always checking back with the client and letting them be in the driver’s seat, as we said over and over and over again, is so important because-

James Branum:

The case that we’re talking about here is a great example of that kind of measured risk thing, because in this case, this is someone who has been discharged. And now we’re now going to the Board of Corrections of Naval Records and we also are planning some legislative things to try to influence the drafting of new laws, new regulations regarding recruiter abuse. The great thing about this case is, while there are potential consequences from being publicly known, talking to the press, things like that, what we don’t have in that case is we have zero fear of the UCMJ. She is not subject to the jurisdiction of the UCMJ, she is a civilian 100%. That’s a very different dynamic.

Someone who is still subject to the UCMJ, whole different story. And also to add to that, the issues of reservists is a third complicating factor. But we actually have some positive traction there from the Alan Kennedy case earlier. At least the military itself has recognized that service members are not subject to some of the dissent regulations and whatnot when they are not in federally activated status. So there are some positive things. So there’s lots of ambiguity, lots of questions, and knowing those jurisdictional issues is important. I also wanted to talk about another issue today, and I’m hoping, again… All of our other speakers, feel free to jump in on this one as well. But I think that we have another issue, when we talk about the issue of resistance, we need to remember that there are many reasons why people may resist the military. And some of those might be reasons we would not necessarily agree with or want to support.

Right wing extremism is alive and well and very, very present in the military. And I have had calls from people that I would put into this category, others have as well. I do think it’s important for us to think through what our boundaries are, but also recognize that we may not necessarily agree with our clients 100%, and to ask ourselves what can we live with and what can we not live with? For myself, it’s taken me a long time to formulate those answers but for me, if someone wants to exercise their free speech or values that I just cannot… As a lawyer, I think it’s okay for me to say, “That’s not a case I want to take. There are other lawyers, I can point you towards people who might be a good fit for you, but this is not a good fit.”

Some of the scenarios, for instance, are people feeling like they’re being discriminated against because they’re not allowed to say all their homophobic views to their coworkers that work in the military. That’s the kind of case I don’t want to take, but those other issues are… A couple of years ago vaccine refusals was another big issue. Now, whether your choice… And for those of you watching later, I’m not saying what your position needs to be, what I am saying is though, you need to think about that in advance and to be aware that there’s a lot of complicated reasons some of these issues may come up, to be aware of that, to think it through. And also to recognize, even for people that we may have enough common ground with that we can work with them, we still may have points of tension, that we’re really operating from very different world views.

And so being aware of that I think is really important. And another factor, and we’ve talked about this in another one of our recent MLTF CLEs, but also it’s cultural awareness, racial awareness. That’s a whole other overlay of issues, and for anyone who’s any of the support role or the legal role to be aware of those issues, and especially to be humble enough to ask our clients to explain things when we don’t get it… They can help us to understand but we need to be humble enough to ask them. Well, do we have any other questions, comments?

Stephanie Atkinson:

I don’t know if I answered Chris’s question.

Chris Lombardi:

It was great. It was great, thank you.

Stephanie Atkinson:

Okay.

James Branum:

Kathy…

Stephanie Atkinson:

I want to say one more thing about being a resister and the obligation. And I feel like when I made this decision at 23 that I was not going to go to the war, that it was a profound one. I didn’t think about the long-term consequences of what that meant, and it’s directed the course of my life, right? And I want to say, in the context of resistance, some of these other issues, like what our current client is dealing with, having to say that you are a survivor of military sexual trauma repeatedly, that really defines that client to some extent, in that there’s more complexity to this human than this violence that occurred to her which kicked off this whole thing. But it’s difficult sometimes for resisters, they get cast as that’s always going to be a thing, it is exhausting. Trying to do work beyond advocacy where you’re talking about your experience repeatedly, processing that constantly keeps it fresh in the same way that active duty who have gone on to combat, talking about their experience keeps it fresh.

So on the one hand, while I want to be an advocate and share and disclose and encourage and help, it’s also a physically and emotionally exhausting thing to constantly live in that experience of being a resister at 23. At this point, I’ve lived enough beyond that that should not be just the sole defining part of my experience, but it’s a significant part. And that when people make this decision to be a resister, or people make the decision to go to military conflict, there are long-term consequences. And talking about that in a way that’s positive or being an advocate, it’s not always 100% going to be that way.

James Branum:

Yeah. Well, I think what I’m struck by though is that, of the clients I’ve worked with over the years, they’re all over the map. I have some folks who their experience of resistance was a transformational and very positive effect on their life. I’ve had a few who would say the exact opposite. I think maybe one or two that would be very much convinced now it was a terrible mistake. And many more that it’s much more complicated than that. I think one of the challenging aspects of resistance is, in the moment of resistance the choice is very crystal clear, there’s clarity to it. Not so clear, and the rest of life is much more muddy. The rest of life is often a matter of choosing between two crappy choices that you’re not really sure which is the right one, you’re doing the best you can.

And I think for some folks, that’s a really hard place to be in, when you had this one moment of clarity that, “Now I know, I’m seeing behind the curtain, I can see this clarity.” And so I think for a lot of folks that transition afterwards is really hard. I have seen in the broader resistance… And I’m going to use the word much more broadly here, not just those who break the law but just anyone who uses any kind of free speech action to try to work to push back against military injustice or to push back against war itself. For many people who do that while in the military in various ways, for many of them afterwards… Again, some, it’s a very positive thing that continues. I’ve seen a fair number fall into extremism afterwards, into some really toxic conspiracy theories and whatnot. And there’s also the overlay of mental health issues as well in all of that.

And so I bring all this up not to discourage people from doing this work, but I am saying that all we can do to keep seeing our clients as the complicated human beings they are, the better off we are. And it is tricky. I think about, from the solidarity side of it, what do we need to do to build a movement? We need figureheads, we need people that are moral exemplars that we look and think, “Oh, I want to be like them.” So in one sense, as a movement, we do have to put people on a pedestal, and yet that’s not always a good thing for everyone involved. So there’s such complexity, it makes it hard. Well, we have a few minutes left, are there any other topics that we didn’t get to talk about today that any of our speakers or any of our attendees today would like to talk about? We have a few more minutes left.

Jeff Paterson:

Hey, James, I’ll just jump in. This pitch seems obvious, we’re talking about the future. And looking back, the generation of the Vietnam War, both the people that refused to fight in the Vietnam War and those that supported them at the same time, not to be ageist, but those people won’t be with us forever. Every year we’re starting to see, for example, more and more supporters of Courage to Resist. We’re getting more mail returned as marked, “Person deceased,” by the post office kind of thing. So this is both a political transition period for us as a movement, but it’s also going to be a generational transition period coming up here, which has already started. So if you’re on the fence about, is this a place where your efforts could make a difference? Well, I think if you can commit some number of years in front of you to do this work, I think it could make a difference.

And with this G.I. resistance work, it doesn’t take thousands of people to make a big difference. Really, all the international cases I’ve talked with before, there’s never been more than a core of half a dozen people actually doing most of the work. As long as we’re touching on issues that are important to society in a way that resonates with people, we’ve been able to raise millions of dollars and move hundreds of thousands of people to take action, you can see that in real time. So a small number of people really can make a big difference in this work. And during this generational transition period, your help is needed more than ever, so I’ll make that pitch.

James Branum:

Absolutely. Kathy, do you want to share for just a few minutes about some of what the MLTF does? Just for folks who might not be familiar with MLTF. I think that might be a good thing for us to close with today.

Kathleen Gilberd:

Oh, goodness.

James Branum:

And I’ll jump in too, so don’t stress, but just…

Kathleen Gilberd:

If you want to, you could start.

James Branum:

No, go for it.

Kathleen Gilberd:

Okay.

James Branum:

Why don’t you share a little bit about the MLTF, its history, its forming and why? Because G.I. resistance has been a part of the story the whole time.

Kathleen Gilberd:

It has, and we formed actually before me as the Military Law Project of the National Lawyers Guild, or the Military Law Office. With attorneys and legal workers working especially overseas in the Vietnam era, there were coffeehouses staffed in part by attorneys in Japan, in the Philippines. ACLU had a project in Vietnam at one point. For the guild, that experience of working with G.I. resisters in Asia turned into the Military Law Task Force in the mid ’70s and sustained itself. And this was something really important to me, sustained itself in periods where there was not visible active war that the public was aware of, but still, military action that G.I.s were affected by and were playing role in. And other military policies, personnel policies and, excuse me, practices, that once you got to see them up close and personal, you wanted to fight them, and you wanted to support the G.I.s who were fighting them.

So MLTF had a history not only of the Vietnam War and the wars since then, but also of working around Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and all its predecessor policies. Working against military racism, working around, as I mentioned earlier, the early HIV cases, working around the concepts of bullying and military culture that dehumanize enemies, that dehumanize service members who are seen as other or weak. Fighting on those issues that affected service members day-to-day led, for those service members and those of us in the task force, to thinking about the military policies that those conditions of life and work served and what it meant to take on a military system that was dehumanizing. And in that process-

Kathleen Gilberd:

Allowing people to kill. That’s a little history.

James Branum:

Yes, that’s excellent. So jumping ahead to the present, what the MLTF does is a few things. Part of what we do is education and resources, that if you look at the people that do military law they fall into three categories, people who are in the military, JAG attorneys. The second category are mostly ex-JAG attorneys, and the third are movement lawyers. And so if you look at those first two categories, that first category, the JAG Corps, they have a very comprehensive training program within the system that civilians don’t have access to. Occasionally we can read their journals, and they’re very helpful by the way, the JAG journals, and there’s a few things like that, but we don’t get to go to their trainings, their seminars, things like that.

A lot of the ex-JAGs still have connections with the system to access things like that. But for the rest of us, movement lawyers, where do we get trained? It’s from the MLTF, it’s from the resources that we put out, On Watch, our quarterly. It’s our articles, our memorandum, and it’s our video trainings, things like that. And so it’s an incredibly important piece of what we do, because we are providing the equipping that helps others to do this work. The second thing that MLTF has a strong presence in is Kathy, she’s the one that answers the phone at the MLTF. And the important thing about that is not just that service members get a friendly, kind person on the other end… And we cannot underestimate how important that is. Just because I know this because so many of my clients say, “That sweet lady I talked to that said for me to call you,” they all say that, and so it helps.

But what they don’t always realize is that what also Kathy is doing is she’s helping triage. She’s looking at, “This person who’s calling, who do they need? And where’s the best way to get them plugged in?” And so she is a list of civilian lawyers, she has a list of resources and organizations and all of that. And it plays such a huge role, just having someone to answer those calls, answer those emails, it’s a really helpful thing. And then I think the last major element of the MLTF’s work is then our committee work that focuses on specific issues and is seeking to be more engaged in the shaping of policy, shaping of what is to come. And so there’s a lot of different elements that we do, it does look quite different than what the predecessor of the MLTF did in the ’70s.

It is a different dynamic, we’re not, for instance, having physical offices overseas and things like that like we once did. But in our current environment, I do think MLTF serves a really important role, and that’s why I’m really proud to be a part of it and encourage, if you’re not already, to get involved. Well, we are at the close of our time. I want to thank everyone who’s participated, especially our speakers today, Kathleen, Jeff and Steph. And for everyone who attended live, for those of you watching in recorded form, just remember, please be sure and fill out the registration form and pay your tuition, there’ll be information there as well.

If you have any other questions, I’ll mention the best way to get in touch with the MLTF is via our website, actually go to mltf.org. Or if you want to email us the email is help@nlgmltf.org. Also, I’ll mention, as our evaluation for this program, if you have comments, questions about this program, if you thought it was great, thought it sucked, whatever it is, email us, that’s the best way to let us know, we do want to get your input. It’s also required that we ask for that by the bar rules, so please send us your thoughts on this program at help@nlgmltf.org. And lastly, I’ll just mention, if you want to learn more about Courage to Resist work, the Courage to Resist website is couragetoresist.org.

So thank you, everyone. And also, we have an upcoming training in December several of the folks on this call are going to be involved in as well. I don’t know if we’ve set a time yet for that one, but it’s going to be focusing on asylum protections for overseas conscientious objectors, particularly those who might be fleeing from Russia or Ukraine, coming to the U.S., how those folks can be assisted in the asylum process. So we’re very excited, we have an attorney who’s experienced these cases, and we’ll have some folks there as well who are involved in the support end of things for those cases. That training will be happening in December, we’ll have information on the website about that when it happens. So for now, take care, and bye everyone.