What kind of society is it where the only people prosecuted in connection with the war in Iraq is a conscientious objector and not the criminals who initiated this unprovoked disaster in the first place?

Here is a U.S. soldier we can all be proud of. The New York Times over the weekend profiled a soldier who faces court-martial because he does not want to fight in Iraq. It's not that he's a coward. He volunteered to fight and wanted to go to Afghanistan. But since we are farting around in Iraq, we need soldiers there, too, so he was ordered to fight in that filthy war.

According to the Times:

When First Lt. Ehren K. Watada of the Army shipped out for a tour of duty in South Korea two years ago, he was a promising young officer rated among the best by his superiors. Like many young men after Sept. 11, he had volunteered "out of a desire to protect our country," he said, even paying $800 for a medical test to prove he qualified despite childhood asthma.

What happened to Mr. Watada? "I was still willing to go until I started reading," Lieutenant Watada said in an interview one recent evening.

On Jan. 25, "with deep regret," he delivered a passionate two-page letter to his brigade commander, Col. Stephen J. Townsend, asking to resign his commission. "Simply put, I am wholeheartedly opposed to the continued war in Iraq, the deception used to wage this war, and the lawlessness that has pervaded every aspect of our civilian leadership," Lieutenant Watada wrote.

This guy may have been a model soldier, but he had one flaw: he thinks for himself. The Times: "In retrospect, though, there may have been one ominous note in the praise heaped on him in his various military fitness reports: he was cited as having an 'insatiable appetite for knowledge.'" That appetite saw Mr. Watada read up on the road to the Iraq War, including James Bamford's book "A Pretext for War." As the Times describes the book, it "argues that the war in Iraq was driven by a small group of neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon and their allies in policy institutes. The book suggests that intelligence was twisted to justify the toppling of Saddam Hussein, with the goal of fundamentally changing the Middle East to the benefit of Israel."

Again, the Times: Next was "Chain of Command," by Seymour M. Hersh, about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. After that, Lieutenant Watada moved on to other publications on war-related themes, including selections on the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the so-called Downing Street memo, in which the British chief of intelligence told Prime Minister Tony Blair in July 2002 that the Americans saw war in Iraq as "inevitable" and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Lieutenant Watada said he also talked to soldiers returning to Fort Lewis from Iraq, including a staff sergeant who told him that he and his men had probably committed war crimes.

"When I learned the awful truth that we had been deceived — I was shocked and disgusted," he wrote in the letter to his brigade commander.

He faces a devastating penalty for his refusal to fight in this filthy war: possibly seven years in prison. In fact, the people who belong in prison are the ones who orchestrated this war and want to force people to fight in a war they don't believe in. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits "involuntary servitude." The Courts have interpreted this provision to prohibit slavery, but, really, it should cover a military draft and the situation with Lieutenant Watada.

There will be some who regard this guy as a traitor or un-American. But standing up for what you believe in is as American as baseball. Forcing someone to fight in an unjust war that he does not believe in is disgraceful, particularly since he can come home in a pine box or paralyzed or emotionally traumatized.

As Associated Press reported over the weekend, "The group Human Rights Watch said in a report released Sunday that U.S. military commanders encouraged abusive interrogations of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison scandal called attention to the issue in 2004. Between 2003 and 2005, prisoners were routinely physically mistreated, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme temperatures as part of the interrogation process, the report said. 'Soldiers were told that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and that interrogators could use abusive techniques to get detainees to talk,' wrote John Sifton, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. The organization said it based its conclusion on interviews with military personnel and sworn statements in declassified documents."

We should all have the choice whether to destroy ourselves and to kill or maim or torture others. How can we be forced to do this? This guy chooses not to. In my book, this guy is the real hero. Here's what I think: the ones who want to court-martial him are animals who belong in a cage.