The Army is one of the few jobs that forces you to do the work against your will. Unless you can somehow claim Conscientious Objector status. CO status does not come easily. It is not enough to oppose the war in good faith. You have to oppose all wars, and convince the military authorities that your newfound conversion is sincere.

A few weeks ago, the United States Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that a military doctor is entitled to conscientious objector status, crediting his belief that American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan prompted him to sincerely change his mind about the morality of war. Cases like this don't come around very often.

The case is Watson v. Geren, decided on June 25, 2009. Watson is a doctor who joined the army in 1998. In 2004-05, after much soul-searching and study, Watson determined that he is opposed to all war, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in particular. He decided that his beliefs are incompatible with working for the army. The decision highlights the extensive process comprising the application for conscientious objector status, as Watson had to detail his beliefs, including when he developed his opposition to war. The application mentioned that he marched in anti-war rallies. Here is what he wrote, in part:

Over the past eight plus years of my medical training, more than seven years since the signing of my contract with the Army, the single unifying theme of all my academic and professional endeavors has been the improvement of individuals’ health and wellbeing.

The world and I both have since changed significantly from when I first entered this contractual relationship with the U.S. Army. As a form of retaliation and under the pretense of national security, the United States military has invaded and occupied a foreign country in an unprecedented pre-emptive war and I have become a doctor who now views war as an unacceptable lapse of reason, the ultimate act of futility and an entirely shameful human endeavor.

The tragedy of September 11, 2001 and our subsequent response in Afghanistan and Iraq have been profound catalysts for introspection, and constitute a radical turning point in my life. These ongoing events have led me to reconsider many of my views on life, God, religion, government, politics, and ultimately my role as a human being here and now on this small planet.

We live in a radically different world than we did before September 11, 2001 and our response with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I am a changed person as a result. These ongoing wars, and the mass death and destruction resulting from them, have led me to more fully comprehend the immorality, cruelty and arbitrariness of violence in general, and particularly the futility of violent retaliation. They have led me to detest violence and reject it completely. These events, for me personally and my generation, are comparable to the massive loss of human life inflicted during the Vietnam War and its profound effect on the moral, ethical, and political beliefs of
millions of young people at that time.

A significant part of my response to these horrific events was to learn more about violence, the causes of violence, and alternatives to violence. They also caused me to search deeply within myself and to question my beliefs about life, death, warfare, violence and God.

But it's not easy to get conscientious objector status. Watson's chain of command recommended that his application be rejected, claiming that Watson's statements were vague and that his primary objection is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decisionmaker rejected the application in a one-page ruling that he "did not present convincing evidence ... that the applicant’s stated beliefs warrant award of [conscientious objector] status."

The federal trial court granted Watson's claim, overruling the Army, and the Court of Appeals affirms, ruling that there was no basis in fact for the army's rejection of Watson's request, and that the government's rationales on appeal are not convincing.

The U.S. argued, among other things, that the timing of Watson's request -- his residency was ending and active duty was approaching -- was expedient, and that he merely offered a "grab bag of references to various political and religious figures" to justify his opposition to war (including Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Dr. Martin Luther King, by the way). But timing alone is not enough to reject the application, the Second Circuit says, and Watson was not just opposed to the current wars but all wars in principle. It was those wars that made Watson change his mind about war, but his application did express philosophical opposition to war in general. The Court of Appeals also shot down the government's contemptuous argument that Watson offered a "grab bag" of intellectual sources for his newfound objection to war.

The government also held it against Watson that he had a good lawyer to help him complete the application. There is little case law in the area of testing the sincerity of a conscientious objection, but the Second Circuit does find a case from 1976 that holds "it is impermissible to allow any negative inference about an applicant’s sincerity to be drawn from his attempts to procure legal advice from whatever source.”

As there was no reason to doubt Watson's sincerity in opposing war in principle, the government wrongly denied his conscientious objector application, and Watson wins the case.

They try to deny it, but Supreme Court justices have an enormous amount of power. They are not just deciding cases and making narrow rulings about constitutional interpretation. They are essentially making policy on issues that affect everyone, whether you know it or not. Constitutional provisions and federal laws are often vague enough that to be interpreted in various ways. It makes a big difference who the President nominates to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Senate is focusing this week on Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's choice for the Supreme Court. I'm going to tell you right now. Thank God Obama was elected. Had John McCain won the White House, another conservative would be appointed to the Court, further solidifying what is currently a 5-4 majority on the Court. Another Republican Justice would make it a 6-3 conservative majority.

That one vote can make all the difference. A 5-4 majority is one thing. The fifth conservative, Anthony Kennedy, sometimes grabs hold of himself and votes with the liberals, not so much because Kennedy is a closet liberal, but because he is not an ideologue, and the other conservatives probably scare him from time to time. Were retiring Justice David Souter replaced by a right-winger, Kennedy would lose his status as a swing vote and the fifth rock solid conservative and ... well, it would be all over as far as I'm concerned.

The conservative movement in this country wants to move the Supreme Court further to the right. Having a merely conservative Court is not enough. They want a Supreme Court that makes abortion illegal, grants unfettered gun rights and gives corporations unlimited First Amendment authority to donate zillions of dollars to political campaigns. Those are the hot-button issues before the Court, but the other issues that affect all of us don't get all the attention. Let me tell you how bad it can get on the Court.

The most conservative Supreme Court Justice is Clarence Thomas, appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1991 after a controversial nomination process that saw his former subordinate accuse him of sexual harassment. Since he is black, people thought Thomas would find his inner liberal and sympathize with civil rights victims. It never happened. Thomas has revealed himself as a reactionary who wants to interpret the Constitution in the way that the framers would have interpreted it. As far as Clarence Thomas is concerned, it is always 1787.

This means that public school students should have no free speech rights at all. In 2007, the Supreme Court decided Morse v. Frederick, finding that a school principal could legally discipline a student who unfurled a Bong Hits For Jesus Banner during a school trip. While the Supreme Court sided with the school in that case, it recognized that students continue to have limited rights under the First Amendment. But Justice Thomas took things further. He argued that students in public schools should have no First Amendment rights at all. None. Justice Thomas would overturn a 40 year-old Supreme Court precedent establishing that even students have rights under the First Amendment. His justification for this argument was that students in the 19th Century did not have speech rights. So they should have no rights in school today. This extreme view should have gotten more attention, but it got swept away, and I'm not sure many lawyers even know about it.

A few weeks ago, Clarence Thomas did it again. This time around, the case involved an adolescent girl who was strip-searched by school authorities looking for an Advil equivalent. The Supreme Court said the search violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. Who would argue to the contrary? Clarence Thomas wrote that the Fourth Amendment should not apply to public schools. Instead, we should return to in loco parentis, where schools take on the role as the student's parent and have unlimited authority to discipline the kids. There may be other ways to protect students, Justice Thomas said, but those protections cannot be found in the Constitution. Many conservatives worship Justice Thomas. They are worshiping a man who believes that public schools should be Constitution-free zones.

When George W. Bush ran for president, he said that Clarence Thomas was among his favorite Supreme Court justices. John McCain was Bush-lite. Lord knows who McCain would have picked, but it sure wouldn't have been Sonia Sotomayor. There is no way to predict for sure what kind of Supreme Court justice Sotomayor will become. At a minimum, she will not align herself with the conservatives. Having studied her opinions and argued cases before her on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, I can say this: she has potential to be a damned good Justice, and anyone who voted for Obama and genuinely wanted to prevent another Republican presidency will be glad that she is on the Court.

I like gossip as much as the next guy, but truth is better than fiction, and the state of the world is more interesting than Michael Jackson's funeral. A few recent news stories highlights for me that we are still crawling from the hell-hole that the Bush administration (and its rancid ideology) left us.

In 2005, the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration was wiretapping phone calls without a warrant. These include phone calls from within this country. Government agents and bureaucrats were listening in on phone calls by U.S. citizens despite a law that required a special court to review these privacy intrusions. People were outraged over this, but Bush walked out of this burning bush without a scratch.

Government investigators recently reviewed the wiretapping program. Here is what they found:

While the Bush administration had defended its program of wiretapping without warrants as a vital tool that saved lives, a new government review released Friday said the program’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism was unclear. The report, mandated by Congress last year and produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies, found that other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information. Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said.

The report also hinted at political pressure in preparing the so-called threat assessments that helped form the legal basis for continuing the classified program, whose disclosure in 2005 provoked fierce debate about its legality. The initial authorization of the wiretapping program came after a senior C.I.A. official took a threat evaluation, prepared by analysts who knew nothing of the program, and inserted a paragraph provided by a senior White House official that spoke of the prospect of future attacks against the United States.

These threat assessments, which provided the justification for President George W. Bush’s reauthorization of the wiretapping program every 45 days, became known among intelligence officials as the “scary memos,” the report said. Intelligence analysts involved in the process eventually realized that “if a threat assessment identified a threat against the United States,” the wiretapping and related surveillance programs were “likely to be renewed,” the report added.

It gets worse. According to Associated Press, "The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal."

Can you believe this? I do. I will believe anything at this point. The scandals of the Bush years will haunt us for years to come. Someday George W. Bush will be sworn in to testify about what he was doing in the Oval Office. If he tells the truth, it will not be pretty.

The culture of fear and obedience hit closer to home for many of us. We can't all relate to wiretapping and eavesdropping. But many of us watch the ballgame. The nice thing about baseball is that the action stops when each half-inning ends and the teams switch places. That is when we go to the bathroom or pet the dog or check our email or whatever. These breaktime activities take place at the stadium also (except for the part about petting the dog).

In New York, where the Yankees play, the stadium plays God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch. The team has been doing this ever since 9/11. Most of these performances are played over the loudspeakers through an old recording from Kate Smith. For one fan who had to go the bathroom, he got up to head to interior part of the stadium. But he was stopped by security who objected that he had the nerve to run to the can during the nightly patriotic moment. The fan was kicked out of the stadium. He brought a lawsuit under the First Amendment, and the City of New York settled the case in the amount of approximately $20,000.

The culture of obedience is all around us. Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and place your hand over your heart. Do not move around during God Bless America. Don't you know this is the land of freedom? Do what you are told. This is why the Yankees fan got kicked out of the stadium. He disrespected America. At least that is what his detractors would say.

More than 60 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed this issue, in West Virginia v. Barnett. The Court determined whether public schools could force kids to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The answer is the schools cannot. The Court's language on this issue continues to ring true today:

To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. ... If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.