This morning, I wrote about
Emiliano Santiago's lawsuit,
Santiago v. Rumsfeld, and its first hearing this morning. This is the highest court in which matter's dealing with stop-loss litigation has been heard, so I would have to assume that its decision would be meaningful. I certainly did not expect
a decision so quickly:
A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today rejected a Pasco National Guardsman's lawsuit to stop the military from extending his service.
In June 2004, Santiago's service was involuntarily extended to 2031. That's right, 27 years. In November 2004, he was ordered to deploy to Afghanistan. I hope this isn't his final battle in this fight.
Santiago Was Stop Lossed with Only Two Weeks Left on His Contract
Emiliano Santiago was a high-school junior in Stanfield, Ore., when a National Guard recruiter came to his school. The recruiter impressed Santiago, the child of farm workers and a Mexican immigrant who had been in this country for five years. "I was really excited to see the uniform," says Santiago, now 26. "I wanted to wear the same uniform, to be a part of that."
From a series of meetings with the recruiter, Santiago understood that serving in the National Guard was "a little off-side thing that you could do," almost guaranteed not to result in deployment. "The only reason the National Guard would get deployed is if there was, like, a World War III," Santiago remembers the recruiter telling him. Eighteen years old, he signed up for eight years and became a helicopter refueler for a unit based in Pendleton, Ore. He also got married, moved to Pasco, Wash., and became an electronics technician at a laboratory run by Battelle Memorial Institute for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Nice story that Guard recruiter told you there. Sounds a lot like what I heard when I joined the Guard.
Emiliano's Defense Was To Be Based on Breach of Contract
"There are separate provisions in [Santiago's enlistment] contract which allow for the extension of his contract if Congress declares war or a national emergency," Santiago's attorney, Steven Goldberg of the National Lawyers Guild, told the Bay Guardian. "Neither of those situations happened."
What's more, Goldberg continued, "if the stop-loss statute trumps the enlistment contract - which is what the government argues - the statute should not be applied to [Santiago]," who wasn't on active duty when his stop-loss order came. And even if he had been, Goldberg said, recruits have a constitutional right to know exactly how contract provisions can be overridden.
So that's it. If I understand what Mr. Goldberg said correctly, breach of contract can no longer be used as a defense against involuntarily service extension. Some one please correct my understanding if it is incorrect.
We are trapped in a cycle, with declining military enrollments, involuntarily service extensions and military deaths throughout the media; it will only feed on itself, driving enlistments down further. Where is this taking us?