A Giraffe has been sighted
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Captain Lawrence Rockwood was a counter-intelligence officer in the US Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, a unit that went into Haiti in 1994 on President Clinton’s order to stop human rights abuses there.
Rockwood took the mission seriously. Intelligence reports and public knowledge said that the worst of the abuses were happening to political prisoners in a penetentiary in Port au Prince. Rockwood expected his unit to move into the prison and stop the torture and killings that were going on there.
Rockwood was told there was no plan to do this and ordered not to proceed with his inquiries. The mission of his unit was “force protection”—ensuring the safety of the unit’s own personnel.
A fourth-generation soldier, Rockwood was appalled. He believed the mission of the military is to protect others, not themselves. There were Haititian political prisoners being tortured and killed, people who needed protection. Rockwood went into the prison alone, armed, and demanding to talk with prisoners.
He was removed from Haiti within hours and from the army itself after a long legal battle that reached the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Throughout the many proceedings, Rockwood and his legal team argued the captain was on-mission even though against-orders, and that the precedent of Nuremburg had changed forever a soldier’s duty to follow orders. At Nuremburg, our judgment on |
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the defeated Germans who were “only following orders” was that conscience must override orders that are unconscionable. The captain’s conscience and his duty as an officer in a unit charged with stopping human rights abuses should have been endorsed, not blocked by his immediate superiors.
The military court did not accept the argument. His military career destroyed, Rockwood went back to college for a PhD. His dissertation, a study of military ethics, will be published as a book in 2007 by the University of Massachusetts Press. The title is Walking Away from Nuremberg:: Just War and the Doctrine of Command Responsibility in the American Military Profession.
Still a committed warrior, this reluctant civilian is teaching history at Grossmont College and Cal State San Marcos in California.
You can read more about his case, his ongoing campaign for social justice and human rights, and his forthcoming book at http://soldier.home.igc.org/.
The Project's Founder recently talked with Rockwood.
Read her reactions in "Conversation with a Compassionate Warrior."
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