The NY Times has an arti­cle up about Iraq war desert­ers. One of the com­pli­cat­ing issues about fil­ing for con­sci­en­tious objec­tor sta­tus is brought to light in this arti­cle. Many sol­diers are not opposed to fight­ing a war if they believe the cause is just and there­fore do not qual­ify as ‘objec­tors’ and so have sought asy­lum in Canada.

The major­ity of the desert­ers in Canada have cho­sen not to make the author­i­ties aware of their pres­ence. Like any other ille­gal immi­grants, they have set­tled for invis­i­bil­ity. A few dozen, though, fol­lowed Hinzman’s lead. Most found their way to Jef­fry House. One young Army medic named Justin Colby read an AOL news post­ing about Hinzman’s case while sta­tioned in Iraq. He tele­phoned House from Ramadi and showed up in his office a few months later.

House would even­tu­ally rep­re­sent between 30 and 35 Amer­i­can desert­ers. Most of them, like Colby, say they joined the mil­i­tary in part out of patri­o­tism. “I thought Iraq had some­thing to do with 9/11,” Colby says, “that they were the bad guys that attacked our coun­try.” But unlike Hinz­man, most did not apply for conscientious-objector sta­tus. They tend to say they aren’t opposed to all wars in prin­ci­ple — just to the one they were ordered to fight. It wasn’t until Colby arrived in Iraq that he started to see the con­flict as “a war of aggres­sion, totally unpro­voked,” he says. “I was, like, ‘This is what my bud­dies are dying for?’ ” Mid­way through his tour, he decided: “I’m never going to do this again.” He went AWOL the day before his unit left to train for a sec­ond deploy­ment. House says that more than two-thirds of his clients have been deployed to Iraq at least once. “One is resist­ing a third deployment.”

These young resis­tors have many rea­sons for choos­ing this path and one of the strongest is that they swore to uphold the con­sti­tu­tion and believe they have been put into a sit­u­a­tion which con­flicts with that pledge. There is an orga­ni­za­tion which sup­ports war resis­tors Courage to Resist