Major Jason Watson has never been in combat. He’s an American hero all the same.
Watson is the Air Force Academy graduate who stood in uniform on the U.S. Capitol steps in Washington last week holding a sign saying “Impeach convict remove.”
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It took three minutes for the Capitol police to arrest him, and the grounds were pretty clear: It’s illegal to protest on the Capitol steps without a member of Congress present. Watson had been accompanied by Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas. Once Green left the group, Capitol police ordered Watson to stop protesting and he did not, after which he was arrested.
But that was the least of his concerns.
He’s in Air Force custody now, likely to be court-martialed. Military prison is definitely a possibility. His career is almost certainly over.
He knew what the price could be for proclaiming in public what so many others in Washington are afraid to say even in private.
Some are members of Congress, Republicans mostly, who have been abetting President Trump’s subversion of the Constitution by doing nothing about it.
Others are military officers disgusted and alarmed by Trump’s military incompetence, a repugnance that was underscored as the truth emerged about the first American deaths in the Iran conflict in which six people died after being ordered to work in a trailer located at a commercial port in Kuwait that was completely vulnerable to Iranian drone strikes. They are also horrified at how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been cashiering generals and admirals for being Black, female or simply for their sense of duty and honor.
And yet precious few of those congressional Republicans have been willing to speak up for the nation’s sake. They’re paralyzed by Trump’s tyrannical passions for power and punishment, as demonstrated by the recent party primary defeats of two respected Republican senators he opposed.
Unlike officers in uniform, however, politicians have nothing to lose but their paychecks and perks. The “sacred honor” that 56 people pledged to each other on July 4, 1776 — along with their actual lives and fortunes — is long out of fashion in Washington.
The military has rules against campaign activity in uniform. Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice also prohibits commissioned officers from using “contemptuous words” against the president, vice president, members of Congress, the secretary of defense and certain others.
To call for Trump’s well-deserved impeachment may be contemptuous to a court-martial, but it will be seen as courageous elsewhere.
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“It’s really a question of how severe those consequences will be,” said retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who was chief prosecutor of the alleged al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo until he resigned rather than obey orders to use evidence obtained by waterboarding.
“I knew it would end my military career, but I chose to do it anyway, because I thought it was worth it,” Davis said in an email to the Sun Sentinel. “I suspect Major Watson went through the same or similar thought process as me. Unfortunately for him, Trump is far more petty and vindictive than George Bush.”
Davis subsequently won a settlement and damages over being fired from the Congressional Research Service for newspaper op-eds criticizing President Obama’s failure to reform the process.
In 2020, he was the Democratic nominee for Congress in a deep-red western North Carolina congressional district.
According to the Washington Post, Major Watson’s protest wasn’t his first. He was an anonymous, masked participant holding an “Impeach convict remove” sign during a 22-day hunger strike last year. That got no attention. It occurred to him what would.
“In the grand scheme of things, I’m just a nobody,” he told the media before climbing the Capitol steps. “What matters far more than who I am is what I have to say and the price I’m willing to pay to say it.”
By coincidence, another well-publicized demonstration occurred in Washington on the Fourth of July. Hundreds of members of the Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, paraded through the capital. Some carried Confederate flags.
Nearly all of them wore masks, lacking the individual courage of a solitary Air Force major with a career and his freedom at stake.
Jason Watson showed them — and all of America — what true patriotism is.
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Executive Editor Roger Simmons, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant, Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman. Send letters to [email protected].
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