{"id":809,"date":"2005-05-12T22:03:36","date_gmt":"2005-05-13T03:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=809"},"modified":"2005-05-12T22:04:39","modified_gmt":"2005-05-13T03:04:39","slug":"hard-labor-for-missing-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=809","title":{"rendered":"Hard Labor for Missing Duty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?p=807\">Convicted<\/a> yesterday, leftist peacenik and so-called serviceman Pablo Paredes was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.signonsandiego.com\/news\/military\/20050512-1359-ca-sailorsprotest.html\">sentenced today<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A military judge ordered a Navy sailor on Thursday to complete three months of hard labor for refusing to deploy with his ship in protest of the war in Iraq, but he declined prosecutors&#8217; requests for time in custody.<\/p>\n<p>Lt. Cmdr. Bob Klant also reduced Pablo Paredes&#8217; rank from petty officer third class to seaman recruit, the lowest in the Navy.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Prosecutors had asked Klant to sentence Paredes to nine months in confinement, three months less than the possible maximum, and a bad conduct discharge.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He is trying to infect the military with his own philosophy of disobedience,&#8221; prosecutor Lt. Brandon Hale said. &#8220;Sailors all over the world will want to know whether this will be tolerated. Sailors want to know whether doing what he did is a good way to get out of deployment.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Prosecutors left the courtroom without making any statements, but Sam Samuelson, a Navy spokesman, said Paredes&#8217; guilty verdict sent a message.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;His actions were in conflict with his duty and taxpayers&#8217; obligations that the Navy maintain good order and discipline,&#8221; Samuelson said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Paredes got off way too easily.  His lawyers know it and consider it a victory.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Paredes&#8217; lawyer, Jeremy Warren, called the judge&#8217;s lesser sentence &#8220;a stunning blow to the prosecution.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is an affirmation of every sailor&#8217;s and military person&#8217;s right to speak out and follow their conscience,&#8221; he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Actually, a guilty verdict is exactly not that, jackass.<\/p>\n<p>Paredes and his ilk are cancers to the service and our society.  Paredes himself is even worse &#8212; he&#8217;s a publicity whore of a cancer.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Paredes arrived at the Navy pier that day wearing a T-shirt that read &#8220;Like a Cabinet Member, I Resign&#8221; and handed over his military ID card, telling a military police officer &#8220;I quit.&#8221; Paredes has alerted the media to his plans and a crowd of TV cameras was waiting for him.<\/p>\n<p>The judge seemed troubled by Paredes&#8217; conduct \u00e2\u20ac\u201c wearing a &#8220;silly T-shirt&#8221; with an incoherent message and staging a news conference that upset sailors and Marines who were saying goodbye to their families.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>With all that, I say again this immature little punk got off way to easily.  I do wonder, though, how his fellow sailors will treat him in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Convicted yesterday, leftist peacenik and so-called serviceman Pablo Paredes was sentenced today. A military judge ordered a Navy sailor on Thursday to complete three months of hard labor for refusing to deploy with his ship in protest of the war in Iraq, but he declined prosecutors&#8217; requests for time in custody. Lt. Cmdr. Bob Klant [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-military","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}