The First COVID Court-Martial

The Vaccine Wars Part XXXVI

"Love is the seed in you of every virtue; and of all acts deserving punishment." -Dante

Yesterday, my friend 1st Lieutenant Mark Bashaw let me know that he is now the first [known] target of a COVID court-martial.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/05/03/army-officer-convicted-in-first-known-covid-court-martial/

From that article,

An officer who formerly served as the Army Public Health Center’s headquarters company commander was convicted by a special court-martial Friday of two specifications of violating lawful orders to comply with COVID-19 mitigation measures at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

1st Lt. Mark Bashaw was found guilty of refusing an order to telework and reporting to his office without submitting to a COVID-19 test or otherwise furnishing a negative test result, according to installation spokesperson Amburr Reese. Those mitigation measures were required of unvaccinated troops at Aberdeen.

Bashaw, a former Air Force NCO and father of three, was also found guilty of failing to wear a mask indoors. The trial concluded Friday. His listed attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via social media.

Mark is one of the whistleblowers who dug into the data from the Defense Medical Epidemiological Database (DMED), and he spent many hours of his free time querying further data that helped all of us working on that project to better understand the big picture behind what appears to be mass data fraud from within the Department of Defense. Mark was apparently unwilling to go about his day in a performative manner to play a game designed to make untruths into socially acceptable common "knowledge". 

The performance of reality as reality is one of the most heroic acts possible.

Mark is a good man, and if he is forced out of the military, I believe enough in America that he will find productive employment. I would certainly vouch for him, and I suspect that many others around him would. Perhaps this is why the judge in the case took the highly unusual step of not punishing Mark aside from the misdemeanor conviction. I would call that a badge of honor in service to one's nation, and to all of humanity.

“After a careful consideration of the evidence, a military judge exercised lawful authority not to adjudge punishment for 1st Lt. Mark Bashaw,” Reese said in a statement to Army Times. “Receiving no punishment at a court-martial is not without precedent.

“While the Army does not categorize court-martial convictions as felonies or misdemeanors, many civilian jurisdictions treat a conviction in special court-martial convened by military judge alone, which this one was, as a misdemeanor,” Reese added.

From the sounds of it, Mark was convicted by the letter of the law. Perhaps this was a bureaucratic certainty? The prosecutor in the case is beating his chest on Twitter.

Maybe Vindman will feel more popular after a few hundred likes. When the pride you take in your job tends toward the bureaucratic at the expense of courage, you probably need some form of social drug. And it's probably not going to come from too many of the soldiers.

I think "Elevate this information" needs to be a more common phrase these days. Please share this with your friends in the military, and elsewhere.