Abolish the Selective Service System
[Edward Hasbrouck outside the Federal courthouse in Boston before his sentencing for refusal to register with the Selective Service System, 14 January 1983. Photo by Tom Landers, Boston Globe, via Getty Images]
A Letter to Senators and Representatives in Congress
(The letter below was written in 1999, but more than 20 years later, it remains timely and Congress has yet to act.)
I urge you to eliminate funding for the Selective Service System, and I urge the President to exercise his authority to issue a Presidential proclamation ending the requirement for young men to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft.
, and it is time for even those who
support the draft to admit the failure of draft registration. Millions of men
subject to draft registration — myself included — have refused to register or
simply ignored the registration requirement. As several GAO audits of
registration records have documented, very few registrants notify the Selective
Service System when they move, and the great majority of registrations of
draft-age men do not contain enough current information to ensure that a draft notice
would actually reach the registrant.
I was one of the first group of young men whom the Selective Service
System tried to get to register when draft registration was reinstated in
1980. So many of us did not register — at least one million in that
first cohort alone — that both the Selective Service System and the
Department of Justice recognized (in internal documents that were
eventually made public in discriminatory-prosecution hearings) that it
would be impossible to prosecute more than a token few non-registrants.
The stated hope of SSS and DoJ officials at that time was that “an initial
round of well-publicized prosecutions” might “generate sufficient
registrations to preserve the credibility of the system”. They didn’t.
Instead, the prosecution of myself and 19 others who were identified by
the SSS and the DoJ as the “most vocal” non-registrants (from among
those who had made public statements which could be used to prove
their knowledge of the registration requirement — those who made no
such statements couldn’t be prosecuted for “knowing” non-registration)
served only to call attention to the extent of the resistance to
registration, and to the inability of the government to enforce
registration.
Draft registration rates in the district in which I was tried, convicted, and sentenced to
prison declined thereafter, as they did in most of the districts in which the
show trials of selected non-registrants were held.
Enforcement of the registration requirement was abandoned in failure. No one has been prosecuted
for nonregistration since 1986 — not because everyone registers,
but because .
But young and male.
What’s worst about the continued existence
of draft registration is that it fosters the illusions of those who believe that a
draft is possible. And what’s worst about a draft is that it fosters the
illusions of those who believe that making war without the consent of the people
is not merely possible but the American way.
They are wrong. Those who believe that the American people will fight, kill,
and die for no better reason than “because we say so” or “because it’s the law”
are deluding themselves. Whether you like it or not, I urge you to accept the
reality of the failure of draft registration, and — more importantly — to
accept the reality of its lesson: the ultimate decision about which wars to
fight will be made, as it always has been, by those who are asked to fight those
wars. You cannot make war without our consent, and it’s long past time for you
to recognize that reality and to reorganize your military policies on that
foundation. Whether we will fight or kill, and if so whom we will kill, is —
like it or not — our choice, not yours. It’s time for you to get realistic
about it.
As one of those token few who was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for
resisting and organizing against draft registration, may I also remind you of
the futility, indeed counterproductivity, of prosecuting dissenters or
imprisoning in people for their beliefs. I’m still in touch intermittently with
many of the other 20 indicted non-registrants, and I can say with considerable
confidence that none of us were politically “rehabilitated” by the experience of
prosecution and imprisonment. I’d do it again I were asked to register, much
less to be drafted, tomorrow.
I urge you to acknowledge the failure of draft registration and the
impossibility of a draft, and to begin to restore democracy to American
military decision-making by abolishing the Selective Service System.
Peace,
8 September 1999
