By Camille T. Taiara

With the Iraq war becoming a deeper quagmire and military recruiting efforts consistently coming in below quotas, the Bush administration has used stop-loss orders – those unilaterally extending soldiers' commitment – to maintain its fighting force. Now a much-watched court case is challenging how the government has been wielding that authority.

Emiliano Santiago – who joined the Oregon National Guard in 1996 and was scheduled to complete his service last June, almost four months before he was ordered to Afghanistan – was the first soldier to challenge stop-loss in a federal appeals court. The case was headed to an April 6 hearing in Seattle by the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"There are separate provisions in [Santiago's enlistment] contract which allow for the extension of his contract if Congress declares war or a national emergency," Santiago's attorney, Steven Goldberg of the National Lawyers Guild, told the Bay Guardian. "Neither of those situations happened."

What's more, Goldberg continued, "if the stop-loss statute trumps the enlistment contract – which is what the government argues – the statute should not be applied to [Santiago]," who wasn't on active duty when his stop-loss order came. And even if he had been, Goldberg said, recruits have a constitutional right to know exactly how contract provisions can be overridden.

"Stop Loss has nothing to do with increasing the number of people in the Army and everything to do with effective units," U.S. Army public affairs officer Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty told us by e-mail. "The nation is at war and we are stop-lossing units deploying to a combat theater to ensure they train, deploy, fight, and redeploy as a team."

But that's little relief to many of the 50,000 soldiers affected by stop-loss since Sept. 11 – or the 14,000 Hilferty said are being impacted by stop-loss right now.

"If we can at least get some favorable decision at some level in interpreting these contracts, that might create a basis for raising broader issues in other cases," Goldberg said. "And because the government is taking the position that the contract means nothing, [this case also serves as] a clear warning to students, who are primarily being recruited, that they better understand the ramifications of signing these contracts."

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