Briton Punished for Refusing 3rd Iraq Tour - Yahoo! News

In a follow up to an earlier post, Lt Kendall-Smith gets eight months for refusing to obey orders. Interesting is the fact that, beyond refusing deployment, he also refused to take part in training and other activities prior to deployment which would have been regular military activities, even without deployment which I believe is where this fellow went wrong.

Kendall-Smith's lawyer read a statement from him in which he equated the training with the actual actions and insisted that was why he refused those orders as well. The prosecution said little accept to remind people that the British armed forces were operating under a UN mandate and at the invitation of the current Iraqi government which probably put paid to Kendall-smith's argument that the war was illegal and so was the deployment he refused under international law.

An interesting aside in the last two paragraphs of the peace, the usual little dig about US armed forces comes out (why it is in relation to this situation, I don't know) without any corresponding facts:

The Pentagon says more than 5,500 U.S. servicemen have deserted since the war started in Iraq. It is unclear how many have challenged the legality of the war.

It's unclear who has challenged the legallity or how many because they leave out salient information such as the fact that these "desertions" numbers are nearly on par with desertions from previous years that did not inlclude deployment to conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It's that little piece of the puzzle these reports like to leave out in order to shape their article to the opinion they wish to generate. In this case, that the LT is not the first to desert and has some commonality in his objections with these other 5,500 deserters.

Its bad reporting as usual and some poor slob surfing the net at their desk job at Widget's Inc got the implication in spades.
Briton Punished for Refusing 3rd Iraq Tour - Yahoo! News