Buried in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a provision to automatically register all males at the age of 18 with the Selective Service System (SSS) that, if not stopped, will go into effect this December. Clearing the FOG speaks with Edward Hasbrouck of Resisters.info. Hasbrouck was a draft resister in the early 1980’s who was sent to prison for refusing to register. He discusses how a small number of resisters, who were willing to speak out, proved that the government could not enforce a draft. He adds that this new effort will similarly fail and how we can abolish the system altogether, and stop the United States’ endless wars.
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Edward Hasbrouck is the editor and publisher of Resisters.info, the most comprehensive non-governmental source of information about the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance in the USA. In the 1980s, he worked as an organizer with the National Resistance Committee and as co-editor of “Resistance News”, the national journal of draft resistance. As one of only 20 vocal nonregistrants prosecuted before the government abandoned enforcement of draft registration, he was convicted of willful refusal to present himself for and submit to registration with the Selective Service System, and served four and a half months in a Federal Prison Camp in 1983-1984. In 2019, he was the only draft resister invited to testify before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service at its hearings on the future of Selective Service. The recipient of a Social Courage Award from the Peace and Justice Studies Association “for exemplifying courage and honor in speaking truth to power”, he is a member of the War Resisters League and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, and works as a travel writer and as a consultant to a human rights project. As a person too old to be likely to be drafted, his continued work against age-based military conscription is an expression of his primary political identification as an older ally to young people in their struggle for youth liberation.
