(July 14th, 2008) When Army Specialist Jeremy Hall declined to participate in a Christian prayer ceremony to commemorate Thanksgiving in November 2006 he said he was alienated by his staff sergeant and subjected to vicious personal attacks for stating that he did not believe in God.

Determined to find soldiers who were also atheists, Hall organized a meeting for freethinkers at Combat Operations Base Speicher, Iraq. He said he received permission from the Army chaplain stationed at Speicher to post flyers to publicize the gathering.

But just minutes after the soldiers convened their first meeting last July, Army Maj. Freddy Welborn burst into a room where the soldiers gathered, broke up the atheist meeting and allegedly threatened to block Hall’s reenlistment in the Army and have charged brought against him for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Fearing that higher ranking Army officials would not come to his defense, Hall contacted the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a watchdog group whose core mission is to force the military to adhere to the constitutional provision mandating the separation of church and state.

So Hall and MRFF filed a lawsuit last September against the Pentagon, Welborn, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for allegedly violating the soldier’s First Amendment rights and for permitting a pattern of fundamentalist Christianity to permeate throughout the military. The complaint was amended in March to include new allegations alleging that Hall's promotion in the Army was withdrawn because of he sued the military.

Last week, the Justice Department filed a response to the lawsuit—a massive document exceeding 300 pages that essentially says the lawsuit should be dismissed because Hall “failed to exhaust intramilitary remedies, and assert claims that are nonjusticiable.”