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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

International law being thrown around a lot. Seems like everyone is an int’l law expert, even though it’s quite an exotic speciality.

So please go ahead and tell me, where does International Law prohibit a state that’s at war with another to assassinate its head of state?

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Preventive war (attacking to neutralize a future, non-imminent threat) is considered illegal under modern international law. The UN Charter restricts the use of force to UN Security Council authorization or self-defense against an actual, imminent armed attack, making preventive actions, which target potential future dangers, unlawful.

Israel and Iran are involved in active hostilities for a long time now, direct or by proxies. Furthermore, US and Israel are making the case for a preemptive war with the advent of the Iranian nuclear program (whether you believe it or not, that’s beside the point), and those are legal.

It also allows any one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the US, to unilateraly veto any binding resolution that imposes sanctions for violating said law, with no established rules or even informal expectations that they recuse themselves when conflicts of interest arise.

US is not at war with Iran. Only the Congress has the right to declare war.

Ok, call it a "special military operation" if you want. A war by any other name would smell just as bad.

And what is Congress - or any other part of the US government - going to do about the pedophile not following rules? Stop him? How? Every potential check and balance has either been defanged or is controlled by his supporters.

Probably nothing. Also it’s not like the Democrats have much moral high ground to stand on here either (considering that Obama did more or less the same thing several times).

But congress can of course stop Trump from doing this and a whole bunch of other stuff. The problem is that it just chose not to and to give up much of its powers to the executive over the years (in practice if not legally) due to partisan reasons..

Why can't you be at war without officially declaring it? We have had lots of wars not declared by congress. Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq. This seems like a weird way to think.

Explicit authorization is still required even if there there is no explicit declaration of war.

The caveat being that the president only needs to get the approval of congress after 60 days.

And of course Obama established a precedent with his intervention in Libya which weakened this even more…

Being required legally doesn't change the actual fact of war. Sure it is breaking the law. I don't see how Libya is the one in the long list to set this precedent of illegally non-declared war.

International law == who has biggest guns

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