From The American Conservative:
The U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions has said in a new report that the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani earlier this year was in violation of international law, and noted that the US had provided no evidence that it had acted in self-defense:
The attack violated the UN Charter, Callamard wrote in a report calling for accountability for targeted killings by armed drones and for greater regulation of the weapons.
Callamard’s judgment is correct, but then we didn’t need a UN official to tell us what was right in front of us six months ago. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except for the purpose of self-defense. The US was clearly not engaged in self-defense when it launched an attack to kill a senior member of a foreign government’s military on the territory of a third country. The US not only committed an act of aggression against Iran, but it trampled on Iraq’s sovereignty as well. Everything that the Trump administration told the public about this attack back in January was untrue or misleading, and its claim that the president had authority to launch this attack because of the 2002 Iraq war AUMF was spurious nonsense.
