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What Makes Obama Think His Wars Are Legal?
President Barack Obama's lawyers, working on our dime, have just laid out a 46-page explanation of why current wars are legal. They've done so in response to a lawsuit, which has limited the argument in some significant ways.
First, while Obama has bragged about bombing seven nations, this lawsuit deals only with whichever parts of the world ISIS is in. But there is every reason to believe that Obama would make similar arguments for the legality of his other wars.
Second, while Tony Blair may be in hot water for violating the UN Charter's ban on threatening or using war, and while Germans and Japanese were once prosecuted for violating the Kellogg-Briand Pact's ban on waging war, this lawsuit takes no notice of such laws whatsoever, and thus neither does Obama's response. In fact, the “Most Progressive Democratic Party Platform in History” itself violates the UN Charter by threatening war on Iran and, a bit less explicitly, on Syria.
The lawsuit accuses Obama of waging war against ISIS in violation of the War Powers Resolution. Obama's lawyers (or, if you prefer the idiom of “our troops,” we can say “our lawyers”) try four different arguments for why that isn't so.
Read more by David Swanson at http://www.davidswanson.org” target=”_blank”www.davidswanson.org
Source: http://www.davidswanson.org/node/5216
