Was it assassination? Was it illegal? [View all]
Good read on assassination, definitions, executive power and mission creep, legal vs illegal .. and how we got here with targeted killing.
A One-Word Accusation Swirls Around Trumps Deadly Strike: Assassination
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Government powers to target people abroad are becoming broader as well as more contested and more complex, said Susan Hennessey, executive editor of Lawfare, a legal affairs site. The term assassination is kind of the converse of that, an identification of where the government has exceeded its authority and violated its own ban.
Past administrations have widened that authority so substantially that, if you surveyed every legal scholar, youre probably going to see a fairly strong agreement that this is probably lawful, she said, referring to Mr. Suleimanis killing.
But that would not make his killing just, moral or wise, Ms. Hennessey stressed, only that it would fall within legal precedents set by past administrations. And any rationale remains hypothetical. The administration has presented no legal justification, raising concerns that it may have acted without first establishing the orders legality.
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[link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/world/middleeast/iran-soleimani-assassination.html?|