David Cole: U.S. War on Iran Is “Blatantly Illegal” Under U.S. & Int’l Law

AMY GOODMAN: But I wanted to ask you a quick question about a critical piece you just wrote, headlined “The Lie of 'Preventive' War,” where you write, “Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.” Explain.

DAVID COLE: Well, the basic — and this, too. I mean, when you look at our military actions, those actions require Justice Department to approve them as lawful. There is no way you can justify as lawful what we are doing in Iran, what we did in Venezuela, what we did to the over a hundred people that we have summarily executed on the high seas. And the Justice Department has either looked the other way or written memos saying that that’s lawful.

But with respect to Iran, Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. The U.N. Charter absolutely prohibits one country from aggressively attacking another country, using force against another country, unless that country has attacked us — and Iran had not attacked us — or the U.N. has authorized that intervention. The U.N. did not authorize that intervention. It was blatantly illegal on that ground. It was also blatantly illegal under the Constitution, because the Constitution says that the Congress, not the president, has the authority to authorize military actions, and yet the president took these actions. You know, he famously told The New York Times, you know, it’s just his own sense of morality that limits him, nothing else. And as we’ve seen, that’s not a meaningful limit.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, David Cole, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor in law and public policy at the Georgetown University Law Center, former ACLU national legal director. We’ll link to your article, “The Lie of 'Preventive' War.”