As a citizen of the united states, a graduate of West Point, Ranger School and numerous other Army schools, and a former officer in the Regular Army, sworn to support and defend the Constitution, I am disgusted at the despicable, immoral and illegal murder of General Soleimani (of Iran), General Al-Ibrahim aka Mahdi Al-Muhandis (of Iraq), and their drivers and accompanying soldiers, by drone strikes on their cars as they were driving from the Baghdad Airport while on their way to attend the funerals of members of their militias killed by aircraft strikes days earlier.
The Constitution contains provisions for the declaration of war, because the Constitution explicitly states that one of its purposes is "to provide for the common defense" of the nation.
It assigns the grave authority of declaring war to the Congress, in Article 1 of the Constitution, and it is understood that the founders gave this authority to Congress because the members of Congress most fully represent the will of the people, and the rules and procedures of the two houses of Congress require deliberation and debate before enacting legislation and certainly before declaring war, enabling different arguments to be aired and considered.
The representatives of the people of the united states have not declared war on either Iran or Iraq, and thus no state of war exists between the united states and those countries, making the cold-blooded assassination of officers (or anyone else) from those countries illegal and completely against the "laws of nations" which is described in the Constitution (see sentences underlined in red from Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, shown above).
Indeed, by all accounts, this dastardly assassination was perpetrated before Congress was even told about it. By the time the Congress was told, the assassination of the two generals and their accompanying soldiers had already taken place.
The citizens of the united states are now being assured that abundant intelligence exists showing that these generals were planning attacks on American targets in Iraq and beyond, just as we have been told that the Iraqi militia positions hit by American airstrikes were somehow determined to have been linked to rocket attacks on the "K1" base in Kirkuk where one contractor was killed -- thus far without any actual evidence having been presented to the world to back up these allegations (very limited details have been released).
Why should we have reason to doubt what we are being told about the perpetrators of the attacks on K1?
Why should we have reason to be suspicious about the allegations we are hearing about General Soleimani preparing extensive attacks on Americans?
We have every reason to be suspicious about those allegations and to suspect that things are not necessarily as we are being told, because the entire pretext for invading Iraq in the first place, seventeen years ago in early 2003, was based on complete lies and fabrications.
The most dastardly of these lies, used to support the war of aggression against Iraq, was the lie that Iraq had something to do with the attacks of September 11, 2001.
There is now so much evidence which shows that the official story of what took place on that awful day is a complete pack of lies that nobody who examines that evidence can possibly fail to conclude that we have been lied to about September 11th for going on nineteen years -- and those lies have been used to "justify" (falsely justify, of course, which is no justification at all) wars of aggression which have resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands (probably now numbering in the millions) of innocent civilians, including children, and in the complete devastation of numerous countries and the immiseration of their people.
Wars of aggression are absolutely condemned in the "laws of nations." The Constitution does not provide for the declaration of war or the raising of armies in order to commit wars of aggression. The Nuremberg military tribunal, convened in the aftermath of World War II to try Nazi war criminals, declared that "To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime."
The assassination of General Soleimani and General Al-Muhandis must therefore be viewed in this context. These assassinations are tantamount to an act of war, an act of war which could be characterized as a war of aggression, the supreme international crime. And these assassinations were committed without even the consent of Congress, not that Congress has done anything to stop the illegal wars of aggression which have been perpetrated under the false justification (which is no justification at all) of the official story of September 11, 2001 -- an official story which can be easily shown to be an outright pack of lies.
There is also the fact that these officers were going to attend funerals of militia members who had been killed days earlier in airstrikes which themselves were committed on the pretense that those militias had something to do with a rocket strike on K1 in Kirkuk, hundreds of kilometers away -- allegations which must also be viewed with suspicion.
In point of fact, these militias (and their leader, the late General Al-Muhandis) were actively engaged in combating ISIS / Daesh in Iraq and Syria, and these airstrikes and now the murder of their general should be seen in the context of abundant evidence which points to the conclusion that ISIS / Daesh has been secretly armed and enabled all along by certain nefarious forces using it as a proxy force or a "foreign legion" to carry out regime change against the Syrian government (another war of aggression which has led to massive loss of life, displacement of families, and impoverishment and immiseration).
Indeed, General Soleimani has been widely credited with being the master tactician and strategist who enabled Syria to defeat the murderous brigands of ISIS / Daesh, which is part of the reason he was so popular and so respected.
A few years ago, all we heard about from the news-media and from politicians in the united states was how horrible ISIS / Daesh was, and how important it was to defeat them. We hear next to nothing about ISIS / Daesh anymore -- but for some reason those very men who are presently fighting ISIS / Daesh in Iraq are now categorized as "terrorists," airstrikes are carried out against their outposts, and the cowardly assassination of their leaders while those leaders are driving from the airport on the way to the funerals of those killed by those airstrikes is celebrated as some kind of heroic accomplishment, with nary a voice in the controlled media raising a single question.
I am personally revolted by those who order and carry out drone strikes on funerals or on weddings, and I would argue that everyone who believes in the law of the gods (or the law of God, if you prefer, or the "law of nations" described in the Constitution) should be equally revolted at such barbarous behavior.
The Declaration of Independence signed on July 4, 1776 spent quite a bit of space enumerating war crimes perpetrated by Britain, against which the founders of the united states were justifiably outraged.
The lines of the Constitution reproduced in the image above include the authorization (given to Congress, in Article 1, section 8) "to define and punish piracies on the High Seas, and offenses against the law of nations." By this we see that the founders held offenses against the law of nations to be in the same category as piracy -- and no doubt they would have seen the assassination of officers of nations with whom a nation is not at war as a violation of the law of nations (indeed, such assassinations are universally understood to be a violation of the law of nations to this day).
We also see in this passage from the Constitution the rebuttal to those who will argue against my objections above, saying that "even if we are not at war with Iran or Iraq, we certainly must have recourse to stop their military leaders if they are plotting and committing crimes against our citizens or our soldiers." To this rebuttal, I would first point out that the illegal invasion of Iraq was made under false pretenses, but beyond that, we can grant the objection and show that the Constitution clearly anticipates the likelihood that there will indeed be some enemies who do not observe the "law of nations" (including these enemies in the same category as pirates) -- and that the Constitution quite explicitly gives the authority of defining and punishing such behavior to the Congress.
Thus, the Constitution makes provisions enabling Congress to act and deal with pirates and those who commit felonies in violation of the law of nations.
Tragically, however, if the members of the Congress are willing to accept the lies within the official narrative of the mass-murders perpetrated against American citizens on September 11, 2001 despite all of the evidence which has surfaced in the past eighteen years (or at least to pretend while in public that they accept the official narrative), then they will no doubt accept or pretend to accept whatever "evidence" is trotted out to show that the militia bases hit by the airstrikes last week were somehow connected to the rocket attacks on K1 in Kirkuk, and whatever "evidence" is trotted out to show that General Soleimani was planning some kind of extensive attacks on Americans in Iraq and outside of it.
But the fact remains that no such evidence was even brought before the Congress, prior to the moment that these extra-judicial assassinations by drone, tantamount to acts of war, were perpetrated.
But it gets even worse. We now have the spectacle of the united states vice president, suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, tweeting allegations (never heard before, even in the official report of the events of September 11, 2001) that General Soleimani was somehow partly responsible for September 11, 2001.
Does the big lie about the mass-murders of September 11, 2001 have no limit to its applications as a tool for attempting to justify new illegal acts, even today in the year 2020?
Can anyone still be so ignorant of the evidence that the official story of September 11, 2001 is an outright lie (a completely unsustainable lie) that he or she will fall for these arguments?
What makes this incredible and hitherto-unheard allegation against the murdered General Soleimani so shocking is the fact that General Soleimani actually assisted the united states in strategic and tactical planning against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the immediate aftermath of the September 2001 attacks.
I myself was at West Point as an instructor at the time of the September 11 attacks, and at the time I uncritically accepted the official story attributing those attacks to fanatical Sunni extremists, and continued to do so for many years afterwards. For about eight years, I was vehemently opposed to any suggestion that the destruction and mass-murder that was committed on that day had somehow not been the work of nineteen hijackers with box-cutters.
However, it is no longer the year 2001.
More than eighteen years after the fact, there is simply no excuse for not realizing that the official story is an unsustainable lie.
- World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed into its own footprint at a speed indistinguishable from free-fall speed, despite not being struck by any airliner.
- Hijacked airliners continued to fly around for over an hour without being engaged by any military interceptor aircraft, even after the World Trade Center towers had been struck.
- Something (we are told it was a jetliner) struck the Pentagon (the central headquarters of the entire American military) without ever being engaged by any ground-based air-defense assets.
- Numerous military drills involving aircraft were taking place on that same day, by "astonishing coincidence" (unless we are prepared to believe that somehow these nineteen extremist hijackers also managed to schedule massive military drills on the same day that they had selected for their operation).
- The crime scene of the collapsed towers of World Trade Center 1 and 2 was not investigated but instead was deliberately and rapidly destroyed, the steel carted away in short order, never to be subjected to rigorous forensic analysis.
To try to stretch this lie, the lie about what took place on September 11 and about who was responsible for those mass-murders of thousands of innocent civilians, over this week's murders of General Soleimani and General Al-Muhandis is beyond belief.
The American people need to wake up and condemn the wars of aggression which are being perpetrated in their name, under absolutely false pretenses, wars of aggression which (in the words of the Nuremberg tribunal) constitute "the supreme international crime," and they need to demand that their elected representatives condemn this illegal, immoral and unconstitutional behavior.
We have had almost nineteen years of evidence which shows that Congress will not lift a finger to stop these criminal and unconstitutional wars, as long as their constituents are not raising any outcry. We cannot expect Congress to do the right thing unless we demand it, in massive numbers and expressing our outrage at the crimes that are being committed in our name.
Nobody else in the world can do it for us -- it is up to the citizens of the united states to make these demands.
Preamble: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and General Welfare of the United States; [. . .]
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and to make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; [. . .]
