Iran Retaliates - Hits US Air Bases in Iraq with More Than a Dozen Ballistic Missiles

NewRoxFan · Feb 13, 2020

And look... there is a mannequin of senator sue collins, looking appropriately concerned...

NewRoxFan · Feb 14, 2020

Remember all that discussion about the potential of Iranian action was "imminent"? Apparently the official report must have forgotten...

White House ‘1264 Notice’ and Novel Legal Claims for Military Action Against Iran

The claim that Soleimani posed an imminent threat of attack has been a central plank in the administration’s public justification for the Jan. 2 strike and for not going to Congress before taking action. When submitting a formal written statement to Congress, however, that justification drops out. The absence of an imminent threat is relevant not only to the legal and policy basis for the strike on Jan. 2. It is also relevant for potential future military action. The administration’s position appears to boil down to an assertion that it can use military force against Iran without going to Congress even if responding to a threat from Iran that is not urgent or otherwise imminent.
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Claims of Iran’s responsibility for militias that could boomerang against United States’ support for militia and other military partners. The administration’s position is based on an unstated premise: that Iran is legally responsible for the acts of so-called proxy forces. The notice aggregates—one might say, conflates—military actions of Iranian-backed militias (e.g., the attack on an Iraqi base that killed a US contractor) with the military actions of Iran (e.g., shoot down of the US drone) as a justification for striking Iran. But that only works if Iran is legally responsible for the actions of those militias. So then, what theory of “attribution” under the law of state responsibility is the administration claiming applies? Under international law, there are two competing tests for attribution – a very high threshold of “effective control” and a lower threshold of “overall control.” International courts have split over which is the proper test. So which is it for the Trump administration?
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The notice avoids a key variable for adjudicating whether the president acted within his Article II powers as Commander-in-Chief: The risk of escalation to war with Iran. Even expansive views of the president’s authority presented over time by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (including its 2018 opinion on the US strikes against Syria) assign great weight to this variable.
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An astonishing claim set forth in the new notice is that Congress has already authorized the administration to engage in wide-ranging military actions against Iran due to the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq. The OMB’s Jan. 27 Statement staked out a similar position, but did not receive significant public attention coming in the midst of the Senate impeachment trial. The notice makes even clearer that the administration’s position is not limited to unit self-defense of US and partner forces who come under fire from third parties (including Iranian-backed forces) while combatting ISIS. Rather the administration appears to be taking the position that Iranian forces, now designated as a terrorist organization, constitute a more general threat that triggers application of the 2002 Iraq-AUMF
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https://www.justsecurity.org/68594/...egal-claims-for-military-action-against-iran/

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Iran Retaliates - Hits US Air Bases in Iraq with More Than a Dozen Ballistic Missiles

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