Constitutional Lawyer Bruce Fein Blasts Obama and Israel for Violating International Law with Syria Attack, Drone Kills

February 4, 2013 • 9:12AM

Constitutional lawyer and former top Reagan Justice Department official Bruce Fein, who addressed last weekend's Schiller Institute conference in New York City, has a letter to the editor of the Financial Times today, attacking U.S. and Israeli violations of international law. The full text reads:

Re: Israeli jets hit Syrian convoy as fears rise (News story, p.8, January 31, 2013)

Sir:

The United States and Israel are now dancing on the rubble of international law shattered by their respective limitless conceptions of preemptive warfare. Last week, Israel conducted an unprovoked air strike on a convoy of trucks in Syria suspected of carrying SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles towards Lebanon without evoking a whisper of United States opposition. The United States claims authority to perpetrate predator drone killings in any country where international terrorists or their associates are suspected of dwelling, including Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Both nations preposterously maintain that national self-defense (uniquely to them) includes the right to exterminate any person suspected of a connection to any activity that might at some unknown future time support an enemy attack, e.g., an Iranian nuclear scientist. No imagination is needed to divine how the United States would respond to a Russian predator drone strike against a suspected Chechen terrorist inhabitant of New York City; or how Israel would respond to an Hamas killing of an Israeli scientist assisting its Iron Dome anti-missile program. After its apogee at Nuremberg, international law has plunged like Lucifer from heaven to a doctrine of might makes right indistinguishable from a Hobbesian state of nature. The United States and Israel have been major culprits.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and author of American Empire Before The Fall