What I really want to know though is the detail - how has international law been broken, where, what are the consequences, what are the precedents, etc - anyone know any good links to any laywers working in the field writing blogs, for instance? Anyone here got a background in international law or just law generally?
Just to give one example out of hundreds: The nonprofit
American Society of International Law, consisting mainly of scholars, has laid out the case against President George W. Bush as a war criminal in article after article in a dispassionate fashion.
But
very briefly:
Any law scholar will tell you that pre-emptive self-defense is unlawful under international law – from Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter to the UN Charter. In fact, the United States was the guiding force behind both the Nuremberg trials and the establishment of the United Nations. At the end of the second world war, with the Nazis defeated and discredited, the United Nations Charter, a treaty binding on the U.S., prohibited nations using preventive force in Article II, Section 4. Only the Security Council has the authority to take measures against “threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.”
The only exception to this is the right of individual and collective self-defense that the U.S. and Britain invoked under Article 51. The key, of course, is that you have to be attacked or that an enemy must be in the process of attacking you. Under the UN Charter, you cannot simply say here’s a list of “rogue nations” who may at some undefined time in the near future pose a threat to you because they may harbor weapons of mass destruction, which we have in abundance, and they are not allowed to have. Nor is there anything under international law that says simply developing a weapons program amounts to an armed threat or attack. If this were true, every country on Earth would be justified in attacking the U.S., the country with the greatest number of WMD’s, at any time.
But that's only the beginning ...