By:HuckleBuck411

In today’s news we see concrete reasons for why Trump and his administration should be considered psychopaths and Israeli toadies. First, in the aftermath of the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, we have an International article titled “Trump Says US Will Not Leave Iraq Until Baghdad Pays for American Air Base, Threatens Sanctions.” Trump brushed aside any attempt by the sovereign nation of Iraq to control its own fate partly based on the fact that billions had been spent constructing a large US military base on Iraqi territory.

The Iraqi parliament on Sunday voted to expel all foreign troops from the nation’s territories and cut off ties with the US-led international anti-terrorist coalition after Friday’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Baghdad, by the US.

Trump’s arrogant and psychopathic response was:

We have a very extraordinarily expensive airbase that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it […] We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame”, Trump said Sunday, while traveling back to DC from Florida.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/202001051077947844-body-of-general-soleimani-arrives-in-ahvaz-iran-for-farewell-ceremony---video/

Using that logic maybe the U.S. should threaten to sanction Vietnam unless they pay the U.S. back for the expense of building up the Cam Ranh Bay facilities during the Vietnam war.

Trump then tweeted this threat aimed at Iran if they should in any way retaliate for Soleimani’s assassination, which occurred on Iraqi soil.

http://www.renegadetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/opera_Z5S9Pqiawp.jpg

This, of course, sparked world outrage, since targeting cultural sites is considered a war crime. US Secretary of State, and Neoconservative Mike Pompeo, has since been attempting to cover for President Trump’s threats.

http://www.renegadetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/opera_kUlrnOCpSc.jpg

Yes, Mr. Pompeo, everyone has read Trump’s statements and they appear to be very straightforward.

So where did today’s legalized version of “imminent attacks” reasoning for unilateral action against individuals and nations, used by the U.S., Israel and other U.S. coalition partners, come from?

In many respects its origins date from an 1837 incident that occurred between the U.S., Canada and Great Britain known as the Caroline affair or the Caroline case. You can read more about it by following the Wikipedia link to the story.

The diplomatic crisis was defused by the negotiations that led to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842, in which both the US and British admitted to wrongdoing…In the aftermath, the incident led to the legal principle of the “Caroline test“. The principle states that the necessity for [self-defense] must be “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”, as formulated by Daniel Webster in his response to British claims that they attacked the Caroline in self-defense. According to scholars, the “Caroline test” remains an accepted part of international law today.

The essence of the Caroline test has been recognized by the United Nations, but in the aftermath of 9/11 a lot of Jewish/Zionist [CIA, Executive branch] legal finagling has come about to broaden the meaning of the word “imminent.” To learn more about this we must travel to another of our erstwhile military partners, the United Kingdom and its Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the FCO. Referencing articles by Craig Murray :

The government employs in the FCO a dozen of the most distinguished public international lawyers in the world. When the Attorney-General’s office needs an Opinion on public international law, they ask the FCO to provide it for him to sign…The only known occasion when this did not happen was the Iraq War. Then the FCO Legal Advisers – unanimously – advised the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, that to invade Iraq was illegal. Jack Straw asked the Attorney-General to dismiss the FCO chief Legal Adviser, Sir Michael Wood (Goldsmith refused). Blair sent Goldsmith to Washington where the Opinion was written for him to sign by George Bush’s lawyers. [I know this sounds incredible, but it is absolutely true]. Sir Michael Wood’s deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned in protest.

It is at this point where an Israeli Zionist was brought in to start manipulating the legal meaning of “imminent” in the phrase “imminent attacks.”

In consequence Blair and Straw decided that, again for the first time ever, the FCO’s chief legal adviser had to be appointed not from within the FCO legal advisers, who had all declared the war on Iraq to be illegal, but from outside. They had to find a distinguished public international lawyer who was prepared to argue that the war on Iraq had been legal. That was a very small field. Blair and Straw thus turned to Benjamin Netanyahu’s favourite lawyer, Daniel Bethlehem.

Daniel Bethlehem had represented Israel before Senator George Mitchell’s Inquiry into violence against the people of Gaza, arguing that it was all legitimate self-defence. He had also supplied the Government of Israel with a Legal Opinion that the vast wall they were building in illegally occupied land, surrounding and isolating all the major Palestinian communities and turning them into large prisons, was also legal. Daniel Bethlehem is an extreme Zionist militarist of the most aggressive kind, and close to Mark Regev, Israel’s new Ambassador to the UK.

Daniel Bethlehem had developed, in his work for Israel, an extremist doctrine of the right of States to use pre-emptive self-defence – a doctrine which would not be accepted by the vast majority of public international lawyers [sounds a lot like a “Minority Report” scenario]. He clinched his appointment by Blair as the FCO chief legal adviser by presenting a memorandum to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in 2004 outlining this doctrine, and thus de facto defending the attack on Iraq and the Bush/Blair doctrine.

A key sentence of Daniel Bethlehem’s memorandum is this:

“It must be right that states are able to act in self-defense in circumstances where there is evidence of further imminent attacks by terrorist groups, even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack.”

There is a fundamental flaw in this argument. How can you be certain that an attack is “imminent”, if you are not certain where or what it is? Even if we can wildly imagine a scenario where the government know of an “imminent” attack, but not where or what it is, how could killing someone in Syria stop the attack in the UK? If a team were active, armed and in course of operation in the UK – which is needed for “imminent” – how would killing an individual in Syria prevent them from going through with it? It simply does not add up as a practical scenario.

Interestingly, Daniel Bethlehem does not pretend this is accepted international law, but specifically states that:

“The concept of what constitutes an “imminent” armed attack will develop to meet new circumstances and new threats.”

Bethlehem is attempting to develop the concept of “imminent” beyond any natural interpretation of the word “imminent”.

This is what has come to be known as the “Bethlehem Doctrine” and ever since the second invasion of Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) it has been the go to doctrine for carrying out unilateral attacks by the U.S., Israel, the UK and other coalition allies under the more liberal definition of danger from “imminent attacks.”

So you may be assassinated by a drone or bomb strike – and the doctrine was specifically developed to justify such strikes – because of “intelligence” you are engaged in a plot, when that intelligence neither says what the plot is nor when it might occur. Or even more tenuous, because there is intelligence you have engaged in a plot before, so it is reasonable to kill you in case you do so again.

The latest victim of the “Bethlehem Doctrine” has been General Soleimani and Trump, like presidents and other Western and Israeli leaders before him, will continue to use this doctrine to carry out just about any military action he wishes under its auspices while thumbing his nose at the rest of the world.

Daniel Bethlehem left the FCO in 2011. But he had firmly set the British government doctrine [I would also include U.S. and Israeli doctrine] on this issue, while all FCO legal advisers know not to follow it gets you sacked.