US military operation in Syria unauthorized: Former official
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The former legal advisor to the US State Department explains how the presence of US forces in Syria is not based on legal grounds and denounces the pretext of fighting ISIS in Syria in a Foreign Affairs article.
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An estimated 9.2m people have been displaced in Iraq since the US-led war began. (Getty Images)
Brian Finucane, former US State Department Legal Advisor, has stated today, Tuesday, that the US forces' presence in Syria "raises questions about the underlying legal rationales for their deployment."
In an article published by Foreign Affairs, Finucane denounced that US military operations in Syria do not fall under the task of combatting ISIS, which the US has always used as a pretext to justify its soldiers' actions. The former US official noted that "although the Obama administration did not offer a legal theory for its erroneous strikes on Syrian troops, the Trump and Biden administrations have articulated justifications for fighting non-ISIS forces, and these rationales differ in some respects."
Finucane addressed the Congress asking to reconsider the authorization of 2001 which paved the way for wars, leading to the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and then an ongoing aggression against Syria and Libya.
He, affirmatively, expressed the Biden administration's rejection of any congressional review to rethink the authorization of the war, suggesting that "There [is not] much chance that Congress, which is divided on the continued US presence in Syria and has grown accustomed as a body to dodging its responsibility for matters of war and peace, will take a consequential vote on US operations in Syria."
Finucane said the administration, as well as Congress, should work together to prevent the "ingenuity" of legal interpretations from turning into what led to the expansion of hostilities in Syria and beyond.
Forget skeletons in the closet - they're swept under a rug!
Last month, according to the New York Times, during the war, thousands of civilians, including children, were murdered by US airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, which were carried out with imprecise targeting and "deeply flawed intelligence."
The newspaper has studied 1,311 documents from a hidden Pentagon archive, concluding that the civilian death toll was a lot higher than the 1,417 civilian deaths reported by the US military in Iraq and Syria and the 188 deaths reported in Afghanistan.
Reports of civilian casualties were often dismissed because surveillance footage was "too brief", according to the NYT. Interviews with surviving residents and current and former US officials revealed that the US military made little effort to identify patterns of failure, with a lack of any public assessments that included a finding of wrongdoing.
The Times also wrote in a lengthy investigation that a top-secret US combat cell launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles allegedly against the ISIS terrorist organization in Syria, disclosing that this shadowy force, however, exceeded guarantees and repeatedly killed civilians, according to the testimonies of several current military personnel and former US intelligence officials.
