The drone strike that killed a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, was an “immoral action” that violated national and international law, a former lawyer who helped prosecute Nazi leaders at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charges.
In a letter to The New York Times, Benjamin Ferencz, 99, called the hit an assassination.
"I have felt obliged to repay the United States for the opportunities given to me," wrote Ferencz, who arrived in the United States as a child from Romanian-occupied Hungary in 1921.
"I was an American combat soldier in World War II, and was proud to serve my country as the chief prosecutor in a war crimes trial at Nuremberg against Nazi leaders who murdered millions of innocent men, women and children," he wrote.
But he suggested the Trump administration is undermining international law.
"The administration recently announced that, on orders of the president, the United States had 'taken out' (which really means 'murdered') an important military leader of a country with which we were not at war," he wrote.
"As a Harvard Law School graduate who has written extensively on the subject, I view such immoral action as a clear violation of national and international law."
The killing touched off high tensions between Washington and Tehran, during which time Iran launched ballistic missiles against American troops in Iraq and accidentally shot down a passenger jet outside Tehran.
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