Just as an aside

I occasionally mention that our Administration has ordered our armed forces to do things that got people hanged at Nuremburg.

I'm not kidding.

Read the whole article, titled "Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?" wrtten by Jan Frel, AlterNet, and dated July 10, 2006.

An excerpt:

Perhaps no person on the planet is better equipped to identify and describe our[sic] crimes in Iraq than Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials who successfully convicted 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating death squads that killed more than one million people in the famous Einsatzgruppen Case.

That's who we're talking about. Here's what he has to say about "preemptive self-defense":

Interviewed from his home in New York, Ferencz laid out a simple summary of the case:

"The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States formulated by the United States in fact, after World War II. Its says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can't use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, 'Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they've found -- then we'll figure out what we're going to do. The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq -- which was all pre-arranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter."

Ths is why only Congress is allowed to declare war. This, in fact, is why we started the United Nations and had the Nuremberg trials to begin with - to show the world what the reward for aggression was.