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Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School, said the Obama administration used the 'imminence' argument in unprecedented and expansive ways in targeting al-Awlaki, and traces of that approach are evident now in the Trump administration's justifications of killing Soleimani.
But she says the Soleimani case is very different. "You can't take aim at an official inside a government and say that is not a war," she told CNN. The administration has "crossed a threshold, and the significance of that cannot be overstated."
"What happened with the War on Terror is that we had mission creep beyond what the initial authorization was, but it does not extend to here," Greenberg said.
Greenberg believes the system is broken. "There has to be some kind of authorization for this war, and it can't be our continually-expanding-without-oversight drone policy that has guided us for the last ten years."
"This constant redefinition of terms to push aside legal restraints has come to the point we all feared it would. 'It's not an assassination, it's a targeted killing.' Or, 'It's not war, it's just the way we're doing business these days,'" Greenberg said.