Let’s summarize what Senator Reed said — and, more importantly, what he failed to say.

1. The US acted in violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.

2. According to the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, that is a violation of the Supreme Law of the Land.

3. Senator Reed fails to recognize unambiguously that the US military acted in flagrant violation of the Supreme Law of the Land.

4. Senator Reed doesn't acknowledge that the US military was constitutionally bound to refuse to follow illegal orders and has nothing better on offer than the Nuremberg defense.

None of this is particularly complicated, for those who recall what Justice Robert H. Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, had to say:

"If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

While I’m at it, I may as well add this Howard Zinn quote from his A People’s History of the United States — historyisaweapon.com/de…

"It was the new politics of ambiguity-speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Like so much in the American system, it was not devilishly contrived by some master plotters; it developed naturally out of the needs of the situation."

Note the "politics of ambiguity-speaking" in Zinn's first sentence.