Murder, she wrote

From 1984 to 1996, Dame Angela Lansbury portrayed mystery writer Jessica Fletcher, whose fictional pursuits were overshadowed by her penchant in solving real life murders on ‘Murder, She Wrote’. As good as Fletcher was, we didn’t need her fictional expertise to pin premeditated state sponsored murder of a foreign official on President Trump and his loyal Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. But it did take a woman, Agnes Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. She had responsibility for investigating the January 3 drone attack at Baghdad International Airport that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and nine others as they departed the airport for a meeting called by our Iraq ally to broker peaceful relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

It took Callamard six months, somewhat longer than the fictional Fletcher’s one hour to solve the killing. But her verdict, which breaks new ground on the international law of war is stark:

“The targeted killing of General Qasem Soleimani is the first case of a drone attack against the representative of the armed forces of a state. Until now, all drone kills that I am aware of have targeted non-state targets, particularly individuals associated with acts of terror.”

How might the U.S. react if Iran, not at war with the U.S., launched a drone attack which, like the Soleimani murder, incinerated the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and nine others he was meeting with to discuss peace? My guess? Iran would be bombed back to the Stone Age.

The extrajudicial murders of Gen. Soleimani and his nine member entourage compared to the 268 murders solved by Lansbury’s fictional Jessica Fletcher, reveal once again that truth is stranger than fiction…and a lot more grisly.