I was not engaging in hyperbole. I was stating a legal principle already established at Nuremberg. Invoking Godwin's Law to dismiss it is akin to the Stalinists screaming "red-baiting" when called out on their similar contempt for international law. As we already wrote:

International law scholar Francis Boyle reminded us as Bush was preparing for the Iraq attack in 2003: "This doctrine of pre-emptive warfare or pre-emptive attack was rejected soundly in the Nuremberg Judgment." Former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz also pointed this out in the prelude to the war, stating: "A preemptive military strike not authorized by the Security Council would clearly violate the UN Charter." As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, said in his opening statement to the tribunal in November 1945: "Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions."

So go argue with them, willya?

I'm sorry, but it is a pretty critical distinction whether the US carries out military operations with or without the consent of the sovereign government of the territory in question. Obama's statements are dangerously (and perhaps intentionally) ambiguous on this point.