The narrative that the Donald Trump administration has continued to go with when it comes to the United States’ assassination of Qassem Soleimani was that the Iranian military leader was planning an “imminent attack” against U.S. interests in the region.
Unfortunately for the administration, that particular justification continues to have holes poked in it as New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi wrote in a detailed Twitter thread Saturday the mounting evidence just doesn’t support the claim.
According to two U.S. officials who received intelligence briefings in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination, which was ordered by President Donald Trump, “the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is ‘razor thin,'” Callimachi reported.
“In fact the evidence pointing to that came as three discrete facts,” Callimachi wrote. Those three facts, according to Callimachi, were Soleimani’s “pattern of travel,” his request for the Iranian Supreme Leader’s approval for an unspecified “operation,” and Iran’s supposed “increasingly bellicose position towards American interests in Iraq.”
“As one source put it, a) + b) + c) is hardly evidence of an imminent attack on American interests that could kill hundreds, as the White House has since claimed,” Callimachi wrote. “The official describes the reading of the intelligence as an illogical leap.”
Callimachi also points to what a lot of people are thinking when it comes to the timing of the assassination and the looming senate trial over Trump’s impeachment.
Legal justifications for the attack were also picked apart by CNN’s Susan Hennessey stating that “if this thread is accurate then both the policy and legal justifications for the strike [are] about to crumble.” Meanwhile, Yale Law School professor Oona Hathaway elaborated on Hennessey’s statement:
Moderate Democrats shouldn’t be given a pass
As much as some moderate Democrats want to parrot the Trump administrations justification when it comes to the assassination of Soleimani that he was a “killer” and a “terrorist” but who are decrying the attack as a prelude to all-out war in the region, those same Democrats essentially invited these neoconservative foreign policies to the table.
In late December, it was Democrats who helped greenlight the the
