How Trump's 'Imminent Threat' on Iran Turned in to the New WMD

[babylonsister]

January 14, 2020 7:00AM ET
How Trump’s ‘Imminent Threat’ on Iran Turned in to the New WMD
The administration’s increasingly incoherent case for assassinating Qasem Soleimani doesn’t add up
By Tim Dickinson


His administration unable to keep its story straight about how exactly General Qasem Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” to U.S. national security, President Trump now claims it “really doesn’t matter” if the assassinated Iranian commander was about to kill Americans.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The question of imminence matters. Indeed, the legal justification of the strike depends on it. Killing a top-ranking government official of a nation that the United States is not at war with, on the soil of a third nation altogether, would be illegal, except as an extreme matter of self defense.

Even acting to foil an imminent threat requires an expansive legal reading of Article 51 of the United Nations charter, which outlines the “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” According to experts in international law, killing Soleimani was legal only if the U.S. could demonstrate he was the operational commander of attacks that were about to happen, and that killing him — and only the act of killing him — would disrupt that threat.

The truth appears quite different. Like the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2002, the Trump administration’s invocation of an “imminent threat” posed by Soleimani looks increasingly like a flimsy rationale, chosen after the fact to justify a predetermined course of U.S. military action.

Democrats have been quicker to call bullshit this time around. “I have still not seen any intelligence to suggest that there was an imminent attack against U.S. forces,” said Senator Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Counterterrorism. Some Republicans have joined them: “There was no specific information given to us of a specific attack,” said Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky after a classified briefing by the administration. “I didn’t learn anything in the hearing that I hadn’t seen in a newspaper already.”

According to recent news reports, the killing of Soleimani had been premeditated by the administration for months, not as an act of self-defense, but as a measure of vengeance on a “bad guy” who has long directed violent militias in the region. Moreover, we’ve learned that Soleimani wasn’t the only target for assassination, and that the U.S. also tried, and failed, to take out a second Quds Force commander, Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was targeted in a fourth country, Yemen. More alarming, President Trump himself has reportedly characterized the strikes against Iranians as part of an effort to curry favor with GOP hawks in the Senate who will imminently be serving as jurors in his impeachment trial.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/imminent-threat-turned-weapons-mass-destruction-937039/

[duforsure]

1. This tactic he's used before

Lie then exaggerate it to what he wants then backs off then changes the lie again when the first one falls flat from being exposed as false. Just like his accusations he uses to attack others with, he makes exaggerated claims, then makes more claims to it then repeats it over and over again. Sometimes he claims he never said it when he did, on tape. He's a corrupt serial liar and criminal, selling our country out to the highest bidder for policy, intel, and for personal gains. A lot more people are realizing this now.