White House reports on Soleimani
No imminent threat cited in justifying memo to Congress
WASHINGTON — The White House told Congress on Friday that President Donald Trump authorized the strike last month that killed Iran’s top general to respond to attacks that had already taken place and deter future ones.
In a legally mandated, twopage unclassified memo to lawmakers, the White House asserted that the strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani was “in response to an escalating series of attacks in preceding months” by Iran and Iran-backed militias.
“The purposes of this action were to protect United States personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against United States forces and interests, to degrade Iran’s and Quds Force-backed militias’s ability to conduct attacks, and to end Iran’s strategic escalation of attacks,” said the report, which was transmitted Friday to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“This official report directly contradicts the president’s false assertion that he attacked Iran to prevent an imminent attack against United States personnel and embassies,” Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “The administration’s explanation in this report makes no mention of any imminent threat and shows that the justification the president offered to the American people was false, plain and simple.”
Trump and other top officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the strike was conducted in response to imminent threats to American lives, but they declined to provide any evidence.
Pressed over several days, Pompeo conceded that the United States did not have specific intelligence on where or when an attack would take place. Trump claimed that four U.S. embassies had been targeted for attacks, but under questioning during a television interview, Mark Esper, secretary of defense, said he had seen no evidence of that.
Trump later insisted on Twitter that Soleimani had, in fact, been planning an imminent attack on U.S. forces, but added, “It doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!”
The State Department had declared Soleimani a terrorist and his Quds Force a terrorist organization.
The report Friday came a day after the Senate passed a resolution aimed at restraining Trump’s war-making powers with Iran. Eight Republicans joined all the Democrats in passing the resolution. The Democrat-controlled House is expected to pass the measure soon, sending it to the president’s desk. Trump’s advisers have said he will veto it.
The White House lawmakers in early January sent Congress a formal notification, required under the War Powers Act, of the drone strikes. Lawmakers had expected it to lay out a legal justification for the strike, but the entire document was classified, and officials who read it said it contained no information on future threats or an imminent attack.
A series of briefings delivered by top administration officials had some lawmakers complaining that they were dismissed for questioning the administration’s strategy.
Friday’s report also discussed previous acts of aggression by Iran. It cited as a legal framework the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief and the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq that Congress passed in 2002, using two justifications the administration has previously mentioned.
“Iran’s past and recent activities, coupled with intelligence at the time of the airstrike, indicated that Iran’s Quds force posed a threat to the United States in Iraq,” the report said.
Congressional Democrats have coalesced behind a new push to repeal the 2002 law, which was passed to authorize a military response to Saddam Hussein and his government.
“To suggest that 18 years later this authorization could justify killing an Iranian official stretches the law far beyond anything Congress ever intended,” Engel said.
The House last month voted to repeal the 2002 law. During negotiations on the annual defense policy bill, the White House was initially open to repealing the law, but the Pentagon intervened.