Memo justifying Soleimani strike doesn’t mention imminent threat
WASHINGTON >> The White House told Congress on Friday that President Donald Trump authorized the strike last month that killed Iran’s most important general to respond to attacks that had already taken place and deter future ones, contradicting the president’s claim that he acted in response to an imminent threat.
In a legally mandated, two-page 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.
The document confirmed what lawmakers had privately suspected as the Trump administration has offered a shifting set of justifications for the strike against Soleimani in Baghdad — taken with no congressional consultation — which brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war.
“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.”
In the days after the strike that killed Soleimani, administration officials gave a variety of rationales for the action as they confronted questions about why the president undertook such a provocative move that could incite an escalation with a dangerous rival. Trump and other top officials said the strike was conducted in response to imminent threats to American lives.