Iranian General Soleimani Was on a Peace Mission with Saudi Arabia When He Was Killed by US Military on Orders from the White House
January 8, 2020 in News, Video by RBN Staff
Source: Need To Know | Ron Paul and the GrayZone
Ron Paul says it is highly unlikely that Iran was planning an attack on the US before this assassination, because the country literally is surrounded by US military bases. Trump followed the urging of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Marco Rubio, and Mike Pence when he made the decision to kill the Iranian general. Vice President Pence claimed that Soleimani was responsible for 9/11, and no one mentioned the absurdity of such a statement. When Trump ordered the assassination of General Soleimani, he said he was protecting the US from “imminent attacks” on US facilities and personnel. However, it is now known that Trump was told by Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi that the Iranian general was on his way to Iraq seeking peaceful relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Since the assassination, Iraq’s parliament has voted to expel all US troops from the country, Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has sworn to exact a “severe revenge” on Soleimani’s killers, and Trump has threatened to target Iranian ‘cultural’ sites, which are religious institutions. [This is not going to end well for anyone, including Americans.] -GEG
Desperate to justify the US drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that Washington had made an “intelligence-based assessment” that Soleimani was “actively planning in the region” to attack American interests before he was killed.
President Donald Trump justified his fateful decision to kill the Iranian general in even more explicit language, declaring that Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on US diplomatic facilities and personnel across the Middle East.
“We took action last night to stop a war,” Trump claimed. “We did not take action to start a war.”
Trump’s dubious rationale for an indisputably criminal assassination has been repeated widely across corporate media networks, and often without any skepticism or debate.
At a January 3 State Department briefing, where reporters finally got the chance to demand evidence for the claim of an “imminent” threat, one US official erupted in anger.
“Jesus, do we have to explain why we do these things?” he barked at the press.
Two days later, when Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi addressed his country’s parliament, Trump’s justification for killing Soleimani was exposed as a cynical lie.
According to Abdul-Mahdi, he had planned to meet Soleimani on the morning the general was killed to discuss a diplomatic rapproachment that Iraq was brokering between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Abdul-Mahdi said that Trump personally thanked him for the efforts, even as he was planning the hit on Soleimani – thus creating the impression that the Iranian general was safe to travel to Baghdad.