By Philip Giraldi
February 13, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Admittedly the news cycle in the United States
seldom runs longer than twenty-four hours, but that
should not serve as an excuse when a major story
that contradicts what the Trump Administration has
been claiming appears and suddenly dies. The public
that actually follows the news might recall a little
more than one month ago the United States
assassinated a senior Iranian official named Qassem
Soleimani. Openly killing someone in the government
of a country with which one is not at war is, to say
the least, unusual, particularly when the crime is
carried out in yet another country with which both
the perpetrator and the victim have friendly
relations. The justification provided by Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, speaking for the
administration, was that Soleimani was in Iraq
planning an “imminent” mass killing of Americans,
for which no additional evidence was provided at
that time or since.
It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in
Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister
Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the
de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi
Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House
apparently knew about may even have approved. If
that is so, events as they unfolded suggest that the
U.S. government might have encouraged Soleimani to
make his trip so he could be set up and killed.
Donald Trump later dismissed the lack of any
corroboration of the tale of “imminent threat” being
peddled by Pompeo, stating that it didn’t really
matter as Soleimani was a terrorist who deserved to
die.
