World Affairs Brief, January 17, 2020 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

Emphasis mostly mine

OFFICIALS DESPERATE TO JUSTIFY FALSE INTEL FED TO TRUMP

In the aftermath of the Soleimani assassination strike at the Baghdad airport last week, US officials hit all the mainstream media and television sites in an attempt to shore up the “imminent threat” narrative they used to justify the strike against Iran’s top general. Trump bragged before a rally that he had just killed the #1 terrorist in the world—#1, he kept repeating. What an idiot! And stupid supporters blindly cheered him on. Confusion reigned as it became known that Soleimani had been presented as a target to focus on months ago in a presentation by John Bolton to president Trump, which blew the “sudden threat” claim out the window. So they inflated the threat to claim that Iran not only wanted to “blow up” the huge Deep State embassy in the Green Zone of Baghdad but three other embassies as well—without naming them. Defense Secretary Esper was caught off guard with that claim and said he hadn’t seen any intel to that effect, further throwing the administration’s story into disarray. Then he later came back to reinforce the official story. Anyone watching all this would think the agencies were making things up on the fly. Naturally, they were overjoyed when Iran had to admit they shot down a Ukrainian airliner that was taking off from Tehran. In their criticism, the US government never mentions that we shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988 killing all aboard.

It has now been revealed that the US tried to kill yet another Iranian commander right after the assassination of Soleimani, but failed. Fox News reported that,

U.S. Special Operations forces unsuccessfully tried to kill another top member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force on the night Gen. Qassem Soleimani was taken out by a drone strike, a senior U.S. official has confirmed to Fox News.

The covert mission in Yemen, which was first reported Friday by The Washington Post, was directed at Abdul Reza Shahla’i, a commander and financier whom the State Department says was at the center of the botched 2011 plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil.

“We have seen the report of a January 2 airstrike in Yemen, which is long-understood as a safe space for terrorists and other adversaries to the United States,” Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told Fox News. “The Department of Defense does not discuss alleged operations in the region.”

U.S. officials that spoke to The Washington Post declined to offer details of the airstrike that failed to take out Shahla’i, but one said, “if we had killed him, we’d be bragging about it that same night.”

Such arrogance and bragging continues to build the US reputation as a bully. And it is so easy to put out claims that Abdul Reza Shahla’i was “at the center of a botched 2011 plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador to the US,” since that kind of claim can never be proven or disproven independently.

In fact, what Iran is doing in Yemen is NOT supporting terrorists, but supporting the breakaway Houthi rebels that overthrew the US-supported puppet regime in Yemen that was supporting US-backed terrorists in Syria. For this, the Houthi rebels in Yemen has been subjected to nonstop bombing by Saudi Arabia, that is killing thousands of civilians—bombs that are supplied by the US government. Who is the real terrorist here?

Last month, the State Department offered a $15 million reward for information leading to Shahla’i and the disruption of the Iran Revolutionary Guards’ financial apparatus. The U.S. has accused the military unit of financially assisting terrorist groups like Hezbollah and becoming involved in world conflicts through the use of proxy forces.

Notice how Fox News follows the neocon agenda of labeling all enemies of US backed terrorists as “terrorists” themselves. Terrorism is supposed to refer to attacks on innocent civilians, not those fighting other armed forces, who in this case happen to be US soldiers supporting terrorists created by the Deep State. Our US soldiers may not realize this, but that is what is happening.

The Trump administration had planned to kill Quds General Qassem Soleimani … a full 18 months before the drone strike that actually took him out at the Baghdad airport, and set the Muslim world on fire in indignation. The Daily Mail wrote,

The US discussed targeting Iranian General Qassem Soleimani for the past 18 months, according to a New York Times report citing officials… Surveillance of Soleimani intensified in May under then national security adviser John R Bolton following attacks on oil tankers.

Those “attacks” were false flag attacks blamed on Iran. The crew of the Japanese tanker unanimously said that the ship was attacked by sea skimming missiles, not mines. I believe the initial proposal to kill Soleimani months earlier by Bolton made it easier for Deep State advisors to get Trump to sign off on the strike on the day it happened.

Under intense scrutiny to justify Soleimani’s killing Mike Pompeo had told the world that he presented an imminent threat to US forces and embassy personnel in the Green Zone. But in the end, he had to admit there was no evidence of that. Daniel McAdams has the story:

Trump’s neoconservative Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is a man unafraid to admit to being a liar. In fact he seems to revel in his ability to lie to the American people.

Remember just a week ago when Pompeo told us that the US absolutely HAD to send in a drone to assassinate Iran’s top general, Qassim Soleimani, while he was in Iraq on a peace mission because he was planning “imminent attacks” on US personnel and interests in the Middle East.

These claims were crafted to blunt any criticism of the blatantly illegal act of killing a top military officer of a country with which you are not at war in a third country (which forbade the attack on its soil) with which you are allied. Americans raising concerns about the murder of Soleimani were to be made to look unpatriotic if they objected: “you mean you WANT Americans die??” That’s how propaganda works.

Then when the smoke clears, you laugh it all off and admit it was all a lie. As Pompeo did last night. Speaking on the Laura Ingraham program, Mike Pompeo admitted that the neocon idea of “imminent ” and the normal idea of “imminent ” are two very different things.

“We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where (the attacks might take place), but it was real,” he told Ingraham.

But if you don’t know when and don’t know where (and presumably don’t know how), on what basis did Pompeo and the Trump Administration sell the idea that he had to be killed immediately lest untold numbers of Americans be killed?

And how can we believe Pompeo that Soleimani was behind the initial rocket attacks on an Iraqi base housing US troops, that a US contractor was killed by Soleimani’s forces at that base, and that Soleimani was behind the “attacks” (vandalism) on the US embassy in Baghdad?

In other words, if the central justification for the murder of Soleimani is an admitted lie, who in his right mind would believe the official version of the antecedents to the murder?

While proudly lying day and night, Pompeo professes to be a great Christian – at the same time he pushed Trump to murder the architect of the anti-ISIS counterinsurgency (Soleimani) that saved hundreds of thousands of Syrian Christian lives.

In response to Pompeo’s weasel word, president Trump deflected the damage by saying “it doesn’t really matter” whether Qassem Soleimani was an imminent’ threat. Really? It doesn’t matter if you kill someone to start a war and it ends up it was a lie? As the Daily Mail reported,

Trump dug himself an even deeper hole:

Donald Trump tweeted Monday that it doesn’t matter whether Qassem Soleimani was planning an ‘imminent’ attack against America. The president said the Iranian general’s “horrible past” was reason enough to take him out.”

And what would Donald Trump know about this “horrible past” except what his Deep State advisors have told him? I am betting he was never told about Soleimani being the sole supplier of weapons and ammunition to the Shiite militias which defeated ISIS at Mosul and other strongholds in Iraq. Trump then repeated the claim that Soleimani was going to attack four embassies.

But even that narrative was undermined by Defense Secretary Esper when, in a moment of innocence, he denied ever seeing any intelligence on that, as the Daily Mail reported, quoting Esper:

‘The president didn’t cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said was he believed,’ Esper said in an interview on Face the Nation Sunday morning. ‘I didn’t see one, with regard to four embassies. What I’m saying is that I shared the president’s view that probably — my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassy is the most prominent display of American presence in a country.’

“Probably”? Not “imminent”? What’s left of the false narrative? Secretary Esper apparently got a private talking to after not adequately defending the official position, so yesterday he came out swinging like a true neocon. Sputnik News was justifiably shocked at the arrogance:

Secretary Mark Esper has said, ‘The United States has the legal and constitutional authority to continue attacking ‘Iranian proxies’, in Iraq or even on Iran’s home soil, in response to attacks against US troops.’

“We hold Iran responsible for its proxies, and we will retain the right to exercise self-defence and take action where legally available and appropriate to hold those proxies accountable for their actions,” the Pentagon chief said, speaking to NPR.

According to Esper, President Trump is entitled to attack Iran under Article 2 of the US Constitution, which gives the president the power to unilaterally engage in military actions in the event of an ‘attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

That is an egregious interpretation of Article 2—which only gives the Commander-in-Chief the authority to respond to an attack on the territory of the United States—as a defensive measure. Iraq is not a US possession and the presence of US troops is now unauthorized and against the will of the Iraqi government. Nowhere is there justification in any treaty or in the constitution for US forces to be there.

The president’s rights are also backed up by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the legal measure passed by Congress in 2001 following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Esper suggested. The latter document has been renewed annually for nearly two decades, and used to justify US wars and military deployments around the globe, from Afghanistan and Iraq to the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea.

Remember, as well, that this law is actually unconstitutional and is intended to bypass the provision of the constitution giving Congress the sole power to declare war. Even if it were a valid delegation of Congressional power to the president, it is based on a false pretense—that the terror threat against the US is external. It is not. Terror was created, fomented and started by a Deep State operation launched against the World Trade Center in NYC, as I have documented for years in the WAB. Now, watch Esper come out in all his full neocon colors:

Esper also again defended the Trump administration’s decision to target General Soleimani, saying the Iranian commander became a “compelling target to take out” because “there was complete agreement based on what he had done and what he was planning to do.” Soleimani, Esper claimed, had “the blood of hundreds of American soldiers and Marines on his hands.”

The latter assertion, including the claim that Iran provided Iraqi militias with arms to attack the US after the 2003 invasion, remains questionable.

Indeed, very questionable. Notice that all Esper will say is that “everyone agreed,” as if unanimous agreement among Deep State intelligence people is sufficient justification for murder.

However, there is substantive and documented evidence to suggest that Soleimani actually indirectly assisted US efforts against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda* in Afghanistan and by targeting Wahhabi terrorists in the campaigns against Daesh (ISIS)* in Iraq and Syria.

This is absolutely true. Quds is and has been fighting ISIS ever since the Deep State sent it on its rampage into Iraq, and the US did not aid the Iraqi militias who did most of the fighting against ISIS there (because the US-trained Iraqi army was largely incompetent).

On Monday, Iranian Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi announced that the Iranian government would seek to prosecute President Trump in an international court over Soleimani’s assassination.

Sadly, that will go nowhere since the international community is controlled by the globalist conspiracy. In Dubai, President Rouhani of Iran decried the continued US presence in Iraq and in the region—the real threat to regional security, as CNBC reports:

In an angry speech on state television, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani lashed out at the U.S. and Europe for its presence in the Middle East and for what he described as the latter’s failures in upholding the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal.

U.S. troops are “insecure” in the region today, and EU troops “might be in danger tomorrow,” Rouhani declared, according to a Reuters translation, marking the first time the leader has directed a threat toward European forces in the region. He demanded the U.S. leave and accused it of making the region insecure, saying it should “apologize to Tehran” for its “previous crimes.”

Rouhani also ridiculed U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suggestion Tuesday that Trump should offer a new nuclear deal, calling it “strange” as “the U.S. president has always broken promises.” [So has the US in general, except its promises to its puppet protectorate, Saudi Arabia.]

Trump has frequently offered to hold negotiations with the Iranians while continuously tightening the screws with more sanctions, the latest announced on Friday. [Which is no way to negotiated in good faith. It only angers the people against the US.] Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Wednesday said his country was “not interested” in negotiating with the Americans, while supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last year that Tehran would “never” talk to the United States. …