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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/01/03/qassim-suleimani-assassination-trump-administration-war/">https://theintercept.com/2020/01/03/qassim-suleimani-assassination-trump-administration-war/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">With Suleimani Assassination, Trump Is Doing the Bidding of Washington’s Most Vile Cabal</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Jeremy Scahill - January 4,2020</div></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>While the media</u>
focus for three years of the Trump presidency has centered around
“Russia collusion” and impeachment, the most dangerous collusion of all
was happening right out in the open — the Trump/Saudi/Israel/UAE <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/06/10/more-than-just-russia-theres-a-strong-case-for-the-trump-team-colluding-with-saudi-arabia-israel-and-the-uae/">drive to war with Iran</a>.</p>
<p>On August 3, 2016 — just three months before Donald Trump would win
the Electoral College vote and ascend to power — Blackwater founder Erik
Prince arranged a meeting at Trump Tower. For decades, Prince had been
agitating for a war with Iran and, as early as 2010, had developed a
fantastical proposal for using mercenaries to wage it.</p>
<p>At this meeting was George Nader, an American citizen who had a long
history of being a quiet emissary for the United States in the Middle
East. Nader, who had also worked for Blackwater and Prince, was a
convicted pedophile in the Czech Republic and is facing similar
allegations in the United States. Nader worked as an adviser for the
Emirati royals and has close ties to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi
crown prince.</p></div><div><p>There was also an
Israeli at the Trump Tower meeting: Joel Zamel. He was there supposedly
pitching a multimillion-dollar social media manipulation campaign to the
Trump team. Zamel’s company, Psy-Group, boasts of employing former
Israeli intelligence operatives. Nader and Zamel were joined by Donald
Trump Jr. According to the New York Times, the purpose of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/us/politics/trump-jr-saudi-uae-nader-prince-zamel.html">meeting</a>
was “primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged
relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over
the coming months, past the election and well into President Trump’s
first year in office.”</p>
<p>One major common goal ran through the agendas of all the participants
in this Trump Tower meeting: regime change in Iran. Trump campaigned on
belligerence toward Iran and trashing the Obama-led Iran nuclear deal,
and he has followed through on those threats, filling his administration
with the most vile, hawkish figures in the U.S. national security
establishment. After appointing notorious warmonger John Bolton as
national security adviser, Trump fired him last September. But despite
reports that Trump had soured on Bolton because of his interventionist
posture toward Iran, Bolton’s firing merely opened the door for the
equally belligerent Mike Pompeo to take over the administration’s Iran
policy at the State Department. Now Pompeo is the public face of the
Suleimani assassination, while for his part, the fired Bolton didn’t
want to be left out of the gruesome victory lap:</p></div><div><p>Trump, who had <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/01/03/four-years-ago-trump-had-no-clue-who-irans-suleimani-was-now-he-may-have-kicked-off-wwiii/">no idea who Qassim Suleimani was</a>
until it was explained to him live on the radio by conservative
journalist Hugh Hewitt in 2015, didn’t seem to need many details to know
that he wanted to crush the Iranian state.</p>
<p>Much as the neoconservatives came to power in 2001 after the election
of George W. Bush with the goal of regime change in Iraq, Trump in his
bumbling way assembled a team of extremists who viewed him as their best
chance of wiping the Islamic Republic of Iran off the map.</p>
<p>While Barack Obama provided crucial military and intelligence support
for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth campaign in Yemen, which killed
untold numbers of civilians, Trump escalated that mass murder in a
blatant effort to draw Iran militarily into a conflict. That was the
agenda of the gulf monarchies and Israel, and it coincided neatly with
the neoconservative dreams of overthrowing the Iranian government. As
the U.S. and Saudi Arabia intensified their military attacks in Yemen,
Iran began to insert itself more and more forcefully into Yemeni
affairs, though Tehran was careful not to be tricked into offering this
Trump/Saudi/UAE/Israel coalition a justification for wider war.</p></div><div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/01/GettyImages-1191367359-1578088697.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=681" alt="Protesters shout slogans against the United States and Israel as they hold posters with the image of top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a US airstrike in Iraq, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during a demonstration in the Kashmiri town of Magam on January 3, 2020. - Hundreds of people in Indian Kashmir staged "anti-American" demonstrations in the troubled territory on January 3 within hours of US forces killing a top Iranian commander. (Photo by Tauseef MUSTAFA / AFP) (Photo by TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP via Getty Images)"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Protesters
shout slogans against the United States and Israel as they hold posters
with the image of top Iranian commander Qassim Suleimani, who was
killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani
during a demonstration in the Kashmiri town of Magam on Jan. 3, 2020.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images</p></div></div><div><p>The
assassination of Suleimani — a popular figure in Iran who is viewed as
one of the major drivers of ISIS’s defeat in Iraq — was one of only a
handful of actions that the U.S. could have taken that would almost
certainly lead to a war with Iran. This assassination, reportedly
ordered directly by Trump, was advocated by the most dangerous and
extreme players in the U.S. foreign policy establishment with that exact
intent.</p>
<p>Assassination has been a central component of U.S. policy for many
decades, though it has been whitewashed and normalized throughout
history, most recently with Obama’s favored term, “targeted killings.”
The U.S. Congress has intentionally never legislated the issue of
assassination. Lawmakers have avoided even <a href="http://fas.org/irp/crs/RS21037.pdf">defining</a> the
word “assassination.” While every president since Gerald Ford has
upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, they
have each carried out assassinations with little to no congressional
outcry.</p></div><div><p>In
1976, following Church Committee recommendations regarding allegations
of assassination plots carried out by U.S. intelligence agencies, Ford
signed an executive order banning “political assassination.” Jimmy
Carter subsequently issued a new order strengthening the prohibition by
dropping the word “political” and extending it to include persons
“employed by or acting on behalf of the United States.” In 1981, Ronald
Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which remains in effect today. The
language seems clear enough: “No person employed by or acting on behalf
of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage
in, assassination.”</p>
<p>As I <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/08/21/trump-may-not-survive-his-term-but-the-assassination-complex-will/">wrote</a> in August 2017, reflecting on our <a href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/">Drone Papers</a>
series from two years earlier, “The Obama administration, by
institutionalizing a policy of drone-based killings of individuals
judged to pose a threat to national security — without indictment or
trial, through secret processes — bequeathed to our political
culture, and thus to Donald Trump, a policy of assassination, in direct
violation of Executive Order 12333 and, moreover, the Fifth Amendment of
the U.S. Constitution. To date, at least seven U.S. citizens are known
to have been killed under this policy, including a 16-year-old boy. Only
one American, the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, was said to have
been the ‘intended target’ of a strike.”</p>
</div><blockquote><span></span><p>There’s no justification for assassinating foreign officials, including Suleimani.</p></blockquote><div><p>While
many Democratic politicians are offering their concerns about the
consequences of Suleimani’s assassination, they are prefacing it with
remarks about how atrocious Suleimani was. Framing his assassination
that way ultimately benefits the extremist cabal of foreign policy hawks
who agitated for this very moment to arrive. There’s no justification
for assassinating foreign officials, including Suleimani. This is an
aggressive act of war, an offensive act committed by the U.S. on the
sovereign territory of a third country, Iraq. This assassination and the
potential for a war it raises are, unfortunately, consistent with more
than half a century of U.S. aggression against Iran and Iraq.</p>
<p>For three years, many Democrats have told the country that Trump is
the gravest threat to a democratic system we have faced. And yet many
leading Democrats have voted consistently to give Trump unprecedented
military budgets and surveillance powers.</p>
<p>Five months ago, California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna offered an
amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have
prohibited this very type of action, but it was removed from the final
bill. “Any member who voted for the NDAA — a blank check — can’t now
express dismay that Trump may have launched another war in the Middle
East,” Khanna <a href="https://twitter.com/RepRoKhanna/status/1212928766911143941">wrote</a>
on Twitter after Suleimani’s assassination. “My Amendment, which was
stripped, would have cut off $$ for any offensive attack against Iran
including against officials like Soleimani.”</p>
<p>Trump is responsible for whatever comes next. But time and again, the
worst foreign policy atrocities of his presidency have been enabled by
the very politicians who claim to want him removed from office.</p></div></div></div></div>
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