President Trump’s claim Gen. Qassem Soleimani was going to attack four embassies was immediately suspect, both because of the absence of evidence offered with it, and its odd specificity. It sounded made up. It was.



Trump’s accusation is rapidly falling apart, with Defense Secretary Mark Esper conceding that there simply was no evidence behind Trump’s claim. Even Trump admitted it was just his belief, and it seems it wasn’t backed by anything other than a wild hunch from the president which everyone else in the administration had to pretend was gospel truth.



On top of that, allegations that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” at all don’t seem well founded, as evidenced by the president having signed off on killing Soleimani seven months ago, just whenever the military might get around to it.



So with all those lies behind us, President Trump now is taking the position that “it doesn’t really matter” if the four embassy thing was made up, or that the “imminent threat” claim was untrue.



Trump now says that Soleimani deserved to die whether or not anything he said about him was true, because of his “horrible past.” Soleimani’s history as a top military leader for a country the US doesn’t get along with would in essence cover this.



And yet despite Trump’s claims, US law has made clear that political assassinations are illegal. Claims of “imminent threats” are so common by the military specifically because it offers them some vague legal pretext to circumvent the law against assassination for policy’s sake. Having lost that, Trump’s claim that it “doesn’t matter” seems to fly in the face of American legal standards.





Author: Jason Ditz Jason Ditz is news editor of Antiwar.com. View all posts by Jason Ditz