Donald Trump Murdered Qassim Suleimani
By James Risen, The Intercept
10 January 20
Donald Trump has dragged America into a moral abyss. And yet Congress, the
press, and the public are unwilling to admit that we are now standing in
blood. The nation is enabling a murderous demagogue, and we are all
complicit.
The president of the United States has murdered a high-ranking official of a
foreign government. The assassination last week of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim
Suleimani was a state-sponsored murder.
But no one in the Washington establishment seems prepared to come out and
say the hard truth: Donald Trump is a murderer.
This criminal moment has been a long time coming.
The United States has an assassination ban. The ban was put in place
following disclosures by the Church Committee in the 1970s, which revealed
that the CIA had secretly attempted to kill a series of foreign leaders,
most notably Cuba's Fidel Castro.
At the time of the Senate committee's investigation, no one in the American
government or media publicly defended assassination as a tool of a modern
nation-state. It was simply not the accepted practice of a democracy that
wanted to serve as a role model for the world.
But the reform-minded 1970s now seem quaint in a nation whose greatest
military innovation in the 21st century has been the targeted killing of
individuals by remote control.
For the last two decades, both Republican and Democratic presidents have
worked quietly to skirt the assassination ban in order to take advantage of
new aviation, missile guidance, and surveillance technologies to find and
kill individuals all over the world. To launch targeted killings without
violating the assassination ban, presidents have counted on compliant
government lawyers to issue secret legal opinions that rubber-stamped their
actions.
The Clinton administration started this process in 1998, in the wake of the
bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa by Al Qaeda. In response, the
White House decided to launch cruise missile strikes against what they
claimed were terrorist training camps near Khost, Afghanistan. The primary
target was Osama bin Laden.
At the time, I was covering national security and intelligence for the New
York Times. I asked White House officials whether the action had violated
the assassination ban. They responded that it had not because the target was
the "command and control infrastructure" of Al Qaeda. When I asked them what
they meant by "command and control infrastructure," they reluctantly
admitted that the "command and control infrastructure" of Al Qaeda was its
leadership, meaning bin Laden. I realized that the Clinton administration's
lawyers had prepared a euphemism-laden opinion to provide legal cover for
Bill Clinton and his advisers. That was the beginning of what has become a
very long pattern.
After 9/11, political concerns about the assassination ban went by the
boards because there was such overwhelming public support for the new,
so-called global war on terror. But the government's lawyers still worried
about the assassination ban and other rules and regulations governing the
use of state-sponsored violence.
That's why the congressional legislation known as the Authorization for Use
of Military Force has been so important to government lawyers. The AUMF,
passed by Congress just days after 9/11, has provided the basic legal
authorization for counterterrorism strikes ever since.
Armed with the AUMF and other legal backstops, the Bush and Obama
administrations began to kill at will. The killing has never stopped. It has
been a vicious campaign that has claimed countless innocent lives,
destabilized nations, and been almost entirely counterproductive. It has
made Americans numb to endless war.
But the United States gained public and legal support for targeted killings
only for what it described as the asymmetric fight against terrorism. It
targeted suspected terrorists: "non-state actors."
That is where Trump has now crossed a clear line. He conducted a drone
strike to murder the official who served as Iran's viceroy in Iraq. Qassim
Suleimani was most definitely not a "non-state actor."
Suleimani was the head of the Quds Force, the elite external operations arm
of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which operated with impunity
throughout Iraq under his leadership. He ran Iran's ground campaign against
ISIS in Iraq, in parallel to the American air campaign, and employed Shia
militias and their ruthless tactics to defeat the cult-like group. The
United States has been happy to take credit for the victory over ISIS in
Iraq, without admitting that it relied heavily upon Suleimani's horrific
paramilitary actions and his strategic acumen.
But he was much more than a special forces commander or spymaster; he was
Iran's most important envoy, and he served as Tehran's intimidating
political fixer throughout the Middle East.
He dominated the political landscape in Baghdad. In November, The Intercept
and the New York Times reported on leaked Iranian intelligence cables that
publicly documented Iran's deep influence in Iraq from Iran's perspective
for the first time. What jumped off the pages in the leaked cables was
Suleimani's personal political power in Iraq and his hold on many of Iraq's
top political, military, and security officials.
Last October, Suleimani intervened at the highest levels of Iraqi politics
to keep Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi in office amid massive
protests and calls for his resignation. American officials serving in Iraq
always thought they heard Suleimani's footsteps.
In April 2019, the Trump administration designated the Revolutionary Guards,
and Suleimani's Quds Force, terrorist organizations. It was the first time
the United States had ever designated a unit of another government a
terrorist group.
At the time, the long-debated action was broadly portrayed as just another
step in Trump's reckless campaign to ratchet up economic sanctions on Iran
and Iranian leaders. But I believe that the terrorist designation was
Suleimani's death warrant. I would not be surprised if the drone strike
against Suleimani was supported by a secret legal opinion claiming that
since he was the leader of a designated terrorist organization, he was a
legitimate target in the war on terror under the AUMF and other
counterterrorism legal guidelines. I'm sure that the lawyers at the National
Security Council, the White House, and the Justice Department are sleeping
well, knowing that they found a quick legal fix to allow Donald Trump to
murder a foreign government official.
If we had a real Congress, there would be a congressional investigation into
whatever lame, paper-thin legal rationalizations have been written by
government lawyers to back up this murder. Instead, we are left with the
nagging realization that Trump has just found a new loophole to circumvent
the assassination ban.
But such actions prompt responses. Iran's parliament has passed a bill
designating all U.S. military forces terrorists.
The threat of retaliation has always been one of the most potent arguments
against the use of assassination as a national security tool: It can prompt
other countries to target Americans for assassination. And if international
strictures against assassination are eliminated, we will be one step closer
to the abandonment of the laws of war.
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