he assassination of Iran’s top General Qassem Soleimani by the United States was an act of war against Iran and Iraq, and an act of cold-blooded murder, American writer and political commentator Stephen Lendman has said.
Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), were killed in US airstrikes at Baghdad’s international airport on January 3.
A few days later, Iran responded to the assassination, striking the American airbase of Ain al-Assad in Anbar province in western Iraq and another in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.
Pressure is growing in the United States on President Donald Trump to declassify the legal justification for a US drone attack, which killed General Soleimani in Iraq.
For months, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), among others, has been working to unearth the national security secret and find out the legal justification for Trump’s order of the assassination of General Soleimani.
The Trump administration sent Congress a formal notification of the assassination under the War Powers Act just after it happened, but kept it classified.
Speaking to Press TV on Friday, Lendman said, “Whether the information is declassified on what justification the Trump regime used to kill General Qassem Soleimani, whether it's released or whether it stays classified in secret, in my judgment makes no difference at all.”
“Killing General Soleimani was an act of cold-blooded murder, plain and simple. And whatever declassified Trump regime information may say, it simply doesn't change that absolute indisputable fact,” he added.
“And probably, if any information is declassified it will make up all kinds of mumbo-jumbo justification. It has no justification whatsoever. I call a lot of US actions unjustifiably justifying or justifying the unjustifiable,” he continued.
“There is no justification for killing anybody even in the US, in a foreign country or whatever. The Pentagon attacked Iran, killing Iranians and Iraqis because this was an act of war. It was cold-blooded murder on the one hand. It was an act of war against Iran and Iraq by this act. And of course, Iran retaliated very strongly sending a message to the US, that if you mess with us, you know you could do us a lot of damage, but we could do you a lot of damage too,” he noted.
“The Pentagon likes to wage wars where it could roll over countries against. Well, it certainly hasn't been the case in most of the wars the US has fought. It hasn’t won a single war since World War II. Didn't win in Korea. Didn't win in Southeast Asia. Didn't win anywhere post-9/11. But the one thing it accomplished was killing many millions of people, causing vast destruction, causing unspeakable human misery on a global scale,” the analyst observed.
“It did a wonderful job achieving those things, but it hasn't won a war. The US doesn’t really wage them to win them. The US wages them just to keep fighting them because the military-industrial complex profits so hugely from American wars,” he pointed out.
“So if they fought a war and it ended then there's no more money to be made by the defense contractors and everybody else that makes money from wars in the US,” he said.
“But again, killing anybody, General Soleimani or anybody else, in any country by the US is an act of war, an act of murder, and there is no justification under international, US constitutional or US statute laws that in any way justifies this, because these acts are unjustifiable, and there's no getting around it,” he concluded.
