Kevin Barrett interviewed by Press TV
US President Donald Trump was ordered by his Israeli masters to authorize the American military to assassinate Iran’s top General Qasem Soleimani, says political analyst Kevin Barrett.
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.
Speaking to Press TV on Thursday, Barrett said, “The Democrats in Congress are demanding that the Trump administration release its justification, its fake justification if they even have one for the murder of General Qasem Soleimani.”
“Trump lied and claimed that there was information that General Soleimani was planning to kill Americans, but there has been actually no evidence presented for this,” he said.
But “the real reason for killing General Soleimani was presumably because Trump was ordered to do that by his Israeli masters,” he opined.
Trump was put in office by Israel, he said, adding “there are all sorts of evidence that in the summer of 2016, Israel contacted the Trump campaign and said ‘you’re going to lose, unless we step in’.”
He went on to say that “Trump and (Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo and others should be going on trial for this murder.”
For months, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), among others, has been working to find out the legal justification for Trump’s order of the assassination.
The Trump administration sent Congress a formal notification of the assassination under the War Powers Act just after it happened, but kept it classified.
Murphy appealed to an agency called the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which is tasked with reviewing declassification requests.
“We’ve seen the Trump administration repeatedly classify information just because it is politically damaging to President Trump, and it’s up to Congress to stop it,” Murphy said in a statement.
“The American people deserve to know why the Trump administration chose to kill Qassem Soleimani back in January, since this event had far-reaching consequences for US security. By hiding the legal rationale for this action, there can be no meaningful public debate about the wisdom of the strike.”