“The basic theme of it was the administration essentially saying, ‘Trust us,'“ said House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.). „I’m not sure who I trust or what I trust when it comes to these issues because we’ve been told so many different things that just bother me.”
Even some Republicans were unimpressed.
Utah’s Mike Lee called the briefing „the worst“ he’d seen on a military issue in his 9-year Senate tenure and complained that „one of the messages we received from the briefers was, ‘Do not debate, do not discuss, the appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran.'“
The criticism comes amid renewed scrutiny of the intelligence community following Soleimani’s killing, only with the pattern of the last few years reversed: Democrats have heaped skepticism on the administration’s claims of an “imminent threat” that justified taking him out, while top officials have called on Americans to trust the spooks they once scorned as a “deep state” bent on ousting the president.
But the Trump administration has so far refused to disclose the exact nature of the threat, and has offered multiple different rationales for striking Soleimani. It has also struggled to explain why killing the Iranian general would prevent future attacks by others.
Lawmakers said on Wednesday that that’s because there wasn’t a specific attack in the works—rather, the intelligence showed that Soleimani had broadly been pushing for a more aggressive posture toward the United States and creating conditions that might ultimately endanger Americans in the region.
“I’m persuaded that he may have been advocating for stepping up confrontation with the United States, but not that there was an attack approved by the Iranian leadership that could only have been prevented in this way,” said one lawmaker who requested anonymity to discuss the briefing. “Nor am I convinced that killing Soleimani prevents the IRGC from future covert actions against us.”
Most Republicans disagreed, and emerged from the briefing expressing confidence that the strike on Soleimani was justified and necessary.
CIA Director Gina Haspel „gave the greatest breadth of information that was not only compelling but certainly exhaustive in terms of the number of attacks and planned attacks that have been contemplated and why the need for action was necessitated,” said North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a close ally of the president who is retiring for an unspecified role helping Trump.
“I was persuaded that we had strong intelligence that meant we had to take action,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.
Intelligence experts noted that it’s obviously not unusual for intelligence to be interpreted differently.
“Like all intelligence, it appears to be nebulous,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who served 26 years in the CIA before retiring from the agency’s Senior Intelligence Service in June.
But Polymeropoulos, who stressed that he does not have access to current intelligence, noted that “Soleimani was always plotting against the U.S., but he wasn’t a cell leader. So the ‘imminence’ piece of this doesn’t make much sense if you wanted to thwart the actual attack.”
Democrats have pointed to officials’ shifting explanations for Soleimani’s killing—from the Pentagon’s initial statement that he was “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region” to the broader definition of imminence pushed more recently by Pompeo.
“We know what happened at the end of last year in December, ultimately leading to the death of an American,” Pompeo said in a news conference on Tuesday. “So, if you are looking for imminence, look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani.”
And they’ve noted news reports suggesting that the president decided to strike Soleimani after stewing over news coverage of protests at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, which he referred to on Twitter as “the anti-Benghazi!”
Rep. Anthony Brown (D-Md.) said after emerging from Wednesday’s closed-door briefing—which included Haspel, Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper—that it appeared to him “that the actions that were taken was much more a response to the past conduct of General Soleimani … I didn’t hear anything about alternatives to neutralize or address the threat.”
„I know what I heard in there,“ added House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). „And I’m not convinced based on what I heard that the measure taken matched the threat.“
Engel, the House Foreign Affairs chairman, has scheduled a hearing on the administration’s Iran policy for next Tuesday and invited Pompeo to testify. He said hearings would go forward with or without Pompeo, but didn’t rule out issuing a subpoena for him to testify.
„It’s a possibility,“ Engel said. „We haven’t made any decision on that.“
On one line of criticism that Democrats have raised in the wake of Soleimani’s death— that the administration didn’t carefully weigh the possible fallout—the briefers offered some reassurance: The intelligence community did provide the White House with an assessment of the potential consequences of launching the strike, according to a person familiar with the matter.
That’s typical in advance of operations like this, experts said.
“The IC does provide what one could describe as an analysis of consequences in some of its pieces, particularly when requested by the policy community,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a 32-year intelligence veteran who now serves as the director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University.
Pfeiffer pointed to his experience working for former CIA Director Hayden, who asked analysts for an assessment of the consequences of four different policies in Iraq as the situation there began to unravel in 2006.
“The analysis of the options was discussed vigorously through the interagency process for months, culminating in what would have to be described as a well-informed decision by the president,” Pfeiffer said.
But that kind of careful, deliberate process might not have been possible in the compressed timeframe in question with Soleimani: By most accounts, the president decided to kill the Iranian general just days before it happened.
Source: politico.com
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