Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire

The dominoes continue to fall. Despite repeated protestations and assurances from Trump’s national security clique, the public has yet to see any sign of the much-celebrated ‘intelligence’ which the White House claims it has, and which was supposedly the basis for the double assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader, General Qasem Soleimani, and senior Iraqi PMU commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, on January 3rd.

Yesterday, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper joined the growing chorus of Trump officials muttering, I don’t know. Although due to step down at the end of this month to cash-in with a lucrative board position in the defense industry, Esper now admits that he hasn’t seen any tangible evidence which indicated that Iran was plotting and planning to strike four US embassies in the Middle East, despite the Trump’s repeated claims the attacks were “imminent.”

“The president didn’t cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said was he believed,” said Esper to CBS News flagship program, Face the Nation on Sunday. “I didn’t see one, with regard to four embassies.”

When pressed again, Esper conceded that the President didn’t actually cite any intelligence, but that “there probably could have been” some type of threat, although nothing he could cite specifically. Clearly shorthand for, there wasn’t any.

From there, things continued to get worse.

“There was intelligence that there was an intent to target the U.S. embassy in Baghdad,” he said. Here, Esper is employing a cheap sleight of hand by claiming there was intelligence which had to do with the US Embassy in Baghdad, but which is probably the same chatter from December 30th in the run-up to the US Embassy protests, likely recycled again to justify the subsequent illegal drone assassinations. Either way, the ‘threat’ was concocted by Trump’s overly enthusiastic advisors.

From there, Esper retreats to the hollowed ground of true believer.

Indeed, there is a certain degree of faith required with most things in this Administration. In this instance, he believes because the President believes, and so therefore it must be true. The empirical fiat is simply breathtaking:

“What the president said with regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well. He said that he believed that they probably, they could have been targeting the embassies in the region,” said Esper.

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The New York Times tried to sum-up the folly as follows:

They had to kill him because he was planning an “imminent” attack. But how imminent they could not say. Where they could not say. When they could not say. And really, it was more about what he had already done. Or actually it was to stop him from hitting an American embassy. Or four embassies. Or not.

Similar fabricated claims of an imminent attack were also made after the fact by recreant US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. During a recent White House press conference, reporters asked Pompeo for specifics on the mystery ‘intelligence’ that the White House claims it has. Pompeo was flanked by Trump’s vexatious Minster of Sanctions, Steve Mnuchin, proceeded to stumble though the questions, and looking more and more like a throwback to the Bush Administration. Remember those halcyon days when pathological liars were all the rage?

“There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani,” said Pompeo to Fox News. “We don’t know precisely when, and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.”

When pressed by the interviewer who asked, “Secretary Pompeo,” he was asked, “what is your definition of imminent?” Pompeo could be seen on his back heals, before unconfidently snapping back, “This was gonna happen. American lives were at risk.”

Pompeo: “there were a series of imminent attacks, we don’t know when, we don’t know where.