Trump Lied About His Planned

Trump Lied About His Planned Iran Strike In Pattern With Past

President Trump’s clumsy explanation Friday of his planned military strike against Iran rapidly collapsed. But it falls within a longer tradition of Executive Branch secrecy and deception regarding history-making United States military and intelligence developments.

Trump claimed via Twitter and then during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that he learned from military officials for the first time just 30 minutes before a planned retaliatory attack on Iran that it would cause an estimated 150 Iranian deaths.

Trump is shown in an NBC News photo with Todd at right during the June 23 interview at the White House.

Trump said that he had cancelled an Air Force attack on Iran  just before launch because the effect would be disproportionate to Iran’s downing of an unmanned drone with no casualties.

Experts, including pundits quoted by name and unnamed sources, promptly disputed Trump’s version.

Former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, told an MSNBC audience, for example, that military officials always gave her casualty estimates early during any advance briefing for her as a senator — and that military would certainly provide an even more thorough briefing to a president before a major strike. Military and intelligence experts concurred on air.

The New York Times first reported that airplanes were already in the air when Trump aborted the mission, contradicting his account. The Washington Post later reported that Trump had in fact been briefed on casualty estimates early on Thursday, unlike his claim that he raised the issue for the first time just 30 minutes before the attack and that “generals” had to research the matter and then get back to him in time for his executive decision.

Other critics roundly criticized Todd and NBC. Aaron Rupar of Vox, for example, published a June 24 column, Chuck Todd’s Trump interview, and the backlash to it, explained. Rupar wrote: “At numerous points throughout the interview, Todd let Trump get away with blatant falsehoods and gaslighting. Todd also teed up a number of softball questions for the president, like ‘Do you think you’ve been more successful in business or the presidency?’”

Similarly, the conservative but anti-Trump Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote on June 24Trump’s lies need to be exposed in real time.

The dispute over Trump’s veracity raises many issues. One involved the sudden resignation of Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan after someone leaked rumors of a long-ago domestic scandal. Shanahan and his son reportedly his then-wife.

Some commentators have claimed that replacement of Shanahan, rumored to have been less militant on Iran than Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, smacks of internal Trump Administration intrigue, especially since Shanahan’s replacement was Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, (shown at right) a West Point colleague of Pompeo’s and purported ally of the administration’s most extreme hawks.

Whatever the facts on that, one issue noted all too seldom by major media is that dissembling and secrecy have a disturbing history in such presidential decision-making on the most important matters, typically involving war, assassinations and covert backgrounds of elected office-holders.

With a few exceptions, such as the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” hoax leading to the 2003 U.S. coalition attack on Iraq, the mainstream, corporate-owned media are especially reluctant to reassess the past even, or especially, in historically important “national security” matters for several enduring reasons.

Those reasons include fear of lost access to powerful officials and fear of compromising the news’  organizations’ own mistakes and / or complicity. The latter reason should concern the public most of all:

This is that on the ultimate civic issues, particularly in matters of lying to promote “national security” or other foreign policy goals, the major media are partners in elite Western “democratic” power structures, not independent critics of it as promoted in conventional wisdom.

For example, our most recent column here, Trump Found His Roy Cohn In Deep State Fixer Bill Barr, reported how the major media and Congress alike have been extremely reluctant event to mention Attorney General William Barr’s disgraceful record as a CIA operative and Justice Department apparatchik decades ago helping cover up heinous, state-sanctioned narcotics and arms smuggling decades ago, along with associated financial crimes totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in victim losses. 

Attorney General William Barr, center, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, right, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Edward O’Callaghan of the National Security Division, are shown as Barr used pro-Trump language to dismiss the findings of the Mueller Report at Justice Department news conference on April 18, 2019.

Just in the time since that column, there are new examples of how secrecy envelopes even the most important foreign policy decisions an even when enough time has passed so that they become the focus of historical inquiry.

A vivid example occurred two weeks ago when former U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter spoke at the Atlantic Magazine’s headquarters at the Watergate about his new book, Inside the Five-Sided Box): Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon.

Carter, shown at right on the cover of his book, had spent three decades at the Pentagon before his promotion from deputy defense secretary to the cabinet position during President Obama’s second term.

During Q&A, this reporter noted that the book briefly addressed Obama’s failure to enforce his “red line” in Syria during the late summer of 2013 but failed to describe who advocated for war authorization from Congress and who advocated for an immediate strike against the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad.

Carter, now director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is writing and speaking for “history,” I mentioned in seeking more detail and no longer an administration employee.

“I’m not going to tell you that for two reasons,” Carter responded. “One, I’m not sure I know because I was deputy secretary at the time….Second, I don’t remember that kind of detail and I would never betray that kind of confidence.”

Can’t Confirm

Shortly afterward during the book-signing part of the program, I mentioned to Carter that I had published 2013 columns based on sources who said that top uniformed military had persuaded the president, despite contrary advice from top civilian advisors, to seek congressional authorization before starting a war against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government.

“I can’t confirm that,” Carter responded while signing my copy of his 463-page book, billed on the cover by endorser Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, as “required reading for every citizen who wants to know more about how our country stays secure.”

My two 2013 columns on the Justice Integrity Project site had been Did America’s Top General Save Nation From Open-Ended War in Syria? on Sept. 3 and Learn the Truth About Benghazi Before Syria Vote! on Sept. 4.

They followed a column on the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Obama’s Syrian chemical attack “proof” relies solely on Israeli intelligence on Aug. 28, 2013, by my colleague Wayne Madsen, who had arranged a meeting for us with two intelligence experts used to analyzing timely but non-classified, sensitive matters.

Madsen, himself a former Navy intelligence officer and analyst for the National Security Agency, had begun his column this way:

WMR’s sources inside the Washington Beltway report that President Obama relied solely on signals intelligence (SIGINT) provided by Israel’s version of the U.S. National Security Agency, Unit 8200, to conclude that Syria’s government ordered the August 21 chemical attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta.

Unit 8200 claimed it had intercepted a communication from a Syrian army unit operating near Ghouta on August 21. The Israelis concluded from the intercept that Syria’s army carried out the chemical attack on Ghouta, although there has been no independent confirmation from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) or the UN weapons inspection team as to who carried out the attack and even what type of chemical weapons were used.

Madsen, right, has also published many columns and a 2012 book, The Manufacturing of a President. It documents how Obama’s and his parents’ longstanding ties to the U.S. intelligence community better explained his ascendancy to the presidency and his presidential policies than a his brief and later work as a “community organizer” in Chicago during the mid-1980s. Madsen’s 2013 column on Syrian war decision-making continued:

Obama claims that his pursuit of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is intended to safeguard NSA’s most closely-guarded secrets that are used to combat terrorism. However, Obama, in his decision to accept the Israeli SIGINT as prima facie evidence of a Syrian chemical attack on civilians, has bypassed NSA’s own SIGINT product, which is flowing into the joint NSA/British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) interception facility in Cyprus, to push the notion that Syrian President Bashar al Assad carried out the attack.

NSA’s and GCHQ’s intelligence do not conclusively prove Syrian government involvement.

WMR has also learned that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, were opposed to taking military action against Syria based only on Israeli SIGINT. However, after Obama made his decision after deferring to National Security Adviser Susan Rice, UN ambassador Samantha Power, and political adviser Valerie Jarrett, both Hagel and Dempsey began plans on August 23 to carry out a unilateral military strike on Syria without the invocation of the War Powers Act or with the authorization of the UN Security Council.

Hersh Tries To Inform

Famed investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, a former New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winner who had long contributed as a featured free-lancer to The New Yorker Magazine, later published a similar source-based story in The London Review of Books, Whose sarin? on Dec 19.

Hersh, shown delivering a lecture in 2015, began:

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts.

Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.

In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order — a planning document that precedes a ground invasion — citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

The New Yorker declined to publish Hersh’s story or his follow up, The Red Line and the Rat Line on April 14, 2014. Hersh’s question, answered in nearly 5,800 words, was:

Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

The New Yorker’s banishment of Hersh for raising these types of questions severely undermined his relationship with his most important outlet and thus the ability of one of the nation’s best known and most honored investigative reporters to inform the public about national security issues. 

Other examples abound. Discerning readers can find lots of them, although they are most apparent when investigative reporters on national security issues compare recollections with one another about the ongoing tensions between reporting “the story” and maintaining employment. Job-holding often typically requires access to pro-interventionist sources, often labeled “right to protect’ advocates when Democrats like Obama and his aides and “neo-conservatives” when Republican, like Trump’s secretary of state..

I can contribute one more such example here, among the many that other reporters experience and share.

On May 18, 2015, I attended a news conference at the National Press Club featuring former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell regarding the publication of his book The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism From Al Qa’ida to ISIS. For some reason, there was only about six reporters president, not all whom asked questions, even though Morell (shown in one of my photos) had been an acting CIA director and had worked “intimately” with Presidents Bush and Obama and six CIA directors during his career.

So, it was not unreasonable for me to ask three questions at separate times during the news conference. One was why the CIA was fighting release of remaining classified documents about President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination that Congress had voted unanimously in 1992 to be released by 2017 in accordance with a careful review process.

Another question regarded the identity of those in the adjoining 2013 picture of then U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, the late Republican of Arizona, meeting with Syrian rebels in May 2013.

Some critics have claimed that one of the rebels was the future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, asserted by some to be second from the left and a photo closely resembling his 2004 mug shot at right before he became fully bearded.

A New York Times New York-based editor, Rick Gladstone, disputed the characterization, in a opinion-style column that appeared as a news article in a Global Research edition in 2014.

The New York Times article, Try as He May, John McCain Can’t Shake Falsehoods About Ties to ISIS, cited scant evidence aside from general denials from McCain’s representatives that his meetings with rebel leaders had included future ISIS leaders.

“I don’t know,” was Morell’s answer at this 2015 news conference, with slight variation, to all three of my questions. He delivered it in a not-unpleasant tone, as befits a new author promoting his book to a professional audience. But his answer and the overall circumstances invited no further discussion to any of the three questions (the third was on the Syria rebellion and similar to the question posed to Ash Carter)..

After the news conference Morell amplified to me more privately while departing, again in a friendly tone: He said that while he did run the CIA at times as deputy and acting director, “that doesn’t mean I know everything.”

Fair enough. But these are hardly trivial matters for an intelligence agency. And the larger point prompting this column is that there never seems to be a time, whether in a book, a congressional investigation or small group interviews with the media, whereby the most sensitive questions are answered.

“I don’t know” seems to be the all-purpose answer from those at or close to the answers

The Basic Problem — And Suggested Solution

Future of Freedom President Jacob Hornberger summed up an even more basic problem in his June 24 opinion column, The Solution to Trump’s Iran Mayhem. Hornberger, right, a Libertarian, law school and military academy graduate, and a publisher of books on sensitive national security topics such as the JFK assassination.

Hornberger published in 2009, for example, a five-volume set Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB), authored by Douglas P. Horne, chief analyst for military records of the congressionally mandated and presidentially supervised AARB process that had been designed by Congress to release all relevant JFK assassination records by 2017. The material is extremely sensitive, as indicated by the thousands of documents already released.

Horne, shown at left, began his Volume V, for example, by documenting his AARB research showing that JFK’s Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had helped plan the fatal parade route for JFK in Dallas that placed the open-air presidential limo at virtually a standstill stop because of a sharp left turn in front of the Texas School Book Depository.

That building, located right at the kill zone in Dealey Plaza, was owned by Johnson’s friend D. H. Byrd, who also controlled LTV, a major defense contractor during the Vietnam War and beyond.

Trump thwarted that AARB document-release process in 2017 by ordering that many records must be withheld until at least after his first term. As we reported at the time, Trump gave scant meaningful explanation of why he felt he could simply claim “national security” on a blanket basis to unilaterally overturn a 1992 law that had been passed unanimously by Congress with the stipulation that a president must give a specific rationale for any document that is withheld as an exception to the full disclosure rule.

Hornberger, who organized a 2017 conference portraying Kennedy at right, had predicted Trump’s actions, however, claiming that Trump as a deal-maker was doubtless in negotiations with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to advance his personal interests, including suppression of embarrassing material, in exchange for withholding information about the Kennedy assassination and cover up that might embarrass important (albeit deceased) U.S. employees and their still-living institutions.

Hornberger, in his column this week about Iran, continued:

The Iran mayhem goes far beyond Donald Trump. It should cause Americans to question the entire foreign policy/military paradigm under which the United States has been operating for more than a century, a paradigm based on empire, world policing, foreign interventionism, and national-security statism.

Hornberger’s JFK-related books focus on forensic medical discrepancies in Warren Commission report on the death and also on pro-war factions in the United States who hated Kennedy’s initiatives for peace late in his administration after the Bay of Pig fiasco in Cuba, the Russian Missile Crisis and the worsening Vietnam War.

The publisher continued in his June 24 column:

The problems began when the U.S. government abandoned its founding policies of a limited-government republic and non-interventionism and instead became a national-security state and embraced a foreign policy of empire and interventionism.

This is what gave the country a huge, permanent military establishment, both domestically and in foreign countries. It also gave the nation assassinations, torture, coups, regime-change operations, alliances with dictatorial regimes, installation of dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes, illegal invasions and occupations, undeclared wars, wars of aggression, terrorism, a war on terrorism, out-of-control spending and debt, and, of course, the destruction of American liberty and privacy.

We close with the words that Douglas Horne, shown at left, used to begin his five-volume JFK assassination book series, published in 1,807 pages in an oversize, 8 by 10-inch format because there was so much-material.

The words came from President Kennedy, speaking in February 1962 on the 20th anniversary of the Voice of America (VOA), a U.S. government-run broadcast network. The words are not without irony. The VOA was always anti-Communist in tone and purpose. And the Kennedy Administration had its national security and other secrets, which have been only partially exposed despite an estimated 3,500 books addressing the still-partial public knowledge about the president’s assassination.

Nonetheless, Kennedy’s words can still inspire:

We seek a free flow of information….We  are not afraid to entrust the Ameran people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosphies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and fa;sehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

In sum, the public deserves to know what really happened last week regarding Iran — but perhaps never will learn unless the current culture of silence, “I don’t know” and cover up is thwarted.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Related News Coverage

An appendix to the column above provides optional reading, including source articles. These supplementary materials can be seen by clicking here. They total more than 4,300 words, too much to include below.