Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said a vote by Iraq’s parliament on Sunday to expel U.S. troops shows that the killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike is already resulting in “consequences to U.S. security in the region.”
Murphy said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations did not kill Soleimani, despite knowing he was the mastermind behind attacks on U.S. troops, because “they believed ultimately that would get more Americans killed, and you can already see the consequence to us security in the region.”
{mosads}Discussing the purported intelligence President Trump has said showed an imminent attack being planned by Soleimani, Murphy said “it’s incumbent upon the administration to present that information to Congress and even if there was an imminent attack—the responsibility is on the admin to prove to us that by taking out the second-most-powerful political figure inside Iran they are preventing more attacks rather than inspiring additional attacks.”
Asked about whether the White House consulted with congressional leaders ahead of the strike, Murphy said “my understanding is there was no consultation with Congress before this strike [and] that is a violation of the War Powers Act.”
He also said he was hopeful Congress would be briefed on the intelligence, as well as “why it was all of a sudden necessary to take this dramatic escalatory step.”
“We do not generally execute high-level political figures of sovereign nations, in part because we know that that opens a Pandora’s box that may expose American officials to assassination, but also because we know that ultimately that may get more Americans killed, as it likely will,” he added.
CBS’s Margaret Brennan also asked Murphy about his earlier description of the killing as an “assassination.”
Murphy responded by describing Soleimani as “evil,” adding that “I don’t know any other way to describe it… this was the intentional execution of a high-level official in a sovereign nation.”