Donald Trump says he DID have Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad lined up for assassination
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President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he had Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad lined up for assassination but was talked out of it by his former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Trump made the admission when he called into ‘Fox & Friends,’ confirming reporting from Bob Woodward’s first book on his administration, ‘Fear,’ which was released two years ago, that Trump wanted to take out al-Assad after he used chemical weapons on his people in April 2017. Trump had denied the claim previously.
‘I would have rather taken him out. I had him all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general. And I let him go,’ Trump Tuesday.
According to Woodward’s 2018 book ‘Fear,’ the commander-in-chief called Mattis to give the order and said: ‘Let’s f***ing kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the f***ing lot of them.’
Mattis agreed to the president’s face and then had aides prepare a plan to strike al-Assad’s resources in a ‘much more measured’ way, Woodward wrote. That was what happened, with airstrikes by cruise missile against limited targets.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he did want to have Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad killed, confirming reporting in Bob Woodward’s 2018 book about the Trump administration, ‘Fear’
Trump said on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning when he called in, ‘I would have rather taken him out. I had him all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general. And I let him go’
Trump wanted to assassinate al-Assad (pictured) after he used chemical weapons on Syrians in April 2017. Trump said Tuesday he didn’t regret not taking the change, though he called al-Assad ‘certainly not a good person’
Trump denied specifically in 2018, when Woodward’s book Fear was published, that an assassination of al-Assad was ever planned.
‘No, that was never even contemplated, nor would it be contemplated,’ he said then.
Killing a world leader would have been a first for the U.S. in any form, although in March 2003, the first airstrikes on Iraq were targeted at a compound in Baghdad after a false intelligence report that Saddam Hussein was present.
It would have shattered relations with Russia, who have seen Assad as a key ally and continue to do so.
The disclosure by Trump is the latest salvo over Mattis, his first defense secretary.
Mattis spoke to Woodward for Woodward’s new book, ‘Rage,’ released Tuesday, prompting the question on Fox & Friends about the claim in his previous book about Mattis’ reaction to the order to kill Assad.
‘Rage’ contains quotes from the ex-DOD chief where he describes the president as ‘dangerous,’ ‘unfit’ and with ‘no moral compass.’
Trump said on ‘Fox & Friends’ that he fired Mattis, although the general told Woodward that he quit in December 2018 ‘when I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid.’ That ‘something’ was an order to pull U.S. troops out of Syria.
After he left the administration, he and Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence, discussed whether they should take ‘collective action’ and come out publicly against Trump.
During his Tuesday talk with ‘Fox & Friends’ hosts, Trump went off on Mattis calling him a ‘terrible general’ and a ‘bad leader.’
‘And he wasn’t doing the job with ISIS. He was not doing the job with Syria or Iraq with respect to ISIS. I got rid of ISIS after he was gone. I did a great job with ISIS, 100 per cent of the caliphate,’ Trump boasted.
The president was referring to his former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who talked to Woodward for the jouralist’s new book and said that Trump was ‘dangerous,’ ‘unfit’ and with ‘no moral compass’
The president said he didn’t regret not killing al-Assad in April 2017.
‘I would have lived either way with that,’ Trump said, noting that the Syrian dictator is ‘certainly not a good person.’
But, Trump continued, ‘Mattis was against it. Mattis was against most of that stuff.’
‘He would keep you in military, but he didn’t know how to win,’ Trump said. ‘He had no concept as to win.’
Trump’s attempted order to kill Assad was issued after a chemical gas attack – suspected of being sarin nerve agent – on the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, which led to the agonizing deaths of 86 people including at least 27 children.
Harrowing footage showed adults and children staggering through the town’s streets, foam pouring from their mouths as they fought to breathe.
When the airstrikes which Trump then ordered took place, on April 6 2017, Trump said he had acted in America’s ‘vital national security interest’ to prevent the use of chemical weapons.
He said: ‘Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children.
‘It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.
‘No child of God should ever suffer such horror.’
Speaking from his Mar-a-Lago estate, he added: ‘There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the chemical weapons convention, and ignored the urging of the UN security council.
‘Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed and failed very dramatically.
‘As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.
Smoke could be seen rising from the Homs airbase targeted by US missile strikes. The military action has already sparked a furious response from President Vladimir Putin, who this morning called the airstrikes an ‘illegal act of aggression’
‘Tonight I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types.’
Prior to the speech, Trump had entertained his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and their wives at a formal dinner,
Less than two hours after the dinner began, the US military fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Assad controlled al-Shayrat military airfield near Homs at 8.45pm eastern time – 4.45am local time – killing at least five and injuring many more.
But the military action sparked a furious response from President Vladimir Putin, who called the airstrikes an ‘illegal act of aggression’.
The strikes won broad international support from U.S. allies, with Canada, the UK and France behind the moves, and behind similar strikes in 2018, again prompted by apparent chemical weapons use.
Trump’s strike was intended to set a different tone to the actions of the Obama administration, which had set a ‘red line in the sand’ over the use of chemical weapons by Assad against his own people as civil war raged in 2012, then eventually accepted a deal offered by Putin in which Assad would surrender his chemical weapons.
It became clear later that the surrender of the weapons was only partial.
Trump used what Republicans said was the indecision and weakness to hit Hillary Clinton in a 2016 presidential debate, and his campaign tied it to the rise of ISIS – although Clinton was not in office at the time, and the link to ISIS was uncertain.
HOW HORROR SCENES PROMPTED TRUMP TO STRIKE
President Donald Trump decided to launch air strikes against the Syrian government in early April 2017 – the first time the US had taken military action against the Assad regime – after saying the Syrian leader had crossed ‘many, many lines’.
Denouncing the chemical attack as an ‘affront to humanity’, Trump said the ‘attack on children’ and ‘beautiful babies’ had changed his attitude to the Syrian government ‘very much’.
He said Assad’s ‘heinous actions’ could not be tolerated and felt he had to intervene in the interests of national security.
It was a suspected sarin nerve agent attack on the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, which led to the agonizing deaths of at least 27 children.
Harrowing footage showed adults and children staggering through the town’s streets, foam pouring from their mouths as they fought to breathe.
Trump was said to be personally disgusted by the footage of the attack and determined to strike at Assad.
Sarin gas is a chemical weapon accidentally created in 1938 by Nazi scientists worked on insecticides – and it is 26 times more deadly than cyanide.
The chemist in charge of the project initially thought he had failed, because the compound he had created was too deadly to animal and human life to use in agriculture. But that is exactly what appealed to Adolf Hitler, whose weapons division took over the project.
Hitler was so pleased with his new weapon, he named it ‘sarin’ after the scientists who discovered it – Gerhard Schrader, Otto Ambros, Gerhard Ritter, and Hans-Jürgen von der Linde.
The effect of exposure to sarin gas is instant, leading to an excruciating death. Inhaling even tiny amounts causes – in less than ten seconds – drooling and vomiting, while breathing becomes shallow and erratic. Less than a minute after exposure, the victim’s nervous system is under sustained attack, making the body unable to control breathing. Lungs secrete fluid to try to repel the gas, making victims foam at the mouth with blood-flecked discharges.
Many suffer from a medical condition known as SLUDGE, which stands for Salivation, Lacrimation (tears), Urination, Defecation, Gastrointestinal distress and Emesis (vomiting). The body loses the ability to control its functions.
Abdul was pictured cradling the bodies of his dead twins after they were killed in the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, in the rebel-held central province of Idlib, Syria
Many die within minutes of inhaling the gas. The maximum life expectancy is ten minutes after exposure. Those lucky enough to survive, due to receiving a much smaller exposure – such as from touching a contaminated person – often suffer permanent nerve and brain damage.
The use of sarin was officially banned in 1997 under the United Nations chemical weapons convention. But only a year later, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used sarin against Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1998, when his war planes dropped bombs containing the nerve agent, killing 5,000 people immediately, while some 12,000 were later reported to have died from symptoms of the attack.
Syria dropped up to 1,000kg of sarin in 2013 on a rebel-held area of Damascus, killing up to 1,400 people. US military intervention was only averted when Russia brokered a deal with Syria, under which Assad agreed to destroy all stockpiles of sarin and other chemical weapons.
But he did not destroy all stocks of sarin and this week deployed the toxic gas again this week, bringing further horror and death.
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