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The former defense official stated that she was forced to minimize the damage to 100 US troops caused by Iranian missile attacks in 2020.
A former Pentagon spokeswoman said that the White House under the leadership of former President Donald Trump put pressure on the military to downplay the injuries suffered by 110 U.S. troops following the shooting. Iranian missile attacks in 2020 A base in Iraq.
In a speech on the One Decision podcast, Alyssa Farah said that the White House has applied pressure to downplay the success of the attack on Iraq’s Ain al-Asad base in retaliation. American killing On January 3, Iran’s Supreme Commander Qassem Soleimani was attacked by a drone at Baghdad Airport.
Although Farah stated that Trump initially claimed that the U.S. military was not injured in the attack, “it was correct when we provided these facts to the President”, but she pointed out that as more casualties were exposed, the White House was under increasing pressure. Big.
Trump initially regarded these injuries as “headaches,” and the Pentagon later described them as mild traumatic brain injuries. Although most of the wounded were cleared after a few days, a few had to fly out of Iraq for treatment.
She said: “Not enough attention is paid to the damage that may occur over time, or even just the importance of the attack.”
Farah said: “The White House tried hard to say-the Iranians did not succeed in harming our target in response.” “And I think it’s too much.
“And I think it eventually covered up the serious injuries suffered by the U.S. military afterwards,” Farah said. “One hundred and ten American soldiers have suffered traumatic brain injuries… from concussions to things where you might lose motor skills (out there).”
The former official said that the White House also pressured the Pentagon to separate its reports on the number of injured, and the number of injured gradually increased from January to February.
She said that the Pentagon’s policy is to release the information as soon as it is received and verified.
“We did get objection from the White House,’Can you report this in a different way? Can it be every 10 days or every two weeks, or do we sum it up after the fact?'” Farah said. “If we update from time to time, the White House will be more willing. Therefore, this kind of Didi, Didi’s quotation, not quoting bad news, will certainly help critics of the strike to realize that this is a mistake, and these are its effects.
“My feeling is that if my experience has taught me anything, transparency will always be your best friend in the field,” she said. “I would rather deal with the bad news than hide your bad news from us.”
Farah, who continues to work in the White House under Trump’s leadership, also defended the overall decision to strike Soleimani, saying that she was “satisfied with the legal grounds, based on our very credible reason to believe that the knowledge plan for an impending strike and The upcoming target is the U.S. military and our alliance partners.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions Agnes Callamard considered strikes to be “illegal killings,” and this legal reason has been seriously questioned.
Bipartisan members of parliament Postpone The Trump administration asserted that Soleimani was planning an “imminent” attack, saying that the classified intelligence briefings they received did not indicate that a specific attack was being planned.
Trump administration officials themselves sometimes had conflicting descriptions of the imminent attack, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo eventually referred to the attack as part of a larger “deterrence” strategy.
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