Hopes of allaying concerns by Trump supporters about a familiar neoconservative betrayal of their President weren’t helped this week when ex-CIA Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted in an interview that intelligence regarding alleged plots by now deceased Iranian General, Qassem Soleimani didn’t include where, when or how the attacks might be carried out. Only that they were ‘imminent.’

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

WMD Deja vu? Paging Colin Powell. We have a winner in the annual “Yellow Cake” weapons of mass destruction neoconservative sweepstakes for sketchy pretext for ongoing war and Saudi-directed American presence in the Middle East.

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

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— Jason Sparks (@sparksjls) January 10, 2020

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that there’s “no doubt” Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was planning “a series of imminent attacks” but “we” just don’t know precisely “when” or “where.” Yeah. Maybe his dictionary is broken.

Meantime, another source inside the American intelligence community called the alleged reports of ‘imminent’ attack thin at best, noting that daily tracking information on the day Soleimani was killed by a drone strike while driving to attend a meeting in Baghdad to deescalate tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia and to formalize a tightened Iran-Iraq alliance involving new infrastructure investments by China and a ramping of Chinese purchases of crude oil from both nations in Yuan-RMB rather than in U.S. dollars.

According to one United States official, the new intelligence indicated “a normal Monday in the Middle East” — Dec. 30 — and General Soleimani’s travels amounted to “business as usual.” That official described the intelligence as thin and said that General Soleimani’s attack was not imminent because of communications the United States had between Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and General Soleimani showing that the Ayatollah had not yet approved any plans by the general for an attack.

The series of events continues to be a schism moment in the Trump movement as antiwar skeptics of Deep State, pro-Saudi policy mongers like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo grow increasingly concerned about an internal neoconservative betrayal of President Donald Trump by pro Saudi Arabian officials, while Trump loyalists have lost any tolerance for policy criticism of the administration, regardless of whether it hurts or benefits Trump’s overall political viability in 2020.