Mike Pence crams 3 inaccuracies about 9/11 into 1 tweet while trying to justify Soleimani strike

Vice President Mike Pence may want to check a middle-school history textbook for this one.

The U.S. carried out an airstrike Friday morning that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force and one of the country's top leaders. After President Trump gave his first remarks acknowledging the strike, Pence tweeted out a thread outlining Soleimani's "worst atrocities," including one that wasn't exactly accurate.

Pence's most questionable tweet outlined Soleimani's alleged role in the 9/11 attacks. Soleimani, Pence said, "assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

The most obviously incorrect bit of information here is the number of hijackers: There were 19, and "8-10" of them "traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001," per the 9/11 commission report. And while the report does conclude "there is strong evidence Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11," Charlotte Clymer of the Human Rights Campaign says Soleimani probably wouldn't have been involved in that.

A New Yorker article from 2013 also points out that the U.S. actually worked with Soleimani "to help the United States destroy their mutual enemy, the Taliban." That lasted until former President George W. Bush declared Iran part of his "Axis of Evil" in the Middle East.