this will be the reason he hadn't 'consulted congress' of course:

1 hour ago:

"President Trump accused Iranian general Qassem Soleimani of planning “imminent and sinister attacks” Friday in his first televised remarks since the deadly airstrike that killed the general at Baghdad's international airport.

We took action last night to stop a war,” Trump said during brief remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “We did not take action to start a war.”

Without divulging details about what led to the early morning airstrike that killed Soleimani and nine others, the president said the United States "caught" the general "in the act and terminated him.”

“Soleimani made the death of innocent people his sick passion,” Trump added, saying that "what the U.S. did yesterday should have been done long ago."
........................
Senior State Department officials described the killing as a defensive strike supported by solid intelligence and claimed Soleimani was planning imminent attacks against United States interests and personnel in the region.

The officials said the attacks were being planned in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and targeted U.S. diplomats, military personnel and facilities that house Americans. They claimed hundreds of Americans could have been killed.

The officials disputed the characterization of Soleimani's death as an assassination – which is against U.S. law – instead describing it as an action taken in self-defense.
..................
"Everyone in his little foreign legion is now scurrying for cover," said one official who noted that Soleimani and the late Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden are the only two terror leaders who have tried to formulate detailed plans for a mass casualty attack on U.S. soil.

overnight news and claims. ye gods and little fishes, i'll try to reconstruct it.

i'll start backward, as this tab's still up:

Big media are all repeating the Trump-Pompeo justification that #Soleimani was responsible for killing 600 American boys in Iraq. But as I've documented in great detail, that was a completely fabricated story Cheney was using to justify an attack on Iran. https://t.co/pOi06xe2Ou

— Gareth Porter (@GarethPorter) January 3, 2020

The first round of talks btw @JZarif and the Qatari FM was held in Tehran. The second round is to be held behind closed doors.
There are reports that the Qatari FM is here to explain about possible use of US base in Qatar for operation against #Soleimani pic.twitter.com/DuzcEJBaGr

— Reza Khaasteh (@Khaaasteh) January 4, 2020

Pentagon confirms tonight’s strike in #Iraq targeting leader of Imam Ali Brigades, pro #Iran militia

Iraqi Militia Leader May be Among Six Killed in Another U.S. Drone Strike in Baghdad https://t.co/37Yl6nOjNc

— Firas Maksad (@FirasMaksad) January 4, 2020

he'd also reported additional strikes, calling them 'open season'.

@ejmalrai 2h2 hours ago

#BreakingNews:
"#US asked #Iran, according to sources in #Tehran, to limit its response to the assassination of Brigadier General #QassemSoleimani to a "similar response".

This means when confirmed, @realDonaldTrump is offering to Iran the life of a US four-star general."
(whooosh-worthy; might they mean 'avenged'?

Following the #US assassination of #Qassem_Soleimani "The red flag was raised over Jamkaran mosque in #Qom #Iran & it won't be taken down until revenge against the US is fulfilled" via @Sara_Haj. pic.twitter.com/qoxOLmQIVG

— Elijah J. Magnier (@ejmalrai) January 4, 2020

Iraqi Sources Reveal Weapon Used To Kill General Soleimani https://t.co/RFBFNmbsec

— SouthFront (@southfronteng) January 4, 2020

(delivered by reaper drones, not helicopters)

and this barn-burning denouncement of lying Trump from bill van auken today 'The murder of Qassem Soleimani and assassination as state policy, 4 January 2020

if i can find the time, i'll try to paste in the excerpts i'd included earlier.

on edit: i'll actually include more passages than i had earlier:

Washington’s cold-blooded murder of a general in the Iranian army and a man widely described as the second most powerful figure in Tehran is unquestionably both a war crime and a direct act of war against Iran.

It may take some time before Iran responds to the killing. There is no question that Tehran will, in fact, react, especially in the face of public outrage over the murder of a figure who had a mass following.

But Iran will no doubt devote far more consideration to its response than Washington gave to its criminal action. The country’s National Security Council met on Friday, and in all probability Iranian officials will discuss the murder of Soleimani with Moscow, Beijing and, more likely than not, Europe. US officials and the corporate media seem almost to desire immediate retaliation for their own purposes, but the Iranians have many options.
.........................................
This crime, driven by increasing US desperation over its position in the Middle East and the mounting internal crisis within the Trump administration, is staggering in its degree of recklessness and lawlessness. The resort by the United States to such a heinous act testifies to the fact that it has failed to achieve any of the strategic objectives that led to the invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

The murder of Soleimani is the culmination of a protracted process of the criminalization of American foreign policy. “Targeted killings,” a term introduced into the lexicon of world imperialist politics by Israel, have been employed by US imperialism against alleged terrorists in countries stretching from South Asia to the Middle East and Africa over the course of nearly two decades. It is unprecedented, however, for the president of the United States to order and then publicly claim responsibility for the killing of a senior government official who was legally and openly visiting a third country.

Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, was not an Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. On the contrary, he played a pivotal role in defeating the forces of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which those two figures, both assassinated by US special operations death squads, had led.

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Tehran and cities across Iran on Friday in mourning and protest over the slaying of Soleimani, who was seen as an icon of Iranian nationalism and resistance to US imperialism’s decades-long attacks on the country.” [large snip]
“Who does the US president think he is fooling with his Mafia rhetoric? The last 20 years have seen the Middle East devastated by a series of US imperialist interventions. The illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq, based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” claimed the lives of over a million people, while decimating what had been the among the most advanced societies in the Arab world. Together with Washington’s eighteen-year-long war in Afghanistan and the regime-change wars launched in Libya and Syria, US imperialism has unleashed a regionwide crisis that has killed millions and forced tens of millions to flee their homes.

Soleimani, whom Trump accused of having “made the death of innocent people his sick passion”—an apt self-description—rose to the leadership of the Iranian military during the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, which claimed the lives of some one million Iranians.

He became known to the US military, intelligence and diplomatic apparatus in 2001, when Tehran provided intelligence to Washington to assist its invasion of Afghanistan. Over the course of the US war in Iraq, American officials conducted back-channel negotiations with Soleimani even as his Quds Force was providing aid to Shia militias resisting the American occupation. He played a central role in picking the Iraqi Shia politicians who led the regimes installed under the US occupation.

Soleimani went on to play a leading role in organizing the defeat of the Al Qaeda-linked militias that were unleashed against the government of Bashar al-Assad in the CIA-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria, and subsequently in rallying Shia militias to defeat Al Qaeda’s offspring, ISIS, after it had overrun roughly one-third of Iraq, routing US-trained security forces.

To describe such a figure as a “terrorist” only means that any state official or military commander anywhere in the world who cuts across the interests of Washington and US banks and corporations can be labeled as such and targeted for murder. The attack at the Baghdad airport signals that the rules of engagement have changed. All “red lines” have been crossed. In the future, the target could be a general or even president in Russia, China or, indeed, any of the capitals of Washington’s erstwhile allies.
After this publicly celebrated assassination—openly claimed by a US president without even a pretense of deniability—is there any head of state or prominent military figure in the world who can meet with US officials without having in the back of his mind that if things do not go well, he too might be murdered?

The killing of General Soleimani in Baghdad was compared by Die Zeit, one of Germany’s newspapers of record, to the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. As in the prior case, it stated, “the whole world is holding its breath and anxiously waiting for what may come.”

jan. 5, 2020:

‘Fragmentation in the Axis of Resistance led to Soleimani’s death’

The US struck Iran at the heart of its pride by killing Major General Soleimani. But the “axis of the Resistance” killed him before that. This is how:
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assassinated the deputy head of the Military Council (the highest authority in the Lebanese Hezbollah, which is headed by its Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah), Hajj Imad Mughniyah in Damascus, Syria, Hezbollah could not avenge him until today.
When Trump gave Netanyahu Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel”, the “Axis of the Resistance” did not move except by holding television symposia and conferences verbally rejecting the decision.

When President Trump offered the occupied Syrian Golan Heights to Israel and the “Axis of Resistance” did not react, the US President Donald Trump and his team understood that they were opposed by no effective deterrent. The inaction of the Resistance axis emboldened Trump to do what he wants.

And when Israel bombed hundreds of Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria, the “Axis of the Resistance” justified its lack of retaliation by the typical sentence: “We do not want to be dragged along by the timing of the engagement imposed by the enemy,” as a senior official in this axis told me.

In Iraq shortly before his death, Major General Soleimani was complaining about the weakening of the Iraqi ranks within this “Axis of the Resistance”, represented by the Al-Bina’ (Construction) Alliance and other groups close to this alliance like Al-Hikma of Ammar al-Hakim and Haidar al-Abadi, formerly close to Iran, that have gone over to the US side.

In Iraq, Major General Soleimani was very patient and never lost his temper. He was trying to reconcile the Iraqis, both his allies and those who had chosen the US camp and disagreed with him. He used to hug those who shouted at him to lower tensions and continue dialogue to avoid spoiling the meeting. Anyone who raised his voice during discussions soon found that it was Soleimani who calmed everyone down.

Hajj Qassem Soleimani was unable to reach a consensus on the new Prime Minister’s name among those he deemed to be allies in the same coalition. He asked Iraqi leaders to select the names and went through all of these asking questions about the acceptability of these names to the political groups, to the Marjaiya, to protestors in the street and whether the suggested names were not provocative or challenging to the US. Notwithstanding the animosity between Iran and the US, Soleimani encouraged the selection of a personality that would not be boycotted by the US. Soleimani believed the US capable of damaging Iraq and understood the importance of maintaining a good relationship with the US for the stability of the country.

Soleimani was shocked by the dissension among Iraqi Shia and believed that the “axis of resistance” needed a new vision as it was faltering. In the final hours before his death, Major General Soleimani was ruminating on the profound antagonisms between Iraqis of the same camp.

When the Iraqi street began to move against the government, the line rejecting American hegemony was fragmented because it was part of the authority that ruled and governed Iraq. To make matters worse, Sayyed Muqtada al-Sadr directed his arrows against his partners in government, as though the street demonstrations did not target him, the politician controlling the largest number of Iraqi deputies, ministers and state officials, who had participated in the government for more than ten years.

Major General Soleimani admonished Moqtada Al-Sadr for his stances, which contributed to undermining the Iraqi ranks because the Sadrist leader did not offer an alternative solution or practical project other than the chaos. Moqtada has his own men, the feared Saraya al-Salam, present in the street.”

[large snip]

Iran invested 40 years building the “Axis of the Resistance”. It cannot remain idle, faced with the assassination of the Leader of this axis. Would a suitable price be the US exit from Iraq and condemnation in the Security Council? Would that, together with withdrawal from the nuclear deal, be enough for Iran to avenge its General? Will the ensuing battle be confined to the Iraqi stage? Will it be used for the victory of certain Iraqi political players?

The assassination of its leader represents the supreme test for the Axis of Resistance. All sides, friend and foe, are awaiting its response."

the lengthy rest, again, is here, including more photos.