Judging Freedom - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Did the Pentagon Miscalculate This War?

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Did the Pentagon Miscalculate This War?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 19th, 2006. My dear friend, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now. Colonel Wilkerson, thank you very much. I want to talk to you about the Pentagon's miscalculations in the war. But before we get to that, how significant to a moral analysis of this war is the resignation of the government's chief counterterrorism officer, a man with a distinguished military and intelligence community background? It's a blow. There was no question about that.

I think a much more telling blow would have been a follow-up immediately, maybe even in the Congress before the committee by the DNI, who has terribly disappointed me and left me thinking I was completely wrong about her character. You're speaking of Tulsi Gabbard, of course. Before we jump to Gabbard, I'm going to play a clip of her cross-examination by Senator also, I don't know if he's a lawyer or not, but he did a superb job. But before we get there. Georgia boy.

Right, right, right, right. Joe Kent, the government now claims he did not have a security clearance. Isn't that absurd? how could he be the head of counterterrorism without a security clearance, like being a surgeon without eyesight? Judge, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff, as I understand it, for very reliable sources, have never been vetted.

They have no security clearance. They probably, neither of them could get one if they went through the process I went through. So what's new? But do you think that the director of counterterrorism did not have a security clearance that he didn't see the documents that Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe and Pete Hegseth saw? Well, I have to assume that from what he did previously, he had a security clearance

and probably a pretty tight one. Right, right. And yet he says in his letter, Iran is not an imminent threat to America. And the president was talked into this war by his friends in television. Eve and their donors and influencers in the media about as profound and direct as you can get, Colonel. True, but I am one who's been burned enough times to always look in the horse's mouth before I listen to the whinny.

And this individual has a record in the past that I would not say, brought him to my attention in a favorable way. That's as kind as I can say. And I also know that there are people right now calculating in the Trump administration that their careers, political or otherwise, are over if they don't make a move now rather than later. So I think you're going to see more people coming out and denouncing, as it were, everything from heritage to Trump himself and trying to re-associate themselves with a line of, of political thought, if you will, that's more favorable to the majority of the American people. Vance is doing that. Vance is going to do that more and more. Watch him closely. Wow. Well, he'll end up like Mike Pence totally ostracized by this.

And he knows that. He knows that. Probably knows that he made a mistake becoming the vice president. It would have been much better off as a single-minded, intellectually honest, conservative, slash libertarian Republican senator from Ohio, not subject to the whims of the White House. Yes, and as long as you're saying that, Mike Pence would have been better off in that regard, too. Yes, yes. Here is your fellow Georgian cross-examining her. Watch how reluctant she answers. She doesn't say, yes, you're right. Yes. No, yes.

And then watch how she tries to claim she is not. the head of intelligence assessing the imminence of threats. Donald Trump is wrong. She doesn't know the law. Right. Chris, she doesn't know the law. Cut number 21. Quote, Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated, end quote, correct? That's right. And is that in fact the assessment of the intelligence community? Yes. So the assessment of the intelligence community is that Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated by last summer's airstrikes? Yes. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community

that there was an imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was a, quote,

imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no? Senator, the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president? False. This is the worldwide threat searing where you present to Congress national intelligence, timely objective and independent of political considerations.

Was it the intelligence community's assessment that nevertheless, despite this obliteration, there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no? It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat. It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes. a threat to the United States. This is the worldwide threats hearing. I have my own views, but I want to hear yours, Colonel.

I suspect we agree. Well, I'll give you my seminar in a capsule. The National Security Act of 1947 was passed by Congress, overwhelmingly passed by Congress, because they didn't like at all, and this is both parties and independence, FDR's decision-making process, which was right close to his chest. He never told anybody anything.

Hell, he told six people they were going to be as vice president one time and didn't select the one to be as vice president until right before the elections. They didn't like that. So they passed a law. That law describes a statutory judge. You know what that word means. Decision-making process in which certain people are named in the law, must participate.

Only on one occasion did they amend and add to those people, and it was, as I recall, the Secretary of Energy because his job became so important with regard to nuclear weapons and such. All to say, the President must make his decisions

whether they're frivolous or not. In that statutory process, Donald Trump has not used that process a single time. So she's lying, but she's just ignorant of the law. what an opportunity she would have had, as you intimated earlier, right then and there, to read aloud her resignation letter. Yes. But she has, by trying to walk a fine line between her prior attachment to first principles and her present fear of her boss, she's alienated both sides.

She's dead. She'll never run for political office again and be successful. Right, right, right. The Trump, how profound is Joe Kent blaming the war on Israel and the domestic lobby? Well, I think that is a sound reason and a sound argument. I think the Israeli lobby, as John Mearsheimer would say, ad nauseum, is very much responsible for this. Plus, and I don't know that Israel's not. playing in this too because I still think Epstein was working with, if not for, Mossad.

Those are the two reasons Trump did this, to get the Epstein scandal off of the calendar as much as possible and to adhere to BB Netanyahu's wishes because he's getting so much money from BB's people. Wow. Here's another way the president is getting money. This is rather reprehensible, and I apologize if this is going to. aggravate you, but you need to see it. Chris, Senator Assoff and the presidential campaign flyer.

I want to call everyone's attention again to this fundraising email signed by the president that Senator Kelly mentioned earlier in which the president of the United States invites his campaign donors to, quote, claim your spot, claim your spot, join now to receive private national security briefings to his political donors featuring a photo of the president at a dignified transfer ceremony with a flag-draped coffin of an American service member killed in action returning to their family. And the American people need to know that the president of the United States is fundraising for his political campaign and his PAC using images of American service members killed in action and it's a disgrace.

I agree. Even Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't do that. Well, Colonel, have you ever heard of something like that? Not at all, but Judge, I saw a report about 48 hours ago that Kushner and Whitgoth and, of course, other members of Trump's entourage have probably amassed about $200 billion, yes, billion dollars, in deals while doing their, quote, diplomacy, unquote. Good, goodness. Right now, Brent Crude is at $130 a barrel, and the national debt last night passed $39 trillion.

George Will, I sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, says we are assassinating ourselves with debt. You're right. we probably can expect if the simulation I ran and was a part of in Beijing in 2009 as any guide, we're probably looking at $200 a barrel before this subsides. If it does subside, it may just go right off the rocket pad. You can't control these sorts of things when there are so many different variables playing in it. And you've got the Iranians masterfully jacking it up.

Every hour virtually. I don't know if you saw the pictures of the Khrom Shah 2, Mach 3, Mach 4 missile with a mirved warhead. They're not bomblets in my mind. They're like our mirved nuclear warheads. Just raining hell down on Tel Aviv. I did not see that. Colonel, what would be a private security or a private national security briefing, which according to Senator Osso, I could. read the document through the screen the president had offered well it'd have to be so anandine that is to say meaningless that i dare say only to get in his shadow would be come they wouldn't come for any information if it were otherwise he'd be violating all the strictures about classified documents and classified material that you could think of he can't do this i don't care if it's the ceo of exon mobile he doesn't have a top secret security clearance Colonel, our mutual friend, Max Blumenthal, is on right after you.

And he is going to tell us, among other things, that the IDF has now threatened the elimination of Russian leaders who wish Israel ill. Would they out of their minds? It would not surprise me. I think I mentioned to you, and it's been firmed up in my head by others in the meantime, that they're after, Erdogan too, that they have threatened to assassinate Erdogan. I had a really epiphany the other day. I'm sitting down thinking about nuclear weapons. And, you know, I was involved in nuclear weapons my whole career virtually.

I started out as a prefix five officer out of the war college or out of the command of staff college. That means you know nuclear weapons. And if I were Bebeenetianahu, And I were strictly thinking in the kind of warped ways I think he does. I wouldn't use one nuclear weapon on Iran. I'd use multiple weapons. I'd use 15 or 20. I'd fire them from my submarines from the eastern Mediterranean and the Sea of Oman,

North Arabian Sea. And I'd make sure that they went at very critical targets, as well as perhaps general population areas for trauma and shock effect. I wouldn't just use one because one would disappear in Iran. I mean, you'd see a mushroom cloud and maybe some debris and there'd be a little radioactivity, depending on whether it was an air burst or a ground burst. But it really wouldn't do much. Now, if it were like one of ours or like one of Russia's, you know, one that's a thousand

times more powerful than both bombs we used on Japan, that'd be different. But Israel doesn't have that kind of bomb. So we're looking at the prospect of not just a single nuclear weapon. I think we're looking at the prospect of this maniac using nuclear weapons as a decisive military instrument in this conflict he is losing. How did the Pentagon so miscalculate this war, Colonel Wilkerson? I think I heard a little bit of that this morning when a person sent me an email, quoting a conversation she had with the in the Pentagon about how wonderful our weapons are, how advanced they are in technological terms, all kinds of nauseating remarks. And she asked me, is this true? And I said, no, this guy's drunk

the Kool-Aid. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the Pentagon and then the armed forces in general who have drunk the Kool-Aid. And if you don't know what that means, it means they're taking your own pills. It means they're listening to the Secretary of Defense of course. the Secretary of Warren attempting to emulate him. Yes, yes, in many respects, in an immediate sense. Yes, but this has been a problem, Judge. One reason Colin Powell was happy. I ran his retirement ceremony.

I ran the whole thing. Ceremonial Hall, Bush Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, Barbara Bush, everybody. I ran the whole thing. I ran two receiving lines because the troops who came through wanted to go see Bush, not Clinton. So they moved over and I had to actually create another receiving line for Bush and his wife, Barbara. So I know how Colin felt during that time. He was glad to be leaving a military which had turned from the one that he had created, which he used in Desert Shield Desert Storm.

It was going to hell in a handbag. Wow. Why did presidents kill? Because they can. Sorry to say it, but that's the way the Greeks said it. That's the way Thucydides recorded it. And I think he was right because they can. And the more they do, either they're like Roosevelt, for example, who probably kill more than any other American president. They get very, very affected by it. I think it had something to do with his death. By that time, he was really morose. And people who knew him said that. So it, it bears. down hard on people who have a conscience and have some morals and some ethical stature. But there are other people like Donald Trump, for example, who can kill all day long and not even think twice about it. How could the president, how could the Pentagon have led the president to believe that they could bring about regime change in a weekend? But how could any rational, serious, intellectually honest, and I guess I'm making a big assumption there.

I'll jump down my throat if you want. A military leader have given him that advice. I don't think General Kane would have been the only military leader that would have interfaced with him, in my view. I mean, that's the law. It's not ironclad law, but that's what normally happens. And I'm not of a mind that Kane didn't object to some of this. He obviously was overruled, and I suspect he was overruled by Exxat,

and the president himself ultimately. Nonetheless, I think he did register some dissent. Wow. Where do you see this going, Colonel? In the disaster, deeper and deeper and deeper. And my great fear is it's not just disaster for us. It's disaster for the region. It's disaster for the bigger region, including all the way up to Ukraine.

And ultimately, it's going to be, if it continues with this economic sledgehammer over all our heads created by oil, but other things too, like urea and other fertilizer ingredients and so forth, it's going to be the world that's impacted by. Wow. Is Trump going to dislodge the regime in Cuba? He might try that in order to have a victory, but I think what he's looking at there is sort of a disaster too, because the Cubans are not going to go quietly into that night. at least some of them. Now, there are quite a few now. Used to be 11 million on that island when I was

visiting. It's down to about nine now because a lot have left of their own volition, risked their lives in the Dary and gap paying $2,500 and then another $2,500 to get out in order to evacuate the island because we've made it so miserable. But there's a fairly significant contingent there that recovered a bit during Obama's rapprochement, mostly because of remittances coming in from Florida, with which they started dry cleaners, automobile repair shops, made their restaurants, they already had private restaurants,

made them bigger and better. So there's a class system in Cuba now. And if someone were to go in there and support that class, not in a predatory capitalist way, but in order for them to create more jobs with what they're, do it and to basically ease in a little positive capitalism, it could be really a powerful country. Judge, the Cubans are the most entrepreneurial, talented, educated, 99% literary rate, and the Caribbean. They are the elite of the Caribbean, and we have treated them like they were

the dregs of the Caribbean. And we have for 60 years. I want to go back, to Iran for a minute. Here is a spokesperson for the IRCG. Now he's speaking Farsi very fast, and the translation is very fast. You're familiar with how fast they speak by our ears. But what he's saying is profound, and I need your thoughts on it. Chris? The Islamic Republic of Iran did not intend to expand the scope of the war to oil facilities and did not want to cause any harm to the economies of friendly and neighbor. neighboring countries. However, with the enemy's attack on energy infrastructure, we have effectively entered a new phase of the war, and the necessity of defending Iran's infrastructure has compelled

us to strike energy facilities connected to the United States and American stakeholders. Honorable people of Iran, your brave sons in the armed forces immediately launched offensive actions after the enemy's malicious act, and through a heavy and retaliatory operation, set fire to a number of oil facilities considered to be American interests in the region until the inflicted damage reached the level of the blow we had received. Once again, we warned the enemy that you made a grave mistake by attacking the energy infrastructure of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and our response is underway and not yet finished. The brave men of the IRGC Aerospace Force, continuing the 63rd wave, also struck the military

positions of the child-killing Zionist occupying regime in the south of the occupied territories with a multi-warhead Qadar missile, which resulted in very very much. various images of the impact. Additioned it up pretty well, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think Iran wanted to take on its neighbors. Even in that kind of veiled way, that is, they're attacking U.S. targets and I'll sorry very much if we hit you. I don't think they wanted to do that. And I don't think they really wanted to bring the world economy into serious jeopardy.

to serious jeopardy. But when you threaten that many people with the force that they had amassed over the last 25, 30 years, and the expertise in using that force that they had amassed, and you miscalculate entirely what they're capable of, which BB Netanyahu and the Mossad have, this is a colossal failure.

This failure rates right in there with George W. Bush and W.M.D. in Iraq, only it has far more disastrous results, I think. especially if it keeps on going. I don't think they wanted to do this, but now we are pushing them. Every time Trump opens his mouth, every time something else happens,

every time he says, for example, Marines are going to land on Carg Island, for example, then they ratchet down. They plan something bigger and better. And that's the way it's going to work, I'm afraid, and they're going to be at least a tie with us. I think I mentioned the other day, Horatz ran the only newspaper I read in Israel anymore because Netanyahu owns or controls the others.

But they had a headline that was right. It said to win all Iran has to do is not lose. Right. To win Israel and Donald Trump have to have a spectacular victory. You reminded me of something I forgot to ask you. What are 2,200 Marines going to do? Get killed. Get killed. They will have to conduct the assault probably with, Ospreys and other things like that because you can't as I recall when Saddam Hussein tried to attack Karg Island he tried to mount it from the sea as it were it didn't work I don't think we could either we could probably get off on

some of the terminals the platforms it's about the third of size of Manhattan it's got deep deep water beautiful water clear water and And you can load 10 super tankers simultaneously there. That's why it's so important. So only place in the Persian Gulf War, in fact, it's probably the only place on the whole coast of Iran where you can do that because the water is so deep. But that makes it extremely difficult to get to and to get on also.

So you'd fly your ospreys in and you'd hope they wouldn't shoot them down. Fond hope that. Drone, shoot them down. And you'd land the Marines from those ospreys. If all the ospreys make it, you may know, the track record of the Osprey. Then they'd put a few Marines on there and they might be able to do a little bit of damage or capture a few of the facilities or whatever.

But how are they going to sustain themselves? I mean, that's a real problem. How do you sustain yourselves once you're there? And they're hammering you probably because you know they have that zeroed in for some of their more sophisticated missiles if necessary. And I say that because they don't want to hit the terminal itself. they want to hit the Marines on the land. Wow. Colonel, thank you very much.

Great analysis, as always, my dear friend. And, of course, we'll need you over and over and over and over again, and are deeply grateful for all the time you give us. Good to be with you. Thank you, Colonel Larry. I'm going to be a woman, Mary, next week. So I'll probably miss you next week. All right.

Maybe Chris will work around your. lecture schedule, but thank you, Colonel. Surely. Take care. So coming up at 3 o'clock, if you're watching us live, that's 34 minutes from now, is Max Blumenthal. I'm going to give you a little

taste of what Max is going to be ripping apart. Here's someone who tried to rip apart Max. His current wife, multiple reports, identify her as

Heather Khazer and say that she has contributed to something called the Greystone. This is an outlet, a media outlet, founded by Max Blumenthal. Who's Max Blumenthal? What is this outlet? Blumenthal wrote for something called Al-Aqbar. That is a pro-hesbala, pro-Assad outlet. Now, he resigned in 2012 over the Syria coverage, but he's also a contributor to Russian state media, R-T and Al Jazeera, which is Qatari money. The gray zone, which he edits, has been criticized as anti-West, anti-Israel, pro-Russia, pro-Iran. Also, he was platformed at an Alexander Dugan-linked event.

If you've listened to this show, I've been talking about Alexander Dugan and how dangerous this guy is since before the turn of the century. He is very, very dangerous. This event called the Forum of the Future 2050 was in Moscow in 2025, and that's where Blumenthal spoke on the same stage with Alexander Dugan. Now I want you to know, crimes of the wife are not crimes of the husband. There's no crime with his wife, but it's a saying. I don't find any solid reporting that proves that she's an employee of Blumenthal,

you know, in the formal sense. but she did write for the site. So I don't know any deeper than that. Those connections are being argued online, but the evidence available does not support she is a Dugan puppet or a supporter of the Red Green Alliance as established fact. However, you can draw an inference from that, but that's not fact.

That said, the ideal. ideological ecosystem that he is in and his wife is in, it is curious to me that he has taken a 180 degree turn after they got together and very, very recently. Boy, well, at three o'clock, Max will be here to let Glenn have it. We will see you then. Max Blumenthal, three o'clock, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.