Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: Did Israel Plan to Nuke Iran?

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Larry Johnson: Did Israel Plan to Nuke Iran?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, April 22nd, 2024. Larry Johnson joins us now. Larry, a pleasure as always. Thank you for your time. Who do you think got the best of this back and forth between Israel and Iran with respect to what Israel began when it destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus? Oh, I think Iran clearly came out on top. Some on other programs like Alexander Mikouros described it as Iran won on points. So all of this has demonstrated that Iran has the capability to hit targets inside Israel and that Israel does not have the ability to stop it. That's the bottom line. Does that not burst the myth, the self-foisted myth of Israel that

the whole world or at least the region must fear it? Yeah, same thing with heavyweight boxers. You know, the guy that, he's the world champion, you can't touch him, and then he gets in the ring and gets punched in the face and goes down. Israel got punched in the face. You know, they've been acting with impunity. I mean, you know, think about this. They routinely, not occasionally, routinely carry out bombing strikes in Lebanon and in Syria. Those are sovereign countries, and Israel attacks them routinely. And nobody in the world says, hey, wait a second, this is a violation. Our international rules-based order would say that's a violation of international law. But that's Israel. Give them a break. Give them a pass.

And they had been assassinating a number of IRGC commanders in really the failed belief that if you kill enough of these people, it will clear up your security issue, make you safer. And it has done just the opposite. So once they hit that embassy annex and the consulate and killed the number of people that they did, Iran was intent on retaliating. And they did so in a very, very sophisticated way. It was not unsophisticated. And when the entire attack was over, despite Israel's claim, oh, they didn't put a glove on me. Why is your left eye swollen? You know, it was that kind of thing.

Didn't, well, first of all, hasn't Israel assassinated Iranian civilians, scientists in Iran? Well, that's our belief. You always start with the cui bono, who benefits the assassination of these Iranian nuclear physicists, people associated with the nuclear energy program in Iran, started back in 2010. They're at least in a period of two years, about four or five. So generally assumed that Israel, in fact, some off moments of Israelis have taken credit for it. So again, Israel, I call it the Munich 72 myth, because in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes in Munich in 72, Israel's mounted this campaign that they're going to go out and assassinate all

those people responsible. Well, that whole operation was a bit of a failure. They killed innocent people and they didn't kill everybody who was involved. And here we are 52 years later, doesn't mean that Israel's more safe, more secure because of those kinds of actions. So this eye for an eye retribution model that they had lived by turned out to be so counterproductive. What's your take on, this is just a little bit off and then we'll get back to this, Trump's assassination of General Soleimani. Yeah, he got, he was sort of strong-armed into it by the intelligence community and Department of Defense. A good friend of mine was involved in those discussions because Trump initially wasn't keen to do it, but, you know, he got enough pressure that he caved to the pressure. And again, okay, we kill Soleimani.

Has that stopped the fighting? You know, that's five years later, six years later. Did that stop the fighting? Did that make the Islamic extremists go away? And here's the real irony. General Soleimani was helping the government of Syria with Iranian militia fight radical Islamists associated with ISIS, because the ISIS fighters are Sunnis, Salafists, and they were attacking and killing Shia Muslims. So Soleimani was involved with killing what we thought or we

claim is a very enemy that we're trying to fight. I mean, you see how ludicrous this is. And so now we kill Soleimani and we accomplished what? Make us feel better? Oh, yeah, we showed him. Well, what we accomplished is aggravating the Arab world against us even more, continuing to poke a hornet's nest, as we've been doing for, I guess, going back to the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran. Yeah, if nothing else, it engenders sympathy for the Persians, the Iranian Persians. You know, because normally there's a bit of a gulf between the Arabs in the region and the Persians in Iran. And yet, now that they see Iran, if you will, standing up to the United States, standing up to Israel, punching back at Israel, it's actually creating a foundation of support for Iran that I don't think they previously enjoyed.

What was the purpose of the tepid, almost meaningless Israeli response to the Iranian assault on the Israeli air base and intelligence facility? It was Netanyahu trying to walk the line between satisfying all the pressure, particularly from the most extreme elements of his government, the Ben-Gavirs and Smotrich and such, that we got to strike back. We have to hit Iran, hit them hard. If they would have had their way, they would have launched nuclear weapons that would have tried to decimate Tehran and other key military facilities throughout. But then there was the pressure from the United States, from Russia, from China. And, you know, basically telling Israel, don't you do this.

Because they recognized the peril that Iran was in a position. Iran really holds more trump cards than Israel in this regard. If nothing else, Iran's in a position, if sufficiently attacked, that it can shut down the Straits of Hormuz, which would completely disrupt the world economy, really create a problem for Joe Biden in the United States with the November elections on their far horizon. How well protected was the airfield, the Israeli airfield, that the Iranians hit? Well, they didn't really hit it. What they sent were reported quad copter drones. Those little drones about the size of an 8x8 brownie pan

with the rotors on all four corners, and those were shot down. It's almost like it was staged because it did not, one of the ways we knew pretty quickly, within a couple of hours, that they didn't hit anything of substance, is the Iranians were live streaming video from that airfield that was supposedly struck. And it was not like a narrow camera. It was a wide angle. You could see from left to right horizon.

So it was a very bizarre thing. And here's what was really so curious about it. Immediately, it's like, oh, they're bombing. Who was doing that? U.S. Department of Defense is putting it out there, CIA officers with their media sources putting it out there, and even some Israelis were confirming it. And then within like 12 hours, the Israelis said, nope, wasn't us.

They were denying it. And Smotrich, or again, Ben-Gavir, he put out a tweet on X saying, oh, this was lame. Oh, man, he got blasted because they're not supposed to even acknowledge he did it. So it's really, now Israel's trying to pretend that they didn't do it. Okay. The Iranian attack on Israel, the one that was preceded by 300 drones that Rishi Sunak and David Cameron made fools of themselves pretending they knew what was happening. Did not that attack hit an Israeli base that was exceptionally well protected? Oh, yeah. The Iranian ballistic missiles penetrated the air defense system

around, I think, what is it, Nevatim is the base in the Negev Desert, which is in southern Israel. And I know that I've seen, I've read an analysis, an extensive analysis that Ted Postol has done, and maybe Ray talked about it earlier on the program. But it is very comprehensive and lays out the kind of damage that was done and the kind of missile technology that was used and the kind of, that prior to April 14th, Iran had never dared to launch any kind of a direct attack on Israel. There was always the claim that they were funding Hamas or Hezbollah to carry out those attacks, but I had maintained that Hamas and Hezbollah didn't need any foreign encouragement to carry out attacks against Israel. So what Iran did in this case was they, you know, with that combination of drone, cruise missile and ballistic missiles,

they found a way to both saturate the Israeli air defense system, denude it, if you will, of their missiles, and then create a situation where they could actually penetrate and hit certain targets. But it was not intended to create massive destruction or to incapacitate the Israeli military. It was just to say, okay, if this is the path you want to follow, we can strike back and we will strike back. What has our friend and colleague Pepe Escobar reported the Israelis contemplated or attempted to do to retaliate against Iran for Iran penetrating the Israeli defenses? Pepe reported a couple of days ago that he had a source in Asia that claimed the Israelis had launched an F-35 carrying a nuclear bomb that was designed to go off

in the upper atmosphere and create what's called an electric magnetic pulse, an EMP, which was in theory designed to fry electrical systems and shut down the electrical grids. But that this plane was shot down by the Russians, and Pepe's source was saying, as the plane exited Georgia or Jordan. So you look at Jordan, Jordan's abutted sort of on the north, the northeast part by Syria and on the eastern part by Iraq. So it was either exiting into Syria or exiting into Iraq. We don't know, but that it was shot down. Well, I had, and I sent Pepe notes on this, that I had some

problems with that because one, that means that plane was, that the Russians were going to be operating in airspace that's east of the Euphrates River, which has been sort of a unofficial demarcation between US and Russian forces, air forces in Syria, going back to September of 2015. I know for a fact through a friend of mine who served there, that in Al Udeid Air Force Base at the Combined Air Operations Center, where AFSCENT, you know, throw out all the acronyms, Air Force Central Command is based, that on a daily basis, the general that's in charge of that facility is on the phone with a Russian counterpart

saying, okay, we're flying from here to there, and we're going to be conducting this mission. So they wanted to make sure that we didn't have Russians and Americans shooting at each other. So for this to have taken place would have implied that, A, the Russians were able to suddenly get intelligence, track this plane taking off, knowing that it had a nuclear device on board, and then shoot it down in territory that was really controlled by the United States. But more importantly than that, let's say, assuming that happened, that means there's a live nuke somewhere on the ground in Syria or Iraq. Well, there'll be a race to recover that if it's there.

But, you know, I've checked with one of my friends involved with the intelligence, and he just laughed because, you know, there would be some indication that that was spinning up to go down. But Pepe, he's not, you know, he's reporting what he was told. And then he went out and got a second source who confirmed it. That doesn't, it doesn't mean that Pepe is wrong. He's just got bad sources. That could be it. And I know he's continuing. Huh? I'll let you tell him that. Oh, I did. Yeah, I understand exactly what you're saying. What about this report this morning? We're transitioning now to Ukraine, that there are a thousand French troops there in Odessa. Yeah, there's, well, you've got, you know, as you pointed out, Doug McGregor's hearing

it from a variety of his sources. And there is a video out from this military analyst, I think he's a Belarusian, named Dima, which purports to show French troops unloading in Odessa. Now, I have had a couple of people on my blog at Sonar21 point out that when you look at the license plates, they actually don't seem to have, it's not the kind of license plate you'd normally see on a French vehicle and very well could be French legionnaires, the Foreign Legion, which would be a little different than members of the French

military per se. But what we know for a fact is that Macron, the French president, has been vowing to do this. And you've had members of the French military saying that they were going to do it. And that's going back two, three months. So that it's happened shouldn't be a surprise if that is confirmed. Do you expect things to get worse for Ukraine now that it may have this false sense of security that the House of Representatives passed to the Senate legislation, which theoretically sends $61 billion. We know that $40 billion of it is not even going to leave the country.

The whole thing's a mess. But anyway, do you think that this will affect things on the battlefield, this vote in the House of Representatives? Absolutely not. It doesn't change a thing. It's just, it's part of this grift, this enormous corruption that unites the United States with the Ukrainian effort. Because you've really got to ask, why are we in the United States so obsessed with Ukraine? It's not like there are a bunch of Thomas Jeffersons and John Adams running around pleading for freedom and democracy and liberty and justice. It's become a brutal, thuggish regime that locks up political opponents, that engages in political oppression of the primary religious organization in the country, the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church. It attacks journalists. It prohibits opposition political members. And even their own legislature has ceased to function. And best of all,

Zelensky, whose term expires next month, is insisting, hey, I ain't leaving. I like the job. I make pretty good money here. So with all of that, it does not change the reality on the ground that Ukraine doesn't have air power. Their air defense system continues to erode. The Russians continue to take apart now their electric infrastructure, which means factories can't operate and then they're not going to be able to even heat their homes. And on top of this, they're still, you know, they've lowered the recruiting age to 25. But in the process, they further infuriated the people of Ukraine. And those guys are in that 25 to 27 year age range. They're bugging out.

They're at the borders trying to figure out how to become professional swimmers and get across the river. Let me show you the scene on the floor of the House of Representatives when that legislation passed. It's a reprehensible site because it involves dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, we couldn't even count, of members of the House of Representatives committing the federal offense of waving foreign flags on the floor of the House of Representatives. I missed it, but thank you. Okay. The House will be in order. The House will be in order. The House will be in order. The Chair would remind my colleagues to observe proper decorum. Flag waving on the floor is not appropriate.

The House will be in order. Without objection, a motion to reconsider is laid on the table. For what purpose does the gentleman from Florida rise? The gentlewoman from Florida. The gentleman does not recognize colleagues.

No, I'm going to... The House will be in order. That was Congresswoman Luna who voted against the giveaway of $61 billion, chastising the other members of the House for childishly waving Ukrainian flags.

And after she did that, the Speaker unrecognized her, since the speaker, who's not the speaker of the House, he's just presiding at the moment, obviously was in favor of the outcome. It was just a reprehensible vote, Larry. I was down in the dumps all weekend between that vote and the vote to extend Section 702 and the spying powers on American citizens. It just turns my stomach when Congress does things like this. Well, America once was a great country, and we've now descended into the status of banana republic

when our cities are ravaged by a fentanyl scourge that's killing over 100,000 Americans every year. And the number is growing. It's not shrinking. When you have children in cities like Baltimore, they get into high school and only 4% of them can read and do math at grade level, where they're basically uneducated and ignorant because the school system has failed. When you have our American streets filled with homeless, when you have crime rates that exceed, like in Chicago, you've got more people dying there than died in Iraq, compare the years over time, and they're waving these damn Ukrainian flags. The one thing if

you're waving an American flag, say, hey, we want to make sure that America is safe, that America is prosperous, that America is secure. But no, this is a grift. We're going to send how much money we can send overseas and how much money we can fill the pockets of the American defense industry with. And it's a sickening, disgusting spectacle. How much longer can the Ukraine war last, no matter what kind of dollars the American Congress borrows and wastes? I think it'll be over by the end of this year at the latest. They can't sustain it because you got to have people out there that can fire the weapons and have some competence in conducting military operations. They don't have that.

That's shrinking. The Russian strategy is one of attrition. And that's what so many in the West do not understand. I had a long discussion the other night with one of my high school buddies. And, you know, in his mind, why aren't they going quicker? Why aren't they killing us? Trying to explain, I said, you know, hey, Don, look, they are tritting and eviscerating the Ukrainian military because their ultimate objective, when all of this is finished, is that Ukraine's not going to have a military power that can threaten Russia.

Russia doesn't want that anymore, and they're going to make sure that there's a buffer zone so that NATO stays in its side of the fence and leaves Russia alone. Here's President Zelensky on Meet the Press yesterday being asked by the moderator, how long should the u.s continue to support ukraine cut number two chris how long should americans be expected to fund the war in ukraine the americans are not funding the war in Ukraine. They first and it reduces the price for all Europe for all NATO it reduces the price for everyone including the US as the leaders in in the NATO US Army now does not have to fight protecting NATO countries Ukrainians are doing that. And it's only the ammo that the civilized world is providing.

And I think it's a good decision. The temptation is to be sarcastic. I didn't know that Ukraine was defending the rest of NATO. I mean, this is just an absurd and repulsive response on his part. Now, Zelensky's now reminding me, I don't know if you saw that, there was a story last week, I think it came out of Brazil. Some woman took her father to a bank to apply for a loan. He was dead, but she had him propped up in the wheelchair and, you know, was trying to get the deal done. That's Zelensky. He's got a propped up dead Ukraine. He, you know, is trying to get the deal done. That's Zelensky.

He's got a propped up dead Ukraine. He's trying to convince us, hey, this is a vibrant cause. This is really in your interest. We're saving you money here. Hey, you're not having to fight because we're doing the fighting, even though you're paying the bill. It's just absurd. But he has been enabled by the West because the West's objective in this was to destroy Russia and to pick a fight with Russia.

And they say, well, why would we do that? Because we want their oil. We want their gas. We want their gold. We want their uranium. We want their aluminum. We want their nickel. I'll go down the list.

This is nothing more than piracy, if you will, on the part of the West. That was the intent. And they ran into a bit of a buzzsaw. The Russians were unwilling to cooperate. And now this entire Ukrainian adventure is blowing up in their face. Do you think the, I know she's gone, she's at Columbia University, which by the way is shut down as we speak, in order to suppress students demonstrating support for the Palestinians. We'll talk about that with Jeff Sachs who's there later today. But Victoria Nuland, do you think she and the neocons recognize the disaster they caused? Oh, heavens no. They take no responsibility for anything. They'll simply blame it on the Republicans for failing to provide funding sooner, for the lack of a backbone as they view it by Joe Biden for not sending F-16s right off the bat, for not providing the full panoply of American

armament, putting that into Ukrainian hands from the outset. Because again, they don't calculate and take into consideration that those kinds of provocative actions are going to elicit a response from the Russians that could escalate into a war that the United States is not prepared to fight, not equipped to fight, and would ultimately lose. I want to go back to Iran and Israel before we finish, Larry. Sure. What do you think of Vladimir Putin? How do you think he views what's going on between Iran and Israel? I think he's trying to do his best to keep this from becoming an actual

hotter war than what it is. You know, I think, what is it, something like almost two million of the Israelis are actually former Russian citizens, and some of them may even still be dual passport holders. Then with Iran, Russia and China have forged an actual, you know, let's call it a military alliance with them. And because they see Iran as a key player in that region. And through the interventions of both Russia and China, you know, they've helped bring peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, where they were having a proxy war that was being waged in Yemen for at least eight years. So I think behind the scenes, Putin is counseling the Iranians to be patient, you know, to play their cards very smartly and to assure them that Russia does have their back. Russia is

not going to tell them one thing and then abandon them. Russia sees it in its interest to help Iran resist American attempts to try to control the Middle East. Larry Johnson, a pleasure, my dear friend. I know you have another commitment at the end of this week. We'll miss you at the roundtable, but Godspeed there, and we'll talk soon. Okay. Thanks. All the best. Coming up later today, Colonel Douglas McGregor at 2 o'clock Eastern, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 3 o'clock Eastern, and a little before 4.30, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.