Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: Will US F-16s Help Ukraine?

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, August 5th, 2024. In a minute, Larry Johnson will be here with us. Ukraine now has F-16s. Does it mean anything? And Iran, is it really a sponsor of terrorism? But first this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value 23%. So $100 invested in gold a year ago is now worth $123. You have $100 in the bank. It still shows $100, but $100 in the bank is now worth 24% less. Inflation has reduced all of your savings, all of your buying power, and mine, by 24%.

And gold is largely immune from that. If you want to learn how gold will soon hit $3,200 an ounce, call Lear Capital, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com. Get your free gold report. Same experts who predicted the 23% rise that I've enjoyed have predicted this $3,200 an ounce gold. Learn about how to transfer this to an IRA. Protect your savings. 800-511-4620. Learjudgenap.com. Tell them the judge sent you. Larry Johnson, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. I know you're in the midst of the hurricane where you are in Florida, but thank goodness for your thoughtfulness, for your time, and for your generator. Keep the power going.

Right, right, right. I want to talk to you about President Zelensky's boasting about the presence of F-16s. I want to talk to you about torture in Israel and the reaction of the establishment and the government to it. But before I do, you and some of our colleagues have recently done some research. In fact, you may have been the principal draftsman of this report on Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. Right, right. It's August of 2024. Joe Biden is sounding, and Lindsey Graham sounds like it's 40 years ago. Is Iran today a state sponsor of terrorism?

Not like we portray it. And what I mean by that is our image of Iran as a sponsor of terrorism was formed in the 1980s when Iran was behind the bombing of first the U.S. Embassy in April of 83, and then the Marine barracks in November of 83, and then the embassy annex in Beirut again. They were kidnapping American citizens. Now, Iran was doing this not because they hated our freedom, hated our democracy. It was a reaction to what the United States was doing militarily in Lebanon, among other things. We were killing Lebanese Muslims, and Iran was already mad at us for having overthrown their government back in 1954.

But the common refrain in the United States is that Iran is the biggest sponsor of international terrorism. And they ascribe that to the fact, well, they provide financial support to Hamas and Hezbollah. Okay, look at Hamas and Hezbollah. We've talked about this before. Hamas, in terms of its terrorist record, according to the Israeli government, not according to Larry Johnson, has carried out very, very few attacks, and those attacks are primarily revenge attacks or attacks on settlers. They are not mass casualty events. So Iran has shifted its actions. They're now, they're a state, but they're not out using terrorism as a tool. And in fact, they've been very instrumental in helping Syria fight against radical Islamists that are out actually doing the

beheading of people. You radical Islamists you mean radical is Zionists or do you mean radical Islam? I mean radical Islamists like Isis So Isis, for example, it was out You know attacking the the Kurds and normally the Kurds and the Iranians don't get along But this is one of those instances where both Iran and the Kurds were both about trying to kill ISIS. And ISIS was in turn trying to kill them. So the ISIS, the ultra-Orthodox in the Sunni community, Iran, as you know, is a Shia Islam. So now this, I, my point is, and we wrote that memo that you referenced, we did that first

one in 2017, Ray McGovern and I as part of the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. But the Iran is not this major sponsor of terrorism. We're using that as an excuse. And the, because when you sit down and total up the terrorist attacks they just don't add up and in fact i think the the of the top 14 groups that the united states identified as representing a terrorist threat to the united states 13 of them are sunni none of them are backed by iran and the other one that was listed on there was not Iranian-backed either. Is Hezbollah a tool, a proxy of Iran, or is Hezbollah now part of the government of Lebanon? Yeah, the days of Hezbollah being an Iranian proxy are long gone. Hezbollah is its own entity. It's a political entity. It's a military entity. It's a force within the government in Lebanon. It doesn't control Lebanon,

but it certainly controls the South. And to pretend that it's just some ragged band of terrorists, you know, during the 1980s, you had this fellow called Ibn al-Muqniyah, who was a Lebanese Muslim, but he was closely aligned with Iran. Yeah, he was bin Laden before there was a bin Laden, okay? He was a terrorist mastermind in terms of planning attacks, but his attacks were focused on U.S. government, U.S. military. And then they went after civilians who were there in Lebanon that they viewed as agents, as assets of the CIA. That was one of the reasons they were kidnapping them back then. What is the credibility of people like Lindsey Graham? I guess I can stop right there. Okay. I don't even have to finish the question.

Who want the president of the United States to wage war on Iran? Yeah, people like Lindsey. You know, I guess he spends too much time playing video games where it's all cost free. I was involved with scripting one military exercise where we had a particular scenario that required putting U.S. forces into Iran. It's ugly. The problem we have is, number one, to actually go in and take control of Iran, you're going to need about 4 million troops. We don't have that. We have 452,000 in the army right now.

Then you get the logistics line problem. And what I mean by that is how you're going to get the food and the water and the other necessary supplies of ammunition and repair parts to an army that's invading and trying to take over Iran, which is four times the size. And we say, well, no, we'll just bomb them. Please give me just one example. We'll take out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's another discussion. But we've never had been able to use a bombing campaign against the country to force that country into submission. You know, we tried to shock and awe in Iraq, and we still had to put troops on the ground. And Iran is heavily bunkered in mountains with some of their key facilities buried underground. They're called hardened, deeply buried targets. So the ability of the United States to go in and crush Iran, I just keep coming back to,

we can't even handle the Houthis, for God's sake. And we want to fight Iran? Wake up. As we speak, Larry, Sergei Shoigu, the former Russian foreign minister and now the chair of their National Security Council. Right, he's defense minister. Defense minister, pardon me, thank you, is in Tehran. What is he negotiating? And is this giving Netanyahu heartache? No, no.

In fact, remember, starting in 2019, I believe, maybe it's 2018, Iran was doing joint military exercises with Russia and China. And they have a de facto military agreement to come. Really, it's Russia to come to Iran's aid, not vice versa. So I'm sure Shoigu is there. He's now in a position, having left the role as the defense minister, he's sort of President Putin's personal envoy on defense matters. So he's there speaking on behalf of Putin. I'm sure he's reassuring the Iranians that they'll have the support of Russia and that sharing with him whatever intelligence that they may have,

as well as working out uh weapons systems that will be supplied to iran you know because putin putin warned the united states okay you're going to keep giving your stuff to ukraine to attack us we can do the same they're going to be good they'll be giving uh you know could potentially give hypersonic missiles that could take out a U.S. aircraft carrier, for example. Alistair Crook opines that Shoigu is bringing with him some high-tech electronic equipment, which will enable the Israelis to interfere with, excuse me, which will enable the Iranians to interfere with thei's ability to detect and identify incoming missiles yeah um i know that they they deployed some electronic the russians deployed or was reported uh some electronic warfare capabilities uh two days ago ago uh so uh you know this is um they're not shoigu is not in tehran to talk about trading

oil or trading gold uh it is to talk about uh you know what is fully anticipated not just iran iran going and retaliating against israel but israel's mindset is that they're going to attack. They need to take out Iran. I can tell you for a fact, I've talked to a number, I've got a couple of friends who are ardent Zionists, and they will still talk to me. But, you know, in their mind, I could read you one of these, just said, oh, Israel's going to go in there and it's going to bomb Iran and that'll fix it.

And I wrote it back. I said, Israel can't even deal with Hamas after 10 months. And there you're right on the, you control the entire border, for God's sake. You don't have a logistics train that's a thousand miles long. You're right there and you can't handle Hamas. And you want to go a thousand miles to the east and start a nuclear war with Iran? Are you crazy? I mean, good God, these people. Are they realistic interpreters of military reality, or are they just religious zealots?

It's either religious zealots, and I'm not sure that's Lindsey Graham's problem. I mean, Graham's problem is he's just delusional about U.S. military capabilities and Israeli capabilities on top of that. So we always think that we can bomb our way out of something, and it's never worked. The 8th Air Force tried it in World War II. That didn't stop the Germans. You had to put soldiers on the shores of the beaches in Normandy, for starters.

We tried it in Vietnam. Man, we bombed the hell out of the Vietnamese. We lost that war. We bombed Iraq, and we still had to put troops in the ground. And after 15 years, what do we have? We've got a country that really doesn't like us for good reason, and that is not necessarily a close ally of ours. So I mean this, you've always got to make sure, if you're going to use military force, know what the hell

you're using it for. What's your purpose? What's your end game? Because when it's all said and done, when the killing is over, what's left? And that's the question Israel's not answering itself because it thinks it can

kill its way out of this. Does Iran, Larry, have nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them? It has the ability to deliver them. It has the ability to build them. The two key things are, have they processed enough uranium to be able to have what they need to generate the nuclear explosion? And have they actually built the device? It's within their capability. I know the intelligence community has long said that they generally, they shied away from it because it was seen as sort of a violation of the tenets of Islam. But they may now be in a situation where they've been attacked repeatedly by Israel, not the other way around, despite what the Israelis say. And it wouldn't surprise me if they did. Let me put it that way. What would be the basis in his mind?

I don't know if you can get in his mind for Netanyahu to characterize the Iranians as barbarian. When he said this, what's going on in the Middle East is a fight between civilization and barbarism. I thought he was talking about himself when he said barbarism. I'm being sarcastic. He wasn't talking about himself. But the IDF are the barbaric ones. So I don't even have to repeat what they're doing. Everybody knows it. The torture that went on two weeks ago, and then the breaking of these guys out of jail with the police looking the other way and the head of their equivalent of their FBI, Ben Gavir saying, let them go. And then their attorney gevier saying let them go and then their attorney general

saying let them go it's reprehensible yeah yeah no it is uh that's the narrative and what people forget is 1981 ronald reagan had just taken office and the israelis come through the door with the CIA and ask Reagan for permission to supply arms to Iran. Okay. This was in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini, who is far more radical than anybody, than the current leaders of Iran, far more radical. And during that period, Iran was carrying out, as we discussed earlier, terrorist attacks or sponsoring attacks against U.S. government and military facilities in the Middle East. And yet, despite all of that, Israel, with our blessing, was supplying weapons to Iran.

So they've got selective memory in Israel. Back then, they didn't mind dealing with this most barbaric of cultures as they describe it because they found it useful to them. Now, it's no longer useful. And it's not like Israel's been sitting there minding its own business all these years and Iran's been out trying to kill them. It's been actually the opposite. The number of nuclear scientists in Iran that have been murdered, assassinated

by Israeli intelligence operations, I think a total number six. Can you imagine the outrage and uproar in the United States if Iran or China or Russia sent in a secret team and started killing our top scientists working on AI, for example? We'd view that as an act of war. So my point in this is Israel does not have clean hands and is not operating from a morally superior position. How reckless is it for Israel today to try and take on Hezbollah when it can't even defeat Hamas? And did you see this morning's Wall Street Journal, a very pro-Israeli, pro-Netanyahu newspaper reporting that the IDF is exhausted, that these young men and women want to go home, that they're begging their commanders to beg Netanyahu not to

attack Hezbollah? Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, that's the, look, the reality over the last 10 months, those soldiers that have been going into Gaza, and, you know, they're not fighting their armed personnel across the board. They're, you know, it's largely women, children, and old men, people who are not soldiers. And yet, despite all of that,rael has struggled uh you know i've heard some people try to say oh well yeah just like ukraine and the russians i go okay wait a second

number one uh russia and ukraine they're pure armies you know ukraine's backed by NATO. You know, Hamas, maybe they get moral support from Iran, but Iran is not faring in weapons to them every night. And yet Israel struggles. And in fact, the IDF chief admitted three weeks ago, we can't defeat Hamas. Why? Because, well, Hamas is an idea. But he was conceding that militarily defeating them and eliminating the violence is beyond the capability right now of the Israeli army.

Well, Hezbollah is three to four times the size of the estimated number of Hamas fighters, and it is actually organized as an army. It's organized as a military with a command hierarchy, with a logistics train. They not only make their own weapons, but they've got very sophisticated weaponry that they've acquired from Iran. They are well entrenched, they are well trained, and they're battle hardened. They've been fighting against ISIS in Syria. So they've been involved with actual combat where the other guys are shooting back. So it's not like these are going to be untrained, inexperienced soldiers going up

against the IDF. These are combat hardened veterans. And that's where a lot of the IDF people are not. If all you're doing, if you're a professional boxer and all you're doing is beating up on little kids or being, you know, like the dude out of Algeria masquerading as a woman that beat up the woman in the Olympics, yeah, you can think you're a tough guy. But then step in the ring with somebody that's actually your own size or a little bigger. All of a sudden, it's a whole different story. And I think the Israelis and their arrogance think that they, oh, we will wipe them out in a heartbeat. I mean, they genuinely believe this. And it's a stupid, foolish thing to do, because I think it will endanger the very survival of Israel. Wow. I want to switch gears to Ukraine and the F-16s. Chris, can you run cut number one and cut number two back to back, please? Watch this, Larry.

Jets are in our sky, and officially today you see them, and it's good that they came and we can use them. We had hundreds of meetings and talks to strengthen the capabilities of our aviation, to strengthen the capabilities of our air defense system, of our defense forces. We often heard it is impossible as an answer, but we still made our ambition, our defensive need possible. Now this is reality, reality in our skies. F-16s are in Ukraine. Is there reason for his rejoicing? No. I mean, hey, I graduated high school in 1973.

I think that's the year the F-16 came out, okay? That's over 50 years ago. So we're celebrating a 50-year-old airplane. I bet Tom Cruise was flying one of them. Hey, Top Gun. You know, this is, what are these planes going to do? Oh, well, they do have the capability that they could carry a nuclear-tipped cruise missile and fire it on Russia, which means Russia views that as an existential threat,

which means Russia, once they determine where these planes are based, Russia will destroy them. And it's going to be the bookies, the bet is how long will they last. Did the United States train Ukrainian pilots or are Americans flying these jets? In theory, it wasn't just the Americans, it was other NATO allies as well, training Ukrainian pilots, supposedly six. But you can't rule out the possibility that there are actually some U.S. pilots there. Well, how much longer can Ukraine last even? Well, how many F-16s did we send them?

I've heard between six and ten. But they can only, I think maybe it was ten, but they've only got six pilots, and because they can't have all the pilots up flying at the same time, but in any event, the way they configure these planes is to try to provide air defense capabilities to shoot incoming missiles and such, which is absolutely no way to use those planes. But, you know, this is more of a symbolic gesture, but it's going to be a futile symbolic gesture because I think it will be taken out of, they'll be destroyed pretty quickly. There is a bounty. The Russian Ministry of Defense has put a bounty out. Pilots can earn

an extra bonus. You'll be the first one to shoot down an F-16. So the Russians are highly motivated. How much longer can Ukraine last? You know, it's amazing that they're still there. The pace of the war against them is increasing. The Russians are making more and more breakthroughs. There is talk that the Ukrainians are going to try to mount one final desperate counteroffensive to take over the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia.

I doubt that they have the capability to do that. And in any event, the Russians are monitoring it. I mean, the Russian intelligence on this is quite good. So I think, I don't think Ukraine can last to the end of the year. Because once winter hits, they're already having revolts in the western part of Ukraine against the military recruiters. This is the area that's the most anti-Russian, and they're attacking the military recruiters there. So if you're getting that kind of blowback already within the population that's considered the most anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian, that tells you that they've got some real problems. Can Russia fight the war in Ukraine and supply Iran with what it needs to fight Israel at the same time?

Yes, because it's not going to require Russian military assets in Iran. Iran's got its own military assets. What Russia can provide Iran is intelligence. It does have an intelligence capability, as well as the use of some of the satellites to assist Iran in fending them off. But it remains to be seen if the United States is going to join in on this attack. We've moved an enormous number of combat assets into the region over the last two weeks. And that's why when this assassination took place, I believe it was a week ago Thursday, of Haniyeh in Tehran. And then within two days, they reported that this WASP group was en route to Beirut. Well, that's a marine amphibious unit that is going there to be involved with extracting U.S. personnel on the ground

to help. If they can't get out by plane, you got to take them off by boat. Well, we knew in advance, apparently, about Israel's plans. Because you just don't bring the folks up at the Norfolk naval base and say, hey, can you guys head out to Israel tomorrow? It doesn't work that way. You've got to alert the different units. You've got to get

the Marines loaded up for one thing. And then you've got to get the ships out of port and across the ocean. Well, they were already out of port across the ocean when this, we're going to lebanon so that's why i said this was the united states had some foreknowledge of it and now you've had the head of central command uh you know the u.s the u.s command that's responsible for the middle east he's flown from his headquarters which is here in tampa flor, in MacDill Air Force Base. Now he's gone to the 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain,

which is in the Persian Gulf. Larry Johnson, thank you, my dear friend. Thank you for your analysis and presenting it in such a lucid way on these two hot-button topics. We have the roundtable on Thursday this week. We'll look forward to seeing you then. All right, my friend. Thank you. Thank you.

All the best. Great conversation with a great man, longtime friend and collaborator of mine. Coming up at two o'clock this afternoon, Anya Parampil. What is the CIA doing in Venezuela? Take a guess. And at four o'clock this afternoon, the always worth waiting for Scott Ritter, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.