Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : Did U.S. Policy Deliberately Harm Civilians in Iran?

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Max Blumenthal : Did U.S. Policy Deliberately Harm Civilians in Iran?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, January 22nd, 2006, Max Blumenthal joins us today. Max, thank you very much. Before we get to your thoughts on President Trump's performance, if you can call it that at Davos, and ICE in Americans' living rooms without search warrants, did the United States foreign policy orchestrated by the CIA set out to kill innocent civilians in Iran? Well, the Treasury Secretary and billionaire, one of the many billionaires in Trump's cabinet,

Scott Besant, fresh off orchestrating the $40 billion bailout of his buddies, the bondholders in Argentina, courtesy of the American taxpayer, appeared in Davos on stage in an interview with your, I don't know if she was your former colleague, Maria Bartoromo, a Fox business. And she asked him about Iran. and he made one of the most revelatory statements I've ever heard a top U.S. official make on the U.S. War on Iran. I don't know if Chris has that clip. We have it.

So hold a second. We'll play it. And I'm dying to hear you slice this up. Chris got number 14. What do you want to say about sanctions, something else you've been working on, of course? What are you planning there in terms of Iran and the impact there? Do sanctions actually work? And the same question with regard to 500% secondary sanctions or tariffs on countries who purchase energy products from Russia.

Okay, so two things there. There are Treasury sanctions. And if you look at a speech that I gave at the Economic Club of New York last March, I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranian citizen, I would take my money out. President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran, and it's worked. Because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under.

The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports. And this is why the people took to the street. So this is economic statecraft. No shots fired. and things are moving in a very positive way here. I can't remember an American official acknowledging that we intentionally devalued the currency of a foreign country in order to make people poor, make people hungry, and drive them into the streets.

Well, there it is. And what he's saying is that the current round, of what were called protests were triggered by U.S. economic manipulation of Iran's currency, which built on crushing sanctions. 14 years of economic warfare on Iran that have distorted its economy caused corruption deliberately, forced Iran to export oil through a shadow fleet, subjected Iranian citizens to a kind of financial terrorism where they can't open back, bank accounts and can't access certain apps. If I want to record an interview in Iran, I can't use Streamyard or Zoom.

So finally, they got the dam to burst. Protesters came out. They were, many of them actually supported their government. There was no repression. The protest started as peaceful. But once they got the protest that they engineered over the currency, then they started to engineer violence. And intelligence agencies from the MI6 to the Mossad,

began to infiltrate the protests. Many of the protesters were armed. You saw them with weapons. There were extremely violent elements carrying out riots across Iran, burning hundreds of mosques, burning fire stations, attacking bank ATMs, attacking ambulances and first responders, because that will make it more difficult if the U.S. attacks Iran for Iranian municipalities to provide their own citizens with medical care

from the injuries they're going to get. And mayhem ensued. So this was the plan. And then they blame the Iranian government for providing security to its citizens, accusing them of massacres. They fake the death toll, claimed 16,500 were killed on Barry Weiss's CBS News. And the next thing you know, a U.S. carrier group is heading towards the Mediterranean. and I think one might be heading toward, is already in the Indian Ocean, giving Trump options

for strikes. All of this started with sanctions and, you know, he's also talking about using tariffs as a form of sanctions. Trump's policy is a form of financial terrorism as well. It has nothing to do with some industrial policy in the U.S. It's now being directed against Russia. But this smug, supercilious secretary of the Treasury boasting about financial statecraft, not a shot being fired, must have known that this was the first salvo in an effort to cause shots to be fired with weapons provided by Mossad, MI6, and CIA. And since people were going to be killed as part of American foreign policy, would Donald Trump have had to have approved this? Trump may not have approved it at all, but he certainly seems to enjoy it. But yeah, this happened within the bowels of Treasury OFAC, which is a division in Treasury that was established after 9-11 by Zionists. I believe it was established by Stuart Levy, people whose life obsession is terrorizing Iran

on behalf of Israel. Their cover was, oh, we're going to go after Al-Qaeda, but that mask soon dropped, and they're totally focused on Iran, and then they focused on Venezuela, and they've now announced that they want to bring down Cuba's government by the end of the year, and it will be the crowning achievement of Trump's legacy, and they're going to do that through economic warfare. It's all through Treasury OFAC, and I don't think Trump understands the intricacies there. I question whether he knows what's happening inside his own Trump-branded businesses. Even though this regime change, which I guess was intended to replicate the coup of 1953,

failed, just as regime change apparently has failed in Venezuela, is an Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran imminent? Well, I saw these riots as an extension of the 12-day war, as an effort to revive the hostility toward Iran after the war that was launched by Israel essentially failed, and Trump declared kind of a symbolic victory by bomb and bordeaux but that was a way of giving Israel a climb down because Israel is getting hammered in its cities and strategic sites were getting hit. The reason that Trump not immediately strike, there was this national security meeting about a week ago and apparently the Israelis said, we're not ready yet for you to go in and strike because our missile defenses are not prepared,

and we need you to set up Patriot batteries to set up the THAAD anti-missile defense systems because we can't defend ourselves with those Patriot batteries that you paid for. So there was a delay. They sent carrier groups. There are over 100 in-air strato-tankers, in-air refueling strato-tankers in the region now.

all the assets are in place. They kind of, today was the day they were put in place. And yesterday at Davos, Peter Orszag, who I think was Treasury Secretary under Obama, former Goldman Sachs banker, he's at some new firm. His wife is a overtly Zionist CNN host. He said that he's hearing through, in his words, indirect sources that the U.S. will strike Iran soon. And I think the inertia is so strong, the preponderance of pressure from Israel on Donald Trump, who they essentially own through Miriam Adelson, to do something that Trump is going to try some kind of decapitation strike.

And that's what all the Iranian monarchist psychos who are now frustrated that their crown prince or what I would call the Potomac-Maryland-based clown prince, Reza Polavi, is not going to be sent back. into Tehran to take power. Trump has poured cold water on that. They are now demanding a decapitation strike on Iran's leader, Ayatollah Alejameh as a kind of consolation prize. And honestly, I can't think of anything that the U.S. can do militarily that will actually lead towards regime change unless they do something like that and he will be quickly replaced.

But that's where I see through my indirect sources, the momentum going. You know, Chris, let's play Orszag, the former Treasury Secretary, now the head of one of the big banks, private banks, revealing what his insight sources have told him. And as you listen to this, correct me if I'm wrong, Max. Actually, before we play it, Chris, because it's on my mind now, didn't most of the Arab countries in the region deny U.S., the United States permission to fly over their airspace? Isn't that why the carriers are there? Supposedly the Qataris denied the U.S., the ability to launch strikes on Iran from Al-Dade Air Base.

We'll see how far that gets them. It's not as though Trump is asking for anybody's permission now. It's almost as if he sees the entire region as a Buffalo Bills cheer. leader. But the only country that's fully on board with these strikes is the United Arab Emirates, which has been fully integrated into greater Israel. The Saudis don't want it and they're lobbying Trump against it. The Turkish government do not want it. Qatar absolutely does not want it because they see how potentially destabilizing it will be. And Iranian military sources are indicating that this time they will do deliberate damage to the global economy if they come under attack,

especially if there are these decapitation strikes and there will be havoc on the financial markets. And it's going to start with the Saudi oil platforms. There could be a migration wave where Turkey will face a border problem. none of them want this and they they told trump do not do this but it's what it's what israel wants that matters chris uh number 19 i think it's very likely that over the next few days there will be something that happens in a ramp you do something big yes why do you think that i i did well from a variety of different uh you know uh indirect uh information and also uh to your point i think uh it's entirely possible the United States was waiting for the carriers to arrive.

Was waiting for them, sorry? For the carriers to arrive. And that this is just, so the Greenland story is just a head fake to? I don't know about a head fake, but it has the effect of, it has that effect, even if that's not the intent. And that would mean what? How does that play out if that's actually the case? Then the big question becomes, can you actually do regime change through effectively a bombing campaign?

And I don't think we have any history in which that's effective. but we'll see. It depends what the objective of what happens is if it's to take out the ballistic missiles, that can be successful. If it's regime change, you know, that's got a more checkered history. Does he even know what he's talking about? The United States can take out Iranian ballistic missiles? They'll try to attack ballistic missile launching sites and do missile suppression attacks, But honestly, that's not the only weapon in Iran's arsenal that can do damage. And we haven't seen the full breadth or depth of Iran's ballistic missile arsenal at all. We did not see that.

In the 12-day war, it will be an intense few days if the U.S. strikes. They're going to try to go in hard as they did in Venezuela, knock out Iran's communication systems, knock out its air defenses, and then move in from there. But that does not guarantee regime change. Iran is not Venezuela. It has a percentage of its population that's willing to fight and die to defend the Islamic Republic. And what Orszag is suggesting is the U.S. would have to do boots on the ground. The American public has no appetite for that. And let's also consider Iran defeated the hybrid warfare tactics that were just deployed against it very handily and very quickly. Once the internet was taken out, the violence in Iran's cities stopped. The coordinated violence immediately stopped because the leaders of these riot cells could no longer get their instructions from abroad. Right. Just getting them through secret signal groups, they were getting them through Israeli-backed international satellite channels like Iran International, which is like one of the main sci-op sources for the Iranian public.

They also knocked out Elon Musk's Starlink, which was being smuggled in by U.S. intelligence in the tens of thousands, and this was supposed to be the workaround after the internet blackout. They wiped it out, apparently with Russian cooperation. And so I think whoever was seeking to instrumentalize these protests as a form of hybrid war against Iran underestimated the country's military and security forces. Just as Israel underestimated Iran when it launched. its unprovoked attack in June of last year, they killed major commanders in the IRGC. Like they killed the IRGC commander who designed the true promise operations.

Hajizada. They killed Bulgaria, who was in charge of, like, overseeing, like a government transition and was a legendary figure. And within about eight hours, Iran's leader, Khamenei replaced all of his commanders, and Iran launched a massive ballistic missile volley that did serious damage to Israel and had Netanyahu on the back foot within 24 to 48 hours. Calling Trump and crying uncle, transitioning to Davos, what did Trump accomplish at Davos besides making himself a laughing stock? Well, it's no laughing matter, although his speech was not as funny as his other speeches. It was more ornery than avuncular, more petty than I've ever seen him. He hates the Europeans.

He clearly is seething at them. And in some ways, they deserve this level of contempt because of their hypocrisy. And they have indeed ripped off the United States through NATO. So there was a lot of truth in what Trump was saying, but the way he delivered it was to rub their faces in their own weakness and to invite some form of retaliation. I don't know what EU trade war will look like. I mean, he mocked Mark Ruta for calling him daddy. He attacked Mark Carney for not being more grateful to the U.S. for preventing them from being destroyed or just simply not coming in and inventing.

them, sort of suggesting he could invade Canada. He said NATO wouldn't defend the U.S. And so I think what Trump accomplished was historic. He's actually contributing to the dissolution of NATO and fracturing the transatlantic relationship that the Beltway national security elite has spent decades building and which was sort of one of the fundamental pillars of the so-called rules-based order. But with the Europeans, they're, and Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, who is now Prime Minister of Canada, their hypocrisy was on full display.

They're freaking out about Greenland. Trump is going to come in and steal this iceberg that belongs to them. The rules-based order is finished, Mark Carney declared. He actually said, this is one of the, another incredibly revelatory moments, and it's really Trump that's responsible for exposing how the truth about empire. Carney said we knew the rules-based order was a fraud. We saw all of these unprovoked illegal wars take place, but we went along with it because we benefited.

And indeed, Canada participated in Afghanistan. They participated in coups in Haiti. They helped the U.S. target Venezuela. They've been all over the place. They sent weapons to Israel as it was committing genocide. But Greenland wasn't the moment when the rules-based order collapsed. It shows just how amoral and sociopathic these European figures are. It was the Gaza genocide, just two years of watching mass systematic ritual infanticide,

which they all supported with all of their hearts and all of the weapons they could provide. And now it's all over because it's targeting them, because it's targeting white people. So Trump has lifted the mask on Europe and you can never come back on again. And Canada. What is happening in Syria as we speak? Is Syria killing Kurds and freeing ISIS prisoners? Well, Trump's envoy, who's another real estate billionaire, Tom Barack, adopted the rebranded founder of al-Qaeda in Syria and co-founder of ISIS, formerly known as Muhammad Jolani,

Ahmed al-Shara. He adopted him as a kind of stepson and told him that you can now federalize Syria, something that we prevented Bashar al-Assad from doing, and you can federalize it by terrorizing Syria's minorities. I mean, we've seen this government slaughter thousands of Alawites in a few days on Syria's coast, then go down to Sweda and terrorize the Druze population. And now they've moved into northeast Syria, which is this key U.S. strategic card. And they're dismantling with U.S. permission the so-called Syrian defense forces of Kurds,

which the U.S. military set up. So let's try to unpack what's happening here. The SDF is a name that was conceived by a U.S. general to rebrand the PKK and the U.K.K. and the YPG military wing of this Kurdish-Marxist party because it was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., they just rebranded them, said, we have destroyed ISIS in northeast Syria around Raqa, and we want you to hold it so that the U.S. can steal Syria's oil and prevent it from accessing its own wheat and its own oil reserves in order to starve the government in Damascus. They succeeded in doing that, starving Assad of revenue. Then they get the new rebranded Al-Qaeda government in there. And they say, well, we're not needed in northeast Syria anymore. And you guys hate Iran because your Sunni fanatics who see the Shia as heretical rejectors of the profit.

So you guys take over and go ahead and slaughter the Kurds who we had told we were allied with. And so the Kurds had taken the U.S. word that they were going. going to protect them, and they got sold out. The U.S. sold out another ally. And now yesterday we saw an ISIS flag raised in Raqa once again. And this, we often remember also. This is what Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia went into Syria to prevent. The U.S. pushed them out, and the U.S. has brought ISIS back with black flags over

Syrian capitals, just as I and everyone else who is mercilessly attacked in the media for opposing this dirty war predicted. How many ISIS fighters were let out of jail by Al Jolani in the past couple of days? It's been reported that Jolani's military, which is a collection of Al-Qaeda rebranded warlords, let out over 1,000 ISIS fighters and ISIS-affiliated individuals from just one prison. Think about how much havoc these fanatics can wreak across the region. And now, Sentcom has announced that to prevent a breakout of these ISIS fighters, they're transferring them to Iraq. So there are two things to consider here.

Number one, that Sentcom, the U.S. government, which is backing Al-S. Shahra and Damascus, actually doesn't trust him to to manage these ISIS fighters. But at the same time, they're asking Syria's minorities, the non-Sinni population, to trust him and to allow him to take over all their territory, to not allow federalization. Number two, they're taking ISIS fighters who see Shia as evil, as satanic, to Iraq. a country with a large population of Shia, which actually a majority of the population are Shia, and they have been integrated through their own popular mobilization units, which Iran helped set up into the Iraqi army.

So it looks like they may have been set, they may have set up some kind of rat line for ISIS in order to destabilize Iraq and attack Iran. And that's the real longer term concern. One of our chatters writes that the injured ISIS are being treated in Israeli hospitals. Well, we saw that in the Golan during the Syrian Dirty War from 2014 on where Al-Qaeda fighters were being taken over and treated in Israeli hospitals. But I don't know if that's taking place in northeast Syria. Last question before we go back to Iran. What will be the excuse, the publicly stated excuse for a choice?

attacking Iran now that the riots are over and Mossad, MI6, and CIA have been exposed as Scott Bessent as the originators of these riots. Well, perhaps there's like a population of Fox News boomers that are deceived by the overt official explanation that Trump is protecting protesters and punishing Iran. The other excuse will be just terror. as George W. Bush would have said, terror. But most of the American public doesn't accept this. And there was hardly any excuse offered for kidnapping Nicholas Maduro.

Trump just went in and did it. But there was no consequence for Donald Trump politically because no U.S. service members lost their lives. In Iran, it'll be a different story. And Trump will pay a political price if he attempts to send U.S. troops in and even still Iran has standoff capacity, which can attack U.S. bases all across the region. So I think there's a political price here that Trump may not understand. Max, thank you very much, my dear friend. I have to run.

I wanted to get into the ice latest, but it'll still be going on next week, unfortunately. They're bad. Well, yes, it's terrible. Terrible. They're just destroying the Fourth Amendment. But we'll see where it goes. It hasn't happened yet as far as. I know, at least it hasn't gotten to a federal judge. Max, thank you very much, my dear friend.

We'll look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks a lot, Judge. Thank you. Coming up later today, pretty soon, actually, at 2 o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, at 3 o'clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.