June 21, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:53
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Seems kind of strange that the Prime Minister of Israel would launch this attack knowing they don't have the capability to take out the main enrichment site. | ||
| He must have been expecting Trump to get involved from the very beginning. | ||
| I think he's probably, yes, I think he probably has anticipated that this is something that he's wanted to do for the entire time that he's been the Israeli Prime Minister and has never had such a supportive voice in the White House as he sees in Donald Trump. | ||
| I don't think Trump wants to do this, by the way. | ||
| Let me also own that. | ||
| I don't think this is something Trump wants to do. | ||
| I think he wants a negotiated resolution. | ||
| But it just seems as if Israel has put us in this position where now, almost, the U.S. is feeling backed into a corner. | ||
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This 30,000-pound massive ordnance penetrator, or the mop, as they call it, the bunker buster. | |
| And you can see just how big it is. | ||
| You've got a 172-foot wingspan. | ||
| And for anyone that's been to an air show and seen this, it's quite an impressive thing. | ||
| It can fly up to 50,000 altitude, capable of midair refueling. | ||
| Yeah, and so you can also use a B-52, but this is the preferred aircraft because of its stealth, because this aircraft won't be seen coming. | ||
| Tuesday, when he had a National Security Council meeting, he was presented with attack plans on Iran, including going after Fordow, the nuclear site that is deep within a mountain, about a half a mile underneath that mountain, that would require pretty large American bombs in order to destroy. | ||
| He approved of those plans, but he did not give a final order. | ||
| So effectively, he has the defense community, the military community, being prepared for if he were to say go, to go. | ||
| But once you make that decision, once you get those attack plans ready, it does build a bit of momentum towards saying go. | ||
| Now he can always pull back and it seems like he has with his two weeks play. | ||
| But he's now having meetings with people like Steve Bannon about whether or not Hague He's having meetings with, you know, people on the traditional Republican hawks who would like him to go ahead and even push further towards regime change. | ||
| He's caught in a bit of a bind here between, you know, in his own politics and the military situation. | ||
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You saw the movie, the latest Top Gun movie. | |
| Eerily enough, this is that plot kind of coming to fruition in real life. | ||
| It's not just one bomb. | ||
| It'll be a bomb after a bomb to get through that penetration. | ||
| Iran has had five decades, five decades, almost half a century to talk. | ||
| And what they've done instead, kill 609 American troops in Iraq. | ||
| What they've done is put an assassination plot on President Trump's head. | ||
| What they've done is take American hostages and wreak havoc on the world. | ||
| America First is not sitting in a beach chair and using words. | ||
| It's taking decisive action when we can take out Fordow the one swoop of an airplane. | ||
| I think she's more lockstep with Trump now. | ||
| It is true that that was said back in March. | ||
| There is a discrepancy to a degree between what you saw then and what you see now. | ||
| But things have also changed since then. | ||
| And the intelligence is different. | ||
| Now, understand there's two ways to look at intelligence. | ||
| One, intelligence is little bits and scraps of information. | ||
| Two, intelligence is an assessment. | ||
| What she was giving there was the perception of all of the different intelligence agencies assessed together. | ||
| What the president is relying on now is... | ||
| They're about 80% in lockstep. | ||
| So it's one of those things that's sort of nuanced. | ||
| But in the end, Tulsi Gabbard has been in all of, or most of, not all, the high-level meetings about this, I'm told. | ||
| She solicits, or better said, the president solicits her opinion. | ||
| She gives it. | ||
| He trusts her advice, and she's not going anywhere anytime soon. | ||
| Of course, famous last words for a reporter to say that, based on what Trump officials have told him, but that's what I'm being told by a number of people who in the past have been very accurate about such things. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | ||
| It's Saturday, 21 June, in the year of our Lord, 2025. | ||
| I guess it's summer solstice today. | ||
| Actually, I guess summer actually starts today, although in the United States and the United Kingdom and other places it's looked at as one world day. | ||
| Close to the end of May. | ||
| Mark Caputo from Axios joins us. | ||
| Mark, thank you. | ||
| Posobiec is going to be here in a moment. | ||
| First off, if I can get up on the split screen. | ||
| They put out last night the President of the United States is actually going to return today from Bedminster. | ||
| And on the calendar that they put out publicly, he's going to get a national security briefing in the Oval Office at 6 p.m. | ||
| And we were working with Real America's Voice. | ||
| I think there's going to be a bonus afternoon war room, maybe starting around 4 o 'clock. | ||
| More information we get on this throughout the day. | ||
| It looks like we will have assets in place to be able to cover everything live. | ||
| Because I will tell you, remember in The Bridge Too Far, in the movie about Market Garden, in the last bridge at Arnhem. | ||
| The phrase there was, the party is on. | ||
| And so that is our analysis this morning. | ||
| Is the party on? | ||
| Is this thing, are we inexorably drawn into this? | ||
| And maybe today's the day of action. | ||
| You know, just the one swoop of a jet that Kayleigh McEnany wants. | ||
| Just one swoop of a jet just going across. | ||
| So we've got Mark Caputo. | ||
| Mark, thank you. | ||
| pretty explosive I think your hit last night with Coates on CNN can you walk us through just once again what what's your logic what your what your your sources are telling you about the intelligence that the president is actually getting that informs his opinion on this situation in | ||
| been John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA. | ||
| And the CIA, it's | ||
| Since I got more time here, one of the great things about doing podcasts is that we're not kind of hemmed in by two, three minute commercial breaks is I should also add. | ||
| I want to make sure. | ||
| We've streamed this live, so we're a live TV show, and we have the three-minute breaks. | ||
| Here's the difference. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| You usually take more time. | ||
| No, no, we take more time. | ||
| No, no, here's why. | ||
| There's a difference. | ||
| In the old cable, they're just boom, boom, boom. | ||
| All they want is up there and just get like two sound bites. | ||
| Here, we understand a reporter like yourself that is deeply dialed in with great sources. | ||
| In fact, some of the most explosive stories coming out of the Trump White House are coming via you and Axios. | ||
| Have they ever come out and refuted any major story that you've broken at the White House, given your sources throughout the administration? | ||
| Not that I'm aware of. | ||
| I guess you usually learn more from your losses and your wins than you remember them, so it hasn't happened yet, but maybe give them time. | ||
| Take your time on this. | ||
| Take your time. | ||
| Take your time. | ||
| The CIA, as I said on Laura Coates, there's two ways to look at intelligence, and this is one of the problems with reporting saying, oh, there's no new intelligence in Iran, and the president just acted. | ||
| Well, that might mean there's no new bits and scraps and pieces of information, but that doesn't mean there's not a new intelligence assessment based on old ones. | ||
| Now, we're not quite sure exactly what the CIA has obviously said to Donald Trump and briefed him on, but it's the lead briefer. | ||
| And it is working closely, and it always has in the Middle East, and certainly when it comes to Israel, will work with Israeli intelligence services. | ||
| I'm told the intelligence... | ||
| And based on CIA's assessment, that is when Donald Trump said, you know, I need to do something. | ||
| Now, what I didn't mention there, and what we didn't go into there, and we'll go into here, is two other factors played into Donald Trump's posture. | ||
| One. | ||
| The IAEA report, the International Atomic Energy Agency, had come out and said things are a lot more dire or threatening with Iran. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| And that's a big thing. | ||
| And then two, there was a feeling that, in the words of one Trump advisor told me, that the Ayatollah had, quote, given us the middle finger. | ||
| And Trump had said, you've got to make a deal or else. | ||
| So this is what the or else looks like, the building up. | ||
| And then I think kind of thirdly, or in addition to all of these things, is the fact that Netanyahu launched his attack. | ||
| And we have to look at what Netanyahu is looking at. | ||
| One, Hamas and Hezbollah are degraded. | ||
| They were great proxies to tie Israel down, Iran proxies. | ||
| They're degraded. | ||
| Assad in Syria is gone. | ||
| And Israel had already had this operation sort of in the works. | ||
| And at a certain point, with all of these different factors working up, is Bibi, Netanyahu, had continually for a long period of time been sort of almost a dog on a leash here, an attack dog, wanting to go after Iran. | ||
| And finally, with everything happening, Trump essentially said, I'm not going to stand in your way. | ||
| And Netanyahu and Israel went ahead. | ||
| Now, once that attack looks so successful, you know Donald Trump better than I do. | ||
| You're the guy who had lunch with him the other day. | ||
| Trump just saw that success and really wanted to be in that slipstream, as I mentioned at CNN. | ||
| But the thing about being in a slipstream is you're in someone else's wake and eventually you can hit some turbulence. | ||
| And Donald Trump is suspicious about going to war. | ||
| Is not ready to go to war yet or drop bombs yet. | ||
| And the reason we know that is he hasn't done it. | ||
| And I think some of that initial blood being up from Trump in those initial first days has cooled a little as he sought more information, more opinions. | ||
| As you know, he crowdsources a lot of big decisions. | ||
| And this is one of them. | ||
| So I can't predict what's going to happen now or, you know, by 6 p.m. | ||
| But I think it's safe to say that Donald Trump is taking in all of the information he has. | ||
| And he's torn between wanting to go ahead and do this and stop Iran. | ||
| I want to break down. | ||
| Audience, that's one of the most sophisticated and smart analysis of where we are, and I want to, Mark, I'm going to impose upon you from not going out and finishing your yard work to stick with us for a few minutes. | ||
| I've already showered and everything, so that's fine. | ||
| I want to go, before, when you say CIA and Mossad, because that's what we're talking about, there's not so much military intelligence, maybe some shinbin, but it's really Mossad. | ||
| When you say 80%, it's what 80%? | ||
| Particularly given the urgency. | ||
| The urgency. | ||
| I tell you what, why don't you hang, I want you to think about that. | ||
| I want to make sure you have a reasoned response. | ||
| We're here on a Saturday at the traditional Saturday morning war room. | ||
| As you know, one of my favorite show of the week. | ||
| Because we can catch our breath and go a little more in depth. | ||
| This afternoon, if things play out like we think they may play out, we will be back live around 4 or 5 o 'clock to see the president come back and kind of hang around the rim to see what happens at this national security briefing. | ||
| There are people saying, there are a lot of people saying, hey, they're trying to play out the negotiations. | ||
| There are also people saying that Number two, the Persians are pretty bureaucratic and slow anyway. | ||
| It's tough to even get somebody to answer Wyckoff's call about who you even sit down with. | ||
| There's also some of the Persians saying, well, hey, you've got to put Bibi back on a leash. | ||
| We can't keep getting bombed and shelled while we're negotiating. | ||
| We're not going to be able to sell that to our people because it's going to look like it's coercive. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But there's others. | ||
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I'm just reporting what I'm hearing from pretty good sources. | |
| The party is on. | ||
| So, another big weekend in this unfolding aspect of the Third World War. | ||
| And no, anyone that's telling you that the Third World War is not here absolutely does not understand. | ||
| The development and evolution of kinetic war. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Mark Caputo from Axios, next. | ||
| Seems kind of strange that the Prime Minister of Israel would launch this attack knowing they don't have the capability to take out the main enrichment site. | ||
| He must have been expecting Trump to get involved from the very beginning. | ||
| I think he's probably, yes, I think he probably has anticipated that this is something that he's wanted to do for the entire time that he's been the Israeli Prime Minister and has never had such a supportive voice in the White House as he sees in Donald Trump. | ||
| I don't think Trump wants to do this, by the way. | ||
| Let me also own that. | ||
| I don't think this is something Trump wants to do. | ||
| I think he wants a negotiated resolution. | ||
| But it just seems as if Israel has put us in this position where now, almost, the U.S. is feeling backed into a corner. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| As you know, we're a very pro-Israel show and site and platform. | ||
| And we catch a lot of grief for that. | ||
| We've been very supportive of going after the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, in Gaza, also what happened in Syria, the destruction of Hezbollah, even the taking out of the Persians' air defense, which the Israelis have done. | ||
| We're not a fan of this, and we're not a fan of this because of what Samir Khan has just said. | ||
| If the United States is going to be involved, we have to understand that at the beginning. | ||
| In your reporting, you just said something last block. | ||
| Caputo, that President Trump and his team kind of acquiesced when these guys came with this because the intelligence is 80% Mossad in CIA. | ||
| They're about 80% in agreement, is what I understand. | ||
| Essentially, allegedly, and I don't know what the intelligence is, they sort of mesh up about at an 80% rate, right? | ||
| Okay, but how did this, Or is it intelligence that, hey, we can make a move because it's good? | ||
| And at any time, as your reporting showed you, at any time, Schmerkner's point, that it was brought to President Trump's attention that, yo, when this attack starts, they do not have the capability, and they admit it, they don't have the capability to finish what they started. | ||
| And unless it's finished at Fordor, it's not finished. | ||
| It's really, it doesn't matter if you did the 80% or 90% you got or 75% you got doesn't matter because you got to get that last 25%, sir. | ||
| I can't speak to that. | ||
| What I can tell you, what I was told by one senior official, when I asked, okay, it's been reported that there was no new intelligence, but then Donald Trump essentially said there was, what's the deal? | ||
| And I was told this, is that in the view and the assessment of the CIA, and therefore the administration now, the Iranians were making progress three ways. | ||
| Making the delivery system for a nuclear weapon, huge progress there. | ||
| I'm quoting, by the way. | ||
| Getting more centrifuges and the guts to make a bomb, huge progress there. | ||
| Enriching from 20 to 60 to 90 percent. | ||
| Not as much progress. | ||
| We're talking months and weeks. | ||
| Not days and not years either. | ||
| And what I was led to believe is where the two intelligence agencies or countries might differ is the degree of the enrichment and the speed with which a nuclear weapon can be assembled and deployed. | ||
| I just want to go back to their own words. | ||
| That would confirm on Sunday evening, and Brett Baer, who's the star of the really news side of Fox, interviewing Bebe, and he asked kind of the same question I just asked you, and he said, look, you know, why was it Thursday night? | ||
| What was the urgency? | ||
| and he kind of went through some of those, but he said it's about 12 to 13 months away, right? | ||
| Is it any, it's all the summation of yours that In the IEAE, we shouldn't miss this. | ||
| In Israel's side, they're saying now they're getting enrichment for, I don't know, 10 to 15 bombs, or the potential for 10 to 15 bombs. | ||
| Am I correct about that report, which shocked everybody? | ||
| I can't remember that specific number, but when that report, pardon the pun, not intended when I thought of it, it was a bombshell report. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| enrichment that was happening. | ||
| And when we go back to what Tulsi Gabbard was saying before, she was saying the amount of enrichment that, and this was in March, that Iran was engaging in was not consistent with a peacetime nuclear development. | ||
| So there's been this narrative out there that she's some sort of peacenik who sort of massaged the numbers. | ||
| And now some of her Probably, with the benefit of hindsight, it could have been harsher, harder, or more dire. | ||
| But what's clear, and what really was made clear in the IAEA report, was Iran was doing a lot of enrichment in their assessment. | ||
| And that had a major effect. | ||
| Understand that when Donald Trump withdrew, I can't remember if it was 2019 or 2020, 2018, in his first administration, Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. | ||
| The JCPOA struck by Obama and other nations with Iran. | ||
| And one of the criticisms then was that the United States shouldn't have done it, and Iran would have been able to then enrich more uranium and would have freehand to do it. | ||
| However, it was still sort of bound by the other signatories. | ||
| Nevertheless, in the agreement, there is something that they call snapback, which essentially calls for much more sanctions and much harsher treatment of Iran if it did stuff like what the IAEA report showed. | ||
| I think what's also being left out, and I'm guilty of this, of the discussion in Israel or Bibi's mind, is it's not just that Iran's proxies were degraded. | ||
| It's not just that Assad was gone from Syria. | ||
| It's not just that the Israelis had a plan that had a high degree of likelihood of success, which wound up being true. | ||
| It's not just that Iran, according to the IAEA and all of these other reports, showed that Iran was close to making a nuclear weapon or was dangerously close to it. | ||
| It's also that Iran's missile program was starting to progress in leaps and bounds a lot faster than it's comfortable for Israel. | ||
| And Israel, it's not just Iron Dome. | ||
| That's just sort of a... | ||
| But Israel has a tiered air defense system of interceptor missiles to shoot down rockets and missiles. | ||
| In fact, the United States, I think, has, what, seven? | ||
| I think we have seven THAAD, theater high altitude area. | ||
| I can't remember the exact term, the interceptor missile systems. | ||
| And two of them are in Israel to help them cope with this. | ||
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Yes. | |
| But the thing with having an interceptor missile system, and I'm just going to use... | ||
| If you've got 500 interceptor missiles and your opponent launches 1,000 missiles, guess what happens? | ||
| You get hit by 500 of them. | ||
| And Israel was looking at being overwhelmed by a bellicose Iran should it launch those. | ||
| So everything for Bibi, and I understand this, and he obviously has domestic problems at home, which is a whole other kettle of fish. | ||
| All of those things just lined up where this just was the time for them to attack. | ||
| And to Smirconish's point, in the back of... | ||
| I don't know, though, when it became clear that they'd need the United States to bunker bust the Florida nuclear facility under a mountain. | ||
| It's number one, unclear how effective that's going to be. | ||
| And despite the saber rattling on Fox or other shows that, oh, we just have this sort of magic bomb that's going to blow things up, there is a long history of war of those who are unaccustomed to the horrors of it are most eager to engage in the activity. | ||
| Well, they weren't. | ||
| And so Trump is well aware that It's easily made and easily broken. | ||
| No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, as Klaus Witz had said. | ||
| There's so much there, and I want to get Jack Pasova in, but I just want to get one point very clear. | ||
| And there's no plan. | ||
| Max Boot has reinforced this. | ||
| many people have reinforced this that are not MAGA and pretty much never Trump. | ||
| There is... | ||
| And I'm not talking about commando racing or anything like that, but they have no air capability. | ||
| No air capability. | ||
| If you start this and you have to... | ||
| One, the ballistic missile program that clearly you're absolutely correct that they were making huge, the Persians making huge progress on, and that was a concern. | ||
| But on the actual enrichment in the facility of actually weaponizing this, it gets down to Fedor at the end. | ||
| You have to make sure that that's out, and I think they've scattered it all over the country, but at least you've got to do that. | ||
| They don't have the actual air assault capability to take that out. | ||
| That absolutely has to come from the Americans, does it not? | ||
| It does. | ||
| They don't have the bomb, and they don't have the delivery system to deliver the bomb, that is the planes. | ||
| Now, in the past, Israel had actually offered, and this has been known for a while, to say, hey, look, we'll fly the planes, right? | ||
| you know, blood won't be on your hand. | ||
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So I know that was... | |
| I'm not sure how in play that is here. | ||
| But yes, in order for there to be more certainty, and in order to really destroy the facility, they will likely need the American B-2 bomber and this massive MOP ordinance. | ||
| That said, there is a component, and there are people who say, The famous military idea that fire without maneuver is inconclusive. | ||
| Maneuver without fire is suicide. | ||
| But in order to really make sure there's a school of thought that there does need to be boots on the ground, or do need to be boots on the ground, that some commando or other sort of group of men, soldiers, or whatever have to go in there and get the stuff and then blow it up. | ||
| Now, the United States is not going to do that. | ||
| That would mean Israel. | ||
| Israel doesn't like to spend its soldiers because it's a small country. | ||
| So that leaves the logical option of just bomb the hell out of the mountain. | ||
| But that might be inconclusive. | ||
| Last thing, Ted Postol, MIT scientist and expert in missiles. | ||
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Hang on. | |
| I want to hold this. | ||
| I want to hold this. | ||
| I'm going to hold this after the break. | ||
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Hang on. | |
| Sorry. | ||
| Posobiec's with us. | ||
| We've taken Caputo out of his garden. | ||
| And put him on the show, which he should. | ||
| He should be on primetime everywhere. | ||
| Taking the time to actually walk through this with real reporting from the White House. | ||
| Is the party on? | ||
| If it is, folks. | ||
| We'll talk about that. | ||
| I'm going to get Jack Posobiec in here. | ||
| By the way, Birchgold. | ||
| Always on Saturday. | ||
| Take your phone out. | ||
| Bannon, 9-8-9-8-9-8. | ||
| I think now is the time. | ||
| There's enough turbulence. | ||
| It's only going to get worse. | ||
| 9-8-9-8-9-8 to get the ultimate guide for investing in gold in the age of Trump. | ||
| And you get access to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Make sure you do that today. | ||
| I've got to mention, I've never had a reporter of any type actually quote Clausewitz the way it should be quoted in a perfect time. | ||
| I would be remiss if I didn't say that your father, First Lieutenant Philip Caputo, I think wrote, if not the best book in the Vietnam War, one of the best books in the Vietnam War, The Rumor of War. | ||
| He knew war, did he not, sir? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I was brought up, he was a reporter before that. | ||
| In fact, the reason you know about Mayor Daley's voting fraud is because he was part of that Pulitzer Prize winning team for the Chicago Tribune back in 72. But I was certainly brought up as a son of a Vietnam vet. | ||
| And who was there on the shores in 65 and then returned as a reporter to cover the fall of Saigon in 75 had seen what happens with the promise of war and then the realities of it. | ||
| And very often those jingoistic people who predict that things are going to go great very often don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Things don't go so well. | ||
| Yeah, the Gulf of Tung King. | ||
| Jack Bosovic, by the way, people have never... | ||
| A rumor of war would be a great weekend read for folks. | ||
| Compared to the Gulf of Tong King and all the all the chess beating that went into Vietnam and then the the men that actually had to deliver in the brutality of it. | ||
| And oftentimes. | ||
| Sometimes, You want to get a real view from the ground? | ||
| Rumor Wars, your book. | ||
| There's other great ones too, but this one's fantastic. | ||
| Your dad's just an extraordinary writer, Mark. | ||
| Jack Posobiec, observations on what Brother Caputo has been putting forward. | ||
| Well, Steve, I have to agree. | ||
| Caputo is exactly right on these situations. | ||
| War, easy to get in, hard to get out. | ||
| And my former boss there, Mr. Michael Smirconish, you know, cribbing off of stuff that I've been saying on the war room all week. | ||
| But that's okay. | ||
| It's not the first time that he's cribbed off of Posobiec back when I was in college. | ||
| And he would, you know, take all my, take all my dramps and never give me credit for his op-eds and his Mumia Abu Dhabar book. | ||
| But look, Steve, the latest is that President Trump has deployed B2. | ||
| Stealth bombers, these spirit bombers, each with two bomb bays, have the ability to drop these bunker busters. | ||
| They have been conducting refueling, so there are some indications that they may be riding heavy as they fly out across the Pacific. | ||
| Fox News reported earlier this morning that they have indications they're headed for Anderson Air Force Base. | ||
| Now, that's on the northern end of Guam. | ||
| I was out at the southern end of Guam a couple of times on the naval base there, but up in the northern base. | ||
| They have a huge Anderson Air Force base. | ||
| This is the key role of Guam and the island-hopping campaign that was undertaken in World War II regarding this. | ||
| Now, that would put them just at the outside of strike range for... | ||
| Now, this is not as close to Diego Garcia, certainly not as close as Saudi or our air base in Qatar, which are there, obviously, in the Gulf. | ||
| So if they wanted to strike Iran from Guam, they would have the ability to, through air-to-air refueling. | ||
| We know these KC-135s have created this air bridge basically around the world at this point. | ||
| And, of course, they could also redeploy to Diego and then fly up from there. | ||
| But currently it looks like those B-2 bombers, four to six of them, flying in formation with refuelers and others, are headed towards Guam, right smack dab, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as we speak. | ||
| So President Trump clearly ratcheting up the pressure here on Iran to make a decision. | ||
| He's getting the assets in place, there's no doubt, to give him alternatives. | ||
| Mark, help us out here. | ||
| This is the question. | ||
| Understanding you didn't have the ability to actually get this done, completed, complete the mission, right? | ||
| What was the urgency from your reporting and what you've heard and what you know, what was the urgency that you had to have a sneak attack Pearl Harbor type strike? | ||
| Last Thursday night as the initiating event of this conflict. | ||
| What was it that, if anything, more than just the urgency of the matter? | ||
| And since their stated objectives have been from the beginning, including what you said, the acquiescence of prompts of administration to go, when did this, because this clearly shifted to a decapitation regime change. | ||
| Now, we said on Friday when we started our coverage, That this was a decapitation, at least of the military, maybe not the Ayatollah, but the senior military command, even people outside the nuclear program. | ||
| It was a decapitation, looking like regime change at the time, because to us it looked pretty obvious. | ||
| But what was the urgency to do this, and then when did they get into the upsell? | ||
| Let's try to upsell the Americans on regime change, sir. | ||
| Well, I can't speak to Netanyahu's mind frame. | ||
| But as described to me, this was the time where it would never be more propitious for Israel to strike. | ||
| Iran was on its proxies were gone. | ||
| It was close to developing a nuke, allegedly. | ||
| It definitely had a missile program that was a dire threat to Israel. | ||
| Trump had finally said, I'm not going to hold you back. | ||
| And so it was go time. | ||
| I don't know all the factors and all the intelligence. | ||
| I think if you were to feed all of these factors that I laid out into chat GBT or some sort of logic game, it would have told BB to make the strike when he did. | ||
| So that is just a guess on my part based on just my understanding filtered through others. | ||
| Of what Israel's calculus was. | ||
| The administration has told us, and we have reported at Axios, that, yeah, the Israelis want regime change. | ||
| That's not really our concern, I was told by a senior administration official. | ||
| And as evidence of that, Netanyahu did want to strike the Ayatollah, we are told, and Donald Trump said, don't do it. | ||
| And when I asked this official, why not, they said, Consider this to be, it's a case of the Ayatollah you know versus the Ayatollah you don't know. | ||
| And Trump still wanted sort of more time to make a deal. | ||
| He still might want some more time, but to Jack's point, boy, the pressure really is ratcheting up. | ||
| When you say the pressure is ratcheting up, because there's colleagues of yours that are in the party, because right now, as we sit here on Saturday morning, audience, there are two schools of thought of what's happening. | ||
| One is that the party is on, that a decision not only has been made, but it looks like it's totally futile to try to negotiate with. | ||
| There's even not enough guys there. | ||
| You don't know who's making decisions. | ||
| They're talking about they need to cease fire. | ||
| The Israelis are not going to do that. | ||
| So there's a party is on school. | ||
| And then there's others said, hey, this two weeks thing may play out. | ||
| Caputo, from everything you know currently, because you're working this weekend, where do you think we stand, sir? | ||
| In all my conversations, people think it's more likely than less likely that the United States is going to strike Iran. | ||
| However, it hasn't happened yet. | ||
| Now, all the pieces aren't in place, but maybe the party's not on, but the hall is rented, the bunting is up, there's punch in the bowl, and some people are walking in with hidden blasts of booze. | ||
| Sir, how can we follow you on social media? | ||
| How do we follow you today? | ||
| Because I know the audience is going to want to do that. | ||
| Where did they go? | ||
| More active on Twitter than anywhere else. | ||
| At Mark A. Caputo. | ||
| It's Mark with a C. There I am. | ||
| Technically, my first name is Mark Antonio. | ||
| Easier to remember with a C than otherwise. | ||
| But I have the extra A in there because someone else had the Mark Caputo handle when I went to go found it. | ||
| Last question. | ||
| Did your father... | ||
| Well, I pulled it off the shelf. | ||
| Like, this is, you know, the Klaus Witts, Jean Migny, these are the books from Officer's Candidate School that he had. | ||
| This says Da Nang, June 23rd, almost the anniversary of that, 1965. | ||
| So that's Klaus Witts, you know, there's Vigetius, which is probably my favorite book. | ||
| Mao Tse Tung, but these are from the OCS, from the Marine Corps back in the day. | ||
| But after he was a soldier or a Marine, he became a foreign correspondent and covered a number of conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, including, I think, the Six-Day War in Israel, the war in Eritrea and Ethiopia. | ||
| So he did quite a bit of foreign correspondent work, and he left that line of work after. | ||
| Well, almost after he was shot in Beirut, not fatally, but when it went to hell there in, I guess, what, 76, 77? | ||
| That's when it was sort of time to get out of the combat zones. | ||
| Mark Camputo, thank you very much for sharing this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Appreciate you guys. | ||
|
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Take it easy. | |
| Good to see you, Jack. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Pasovic, thoughts? | ||
| Well, Steve, the one thing that I would add to some of the calculus on here is that in Israel, it's not as if Bibi Netanyahu is currently sitting on top of a strong coalition the way that President Trump is. | ||
| President Trump's currently 54%, 55% popularity among the American people. | ||
| DB Netanyahu is currently around 30% among Israel, and this is mostly because And he faced, just about two weeks ago, right on the eve of when all these strikes kicked off, he faced a serious challenge to his premiership in that his coalition almost broke apart and he narrowly survived a leadership vote by just single digit votes. | ||
| On the question of this, this ultra-Orthodox party wanted to pull out, and they didn't want to do the conscription. | ||
| they didn't want to be conscripted anymore. | ||
| And this has been a longstanding issue of theirs in Israel. | ||
| So, and there are also elements, by the way, of, that I'm told, of the Israeli national security infrastructure saying that, wait a minute, is this being done out of political concerns for Bibi Netanyahu personally, or is this being done out of any, you know, claiming that it's being done out of national security concerns? | ||
| And so, So, you know, I would just like to throw that in the mix because we do always have to consider the political calculations here as well as the national security calculations and the intelligence. | ||
| And that really could be the question for why, as anyone can agree, Steve, how many different... | ||
| We've heard they're about to have it. | ||
| They're going to have it in two days. | ||
| Well, now it's actually the delivery system. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's the enrichment. | ||
| Then it's a month away. | ||
| then it's a year away. | ||
| Then, you know, and you've got Israeli military telling AFP last night, the Associated Free Press, that they... | ||
| And Netanyahu in the New York Post has it up right now. | ||
| Murdoch paper has Netanyahu saying we can go it alone. | ||
| So it's all over the map here. | ||
| And I think that one of the reasons that a lot of Americans are scratching their heads at the lightning fast speed that all of these events are moving is that we haven't had to sit down and have a serious adult conversation about why this had to happen recently. | ||
| I know you're busy with the family, Dave. | ||
| I just want to hold you through this short break because I want to talk about the ballistic missile program and the citizens of Israel are taking some serious incoming. | ||
| You've got to talk about the dome, how it's worked, the American involvement, the naval assets that are helping, the air assets that are helping, because an underreported story is that the citizens of Israel, and Bibi's, I think, his polling has got to be at a record high. | ||
| They are, I believe, all the controversy around Bibi. | ||
| Has been, I think, settled because they are obviously very focused on taking out the Persians. | ||
| To them, they know it's an existential threat. | ||
| And there is conflicting reporting this morning. | ||
| Both Agency Free Press saying the Israelis saying they've knocked the nuclear program back two or three years and BB telling the New York Post they can go it alone to finish the job, finish what they started. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We've got Poso for one more segment, so let's take advantage of it. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
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We rejoice when there's no more. | |
| Let's take down the CCP. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | ||
| I'm informed by the engine room that it is not Clausewitz, it's von Mulkey about the von Schlieffelin plan, that any plan... | ||
| Jack Posobiec, those officer candidate books that Caputo's dad had to read in Officer Candidate School at Quantico back in the mid-1960s before he went to Vietnam as the first lieutenant infantry officer, are the ones that you've had to read and I had to read. | ||
| Talk to me about, or Mike Tyson put it better. | ||
| Or more succinctly, everybody's got a plan in the box. | ||
| Everybody's got a plan until you get punched right in the mouth, sir. | ||
| Well, Steve, that's right. | ||
| You and I went up through OCS up there in Newport. | ||
| I don't know what you went through. | ||
| I went through in winter, and if anyone's joining the Navy and you're going up to Navy OCS, do not go to Newport in the winter. | ||
| That was one of the worst mistakes. | ||
| I ever made covers blowing off all over the place in the snow and in the rain and all the rest of it. | ||
| And you have to run across the parade ground to go get it. | ||
| Not a good look for Butter Bar Pasovic in that one. | ||
| But the enemy always gets a vote. | ||
| And I see these people on cable news, and I just look at them and say, did you serve? | ||
| Did you serve? | ||
| Have you actually been in operation? | ||
| Have you seen what happens when troops get involved? | ||
| And you get so many people, Steve, and they have this Marvel movie thinking, you know, like it's Star Wars and Luke Skywalker is going to fly up, and oh, you just drop one missile in and it's going to blow up the whole Death Star. | ||
| And I'm sorry, that's just not how the real world works. | ||
| Plus, the Iranians also understand how our bunker busters work. | ||
| And Caputo mentioned the MIT professor and said, wait a minute, there's a lot of problems with this plan. | ||
| You've got angles upon angles that you have to deal with. | ||
| You're talking about reinforced granite that has – they have ways to deflect the explosion. | ||
| They know about our bunker busters. | ||
| It was designed to protect from bunker busters, all of which to say this isn't going to be one fell swoop. | ||
| It's going to take multiple missions. | ||
| It's going to take multiple flights. | ||
| So you're talking potentially if each B-2 can carry – and these things are the size of a bus. | ||
| Okay, these bombs are massive, massive bombs. | ||
| Pray to God that nothing happened, no malfunctions, no anti-aircraft fire comes at them. | ||
| Sure, they're going to be able to fly high enough for that, I assume. | ||
| But you've got to hit this thing dead on each time, possibly 10 strikes to get the job done. | ||
| And then there's real questions as to whether or not the technology is still just going to survive. | ||
| And really, all you're going to do is set them back. | ||
| And you have to be back here in two years when President Trump is still president, because they're going to be able to dig it out or reconstitute it somewhere else. | ||
| And so there's serious questions of, look, if you put in this much, that's why that we're going to get sucked into a wider thing. | ||
| And I'm sick, by the way, of this smear campaign, Steve, of people calling you an isolationist and calling all the MAGA isolationists and saying, oh, you're isolated. | ||
| No, no, excuse me. | ||
| We are America first. | ||
| Populist nationalist. | ||
| Was President Trump an isolationist when he opposed the Iraq war? | ||
| Was President Trump an isolationist when he said we need to get our troops out of harm's way in Syria where they're not doing anything, sitting there as human shields, driving all the chaos that's going on in the land, as President Trump said, the land of blood and death? | ||
| No, he wasn't isolationist. | ||
| He was putting American interests first. | ||
| And because he understands, by the way, he's read history, right? | ||
| And you see these neocons, that's the problem. | ||
| They don't read any history. | ||
| They're not reading Klausowitz. | ||
| They're not listening to the war room, not doing any of this stuff. | ||
| So they don't know about the danger of imperial overstretch. | ||
| Because the danger of imperial overstretch is that you forget about the heartland. | ||
| You forget about your core population. | ||
| And the core population of the United States... | ||
| That's why President Trump is the president. | ||
| That's why we don't have Jeb Bush as the president. | ||
| Jeb Bush is now the president of the anti-Iran coalition over there, by the way. | ||
| It's like the band is getting back together over on that side. | ||
| Yeah, hold on. | ||
| Take a second. | ||
| That was sent to us by the engine room. | ||
|
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Talk about Jeb Bush actually chairs a group, right? | |
| Of course he is. | ||
| That's the anti-Iran coalition, sir. | ||
| Dave, let's go back to basics, alright? | ||
| The Bush family is an oil family. | ||
| They are oil men, right? | ||
| There Will Be Blood, the great film. | ||
| Paul Thomas, go watch that, right? | ||
| You understand the Bushes? | ||
| Go watch that. | ||
| They are still licking their chops, looking at the oil fields. | ||
| Of Iran saying, you know something? | ||
| We couldn't quite get all the oil out of Iraq, and so we go and look over at Iran, and you know what? | ||
| There's all that oil there. | ||
| And, you know, we had access to it under the Shah. | ||
| And then Mo Siguide came up, and he was trying to nationalize everything. | ||
| So we got rid of him, and we got a new Shah in. | ||
| But then these pesky little Islamists came up, and now we got kicked out again. | ||
| Well, first it was the British, and then we got kicked out as well because we tried to backfill the British because after the war they couldn't. | ||
| These guys... | ||
| They don't read any of the history. | ||
| They just say, you know what? | ||
| This means money for us, money and power. | ||
| And they don't look at the broader scope of things. | ||
| And here's something that somebody was saying to me earlier. | ||
| They said, oh, Jack, you're just pushing Iranian and Chinese narratives. | ||
| Excuse me, hold on a second. | ||
| Our carriers just dropped coverage in the South China Sea to go to... | ||
| China is now operating more carriers in the South China Sea than the United States for the first time in history. | ||
| They got two, the Shandong and the Liaoning. | ||
| Then you got Russia. | ||
| They said, wait a minute, who has benefited by $150 barrel gas? | ||
| Well, that's Russia, $150 barrel of fuel. | ||
| Russia is benefited. | ||
| That fuels the coffers of the Kremlin to be able to ground and pound, as they've been doing, to the Ukrainian army. | ||
| So Putin's going to sit back and say, hey, don't do this, but if you want to put money in my pocket, I'm not going to stop you. | ||
| All right, that's what kicked off that whole thing with Nord Stream 2. And so to these people that are looking at this saying, oh, it's going to be good for America, good for America, you're not looking at the wider scope of the consequences of your actions. | ||
| Jack, I know you've got to bounce. | ||
| You've got family obligations. | ||
| Hopefully we can grab you later in the afternoon if we do this live coverage. | ||
| We're working this through right now. | ||
| Where do people go, Jack, on your social media feeds? | ||
| Hi, Steve. | ||
| I'm here. | ||
| I'm tracking it all. | ||
| Human Events Daily. | ||
| By the way, last night, Charlie Kirk and I put up a huge episode of Thought Crime. | ||
| I would encourage everyone to go check that out on my podcast, Apple, Spotify, and Charlie's as well, where we got into all of this. | ||
| We got into every single piece of this. | ||
| Book of Genesis, Ted Cruz, all the scripture, all the theology, all the politics. | ||
| We walked through chapter and verse, including the Bunker Busters and whether or not Fox News is telling you the truth about the physics on this. | ||
| Jack Posobiec. | ||
| Go with God today. | ||
| We'll see you this afternoon. | ||
| Tucker Carlson, Benny Johnson, the great Charlie Kirk, Jack Pasovic. | ||
| I'll toss a worm in there. | ||
| Folks done a pretty good job at making sure you got all the information so that you can, in the fog of war, because there's a lot of fog out there, folks, that you can see clearly. | ||
| We're not going to let this be like the Iraq war. | ||
| We're not going to let all this cheerleading and the roses are going to be thrown down there. | ||
| We're going to give you a reality check. | ||
| Make sure you fully understand what we're getting into, because when we get into it, we're going to have to see it through, right? | ||
| Right, Mr. Ben. | ||
| Short commercial break. |
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