Interview: How the Constitution Was Bypassed in the Iran War
Charles Johnson argues the U.S. bypassed the Constitution during the Iran conflict, noting 47 years of undeclared hostilities since the 1953 CIA coup violated Founding Fathers' intent for Congressional war authority. He critiques President Trump's undefined objectives and crony capitalism, citing his sons' drone investments and failures to address the girls' school bombing apology. Johnson exposes historical distortions like the 1979 embassy takeover, the Iran-Contra affair, and the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian Airbus, claiming the "deep state" manipulates media to sustain imperial overstretch while ignoring democratic republics. Ultimately, this systemic deception erodes public trust and enables capricious military decisions without legal accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, joining us now is New York Times best-selling author Charles Goyette.
His book is Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.
And he's had a lot of experience with the military, with weapons systems.
We're going to talk to him a little bit about his experience with the strategic defense initiative that Reagan had and kind of get his take on what's happening with this anti-ballistic missile thing, as well as where are we going now?
Where are we right now in this war?
Thank you so much for joining us, Charles.
So it's a great pleasure to be with you, David.
Thank you very much for having me.
Well, thank you.
You know, we don't really know.
We're getting all these contradictory statements every day talking about an empire of lies.
Is it nearly over?
Are we just beginning?
We get different stories even from the same people in the Trump regime.
So exactly where are we?
We always got the fog of war, don't we?
And I guess it's mainly because we're getting a lot of smoke blown at us by the government on both sides of the war.
Tell us what you see in terms of what you're watching.
First of all, we're not at war.
Don't forget that we've been at war for 47 years.
So it's total confusion, the fog of war, I guess.
That's not good enough.
It's just political fog.
You know, just to get off track for one second, there's a great deal to be said for the virtues of the Founding Fathers who knew the historical precedents for these kinds of events.
And they decided that on good precedent, they decided that the American people should have the power to declare war through their elected representatives.
And it was because, first of all, I mean, two primary reasons.
First of all, of course, they knew the precedents did suggest that executives, kings, and so on, popes even, had a propensity to engage in needless wars.
That's right.
And that if you lodge the power with the people who had to pay for them and die in them, then there was a certain amount of reluctance that didn't appear in the executive branch.
So they moved the war-making authority without ambiguity over to the people.
But it had the second advantage of having the debate about the objectives of the war clarified in a declaration of war.
So you know that in signing the Declaration of Independence, the founders pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
In a declaration of war, generally the authorities, the relevant authorities declare, they declare what the objective is, who the enemy is, how much resources they're dependent on devoting to it.
And then you know how the end game plays out.
We don't ever have any of that.
And it has the additional virtue of making clear to potential opponents that we're at war with these people.
And if you do anything contrary or that befriends them during this period, and especially to our own people, that would be an act of treason.
But I hear people bandied about the word treason all the time in the United States today, and yet there is no declaration of war.
And without, I mean, the president can't wake up in the morning and say, you know, I'm really, really angry at the people in Bolivia.
And so they become the objects of a war.
And you could commit treason by doing business with the people in Bolivia.
It's insane.
That's one of the reasons why we need a declaration of war.
And of course, we haven't had one since World War II.
But I'm sorry, I got off track there, David.
But no, you're absolutely right.
But, of course, that's what this president does.
I mean, we could wake up tomorrow morning and be at war with Canada or Greenland.
That's what we're looking at for the last year.
When you put this in, people talk about Taco.
Trump always chickens out.
I said this.
Trump always is capricious as well as odious in what he does.
And so we never know from moment to moment because neither does he.
He doesn't know from moment to moment what he's going to do.
He hasn't made up his mind.
And I guess when we look at this war, that's one of the key things.
He's back and forth.
He doesn't even know where he's going because he hasn't even defined the objectives and what winning looks like in his own mind, let alone for everybody else.
And if you had a debate with this, you would expect at least one person out of the 500 and so in Congress would ask the uncomfortable question, why are we doing this?
And what does winning look like?
What is the objective in this?
And we don't know any of that right now.
And so everybody's just wondering, how long is he going to go on this escapade that he's on?
Well, you know, he's going to go, one, he's going to go one to unconditional surrender.
And two, he's going to go to the point where oil prices get too high and he becomes desperate to get out.
You know, one of the news sites, I think it was political, reported the other day that Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, her hair was virtually on fire trying to figure out, you know, call in all the secretaries.
What can we do to suppress gasoline prices because we're in big trouble in November?
Well, that's funny.
Here's what you could do to suppress gasoline prices.
Don't go to war.
That's right.
So think about everything.
You know, there's so much guidance in the backstory and the history and the accumulated wisdom of mankind to prevent these kinds of things.
It's not just declaration of war.
You know, the story of what is her name, who let all the sorrows of the world out of, oh, Pandora, Pandora's box.
Well, Prometheus is the one who stole the fire from the gods, the fire of light, you know, that we would be able to use our ration, our reason, and so on and so forth.
And was tormented for having done so.
But Prometheus means forethought.
And then his brother was afterthought.
His name was Epimetheus.
So, of course, his bride was Pandora.
You think about things later when it's too late.
Gee, I wish I hadn't opened that box.
So we have this, not a Promethean society, but an Epimethean society that thinks about everything later.
That's right.
You know, when you look at this, again, we go to war and we've got our gas tank is half full.
We don't even have, the Europeans are debating as to whether or not they're going to release their strategic petroleum reserves.
We go to war with ours half empty.
Of course, it was emptied by Biden because he had put sanctions on, and then Trump didn't fill it up, even though he's bragging about low oil prices last year.
He didn't fill up his tank when you said prices.
And didn't Biden dump the strategic petroleum reserves to make things look better just in time for the November election?
That's right.
That's right.
You know, this is how they work.
I mean, we're all at play, and our affairs and our prosperity and our liberties are all at the hands of these guys that don't know what the heck they're doing and will do anything to further their own fortunes.
I saw the story, I believe, yesterday that the Trump family, I guess the sons, you know, I mean, we're already up to our eyeballs at profiteering and crony capitalism.
You know, I saw wristwatch TV for Donald Trump.
I'm your favorite president.
Here's my wristwatch.
You know, one of these days, somebody's going to really look into the cryptocurrency stuff.
But the boys came up yesterday.
They're investing in war drones now.
They have some sort of a deal to take a substantial stake in the production of war drones.
I mean, you know, would Jefferson or Washington have behaved like this?
Or would they have let their family behave like this?
Not a chance.
I guess the most disgusting thing I've seen is everybody is talking about who's responsible for bombing this girls' school and killing like 160-something children.
And Trump doesn't even have the respect for the American people to try to come up with a plausible excuse or deniability, right?
He just makes stuff up.
Like, yeah, we sell the Tomahawk to everybody and Iran's got them and Iran probably did it and all the rest of the stuff.
It's just childish what he's doing and a total disregard for human life.
He doesn't.
We've had the senator from Louisiana, Kennedy, apologize publicly for that.
But neither Trump nor Hegseth apologized.
They just said, well, I don't know, maybe somebody else.
We'll look into it and see what happened.
They don't want to accept responsibility for it.
They don't want to apologize.
They don't offer any plausible deniability to the American people.
They figure we're just going to go along with whatever they do.
And evidently, they're right.
That's the amazing thing about it.
Evidently so.
Yeah, and you talk about prosaic.
You know, look at Lindsey Graham gloating about how we're all going to get rich.
The we, I guess.
Who is we, David?
Who exactly is we?
You know, I posted on my X account today, I think, or yesterday or today, a stock chart of Raytheon stock, Makers of the Tomahawk.
Oh, they're doing great.
You may be paying five bucks in California or more for gasoline, but, you know, Raytheon shareholders, they're just doing great.
So we are going to get rich.
It's a big club, but you and I aren't in it.
That's right.
Which brings us to replenishing all these arms that they're rapidly running out of.
I mean, that's the kind of the subtext of a lot of this is you had Kane, who's the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was saying as they were getting ready to go on, you know, we may not have sufficient ammunition really for this, right?
As well as allies.
So they were low on allies and ammunition.
They're also low on strategic petroleum reserve.
But hey, let's go to war anyway.
We'll let Israel set the timetable and tell us who we have to go to war with.
But when you look at this and you look at your experience with the Strategic Defense Initiative that Reagan began, the anti-missile thing, what is your take?
Have you been following what's happening?
I've seen a lot of different stories about how this is shaking out on both sides.
Which side is running out of missiles first?
Whether we have radar sites that have been taken down.
What is your take on that?
Well, my take is I simply don't know.
And secondarily, I don't believe anything the state says.
You know, the mutual assured destruction defense policy of the United States that prevailed during the 60s and into the 70s was a disaster.
You know, it didn't provide any defense.
Look at the defense budget that we had at the time.
It provided no defense for the American people whatsoever with one small carve out.
And that is that the governing classes in Washington were able to provide a small missile defense system for themselves, but not for the rest of the country.
I mean, it was an absolute disaster.
And, you know, by the game theory, by the game logic of mutual assured destruction, people that were opponents of it said, well, if we have a defense capability, which is what Reagan was trying to institute, if we have a defense capability, then the Soviets will be at a disadvantage because we can strike them and destroy them and they can't retaliate.
And that was the whole standoff logic of that mad period.
And so Reagan said, to everybody's shock, Reagan said, well, we'll just give them the technology too.
Now, the reason, whatever you think of that, and I was, I had been being stunned by it, but there's an internal logic to that.
But whatever you think of him wanting to do that, Reagan genuinely believed that the United States of America is not a country that preemptively attacks other countries.
MAGA Coalition Broken Faith00:07:25
That's right.
He literally believed that.
There may have been substantial evidence on the other side.
I'm not prepared to say, but it's just been gangbusters since then of attacks on other countries.
And, you know, we're not very good at it.
We make a mess of things.
I mean, you know, you could look at Iraq, Libya, Syria, the mess in Ukraine and now the mess in Iran.
And there's no reason to think that the current mess in Iran is going to turn out any better than the prior ones.
No, no.
Yeah, it has been a pragmatic disaster when you look at it from that standpoint.
No question about it.
But it is also a moral disaster if we can attack people that have not attacked us.
Throughout history, that has always been the litmus test for who is justified in their war.
Is it a war in defense or is it a war of aggression?
And we've taken the aggressor point over and over again.
And that's, I think, where we are right now.
So as people are talking about nukes and we've got reports about some Trump cabinet members who are building nuclear bunkers, they've got the guy who makes a lot of money doing that.
He's not at Franceberg or whatever.
He says, yeah, I've got a couple of Trump cabinet members that are asking me when's it going to be ready?
And a lot of people are concerned about that.
What's your take on that, reading the tea leaves that you see in public?
Well, I've told friends since before the last election last fall that I didn't think that Trump would last two years of this term.
And, you know, that's a safe bet for somebody like me to make because you win so many ways.
You know, there's the ugly way of, you know, we know he's been attacked.
There have been assassination attacks.
But there's also the matter of his health, which can't be swept under the carpet forever.
That's a challenge.
There is the prospect that this will go very badly and the people will recognize it pretty quickly and decide to do something about it.
There's the chance that his mental deterioration will catch up with him like it didn't with Biden, and there's provision to remove him.
There is also the chance, I think, that Americans, I don't go down this because I'm not a master of this topic.
I look at it and it grows by the day.
And I guess I alluded to it a few minutes ago, but somebody's going to have to do something serious about looking at the extent of cronyism in this administration.
Oh, yeah.
It is off the charts.
I have never seen anything like this.
And it's run rampant.
And it's right in your favor.
It's everything that's not nailed down.
That's right.
And the stuff that's nailed down, too.
That's right.
And they don't even try to hide it.
That's what I said.
They have so little respect for the intelligence of the American people because he is surrounded by yes men and loyalists.
So he figures everybody is that way that supports him.
So they don't bother to come up with a plausible lie.
They don't try to cover up the corruption and the cronyism, as you point out.
It's all in everybody's face.
It's truly amazing.
Yeah.
And the Congress, you know, all they care about is their next reelection.
And so they're afraid that Trump will endorse their opponent and steer money to their opponent and so on.
So they dare not say anything.
But at one point along the way here, it's going to have to reach a critical mass.
The American people are losing faith in him.
The MAGA coalition is toast.
It's history.
It's dust.
It's finished.
He has split it so bad.
And I don't know what gets reformed out of it.
But, you know, now the Republican establishment is cheering for that neocon deep state figure, Marco Rubio, to be the next presidential nominee.
And so, I mean, we're just in a mess, but the whole thing is going to fracture in my view before the end of this year in some unforeseen way.
Well, I think this war is a good start to the big ultimate fracture.
When you look at that and you look at, of course, the Epstein files, that is something that's become a big problem for Trump with his base.
I'm sorry, the what files?
I'm sorry.
I don't recognize the term anymore.
It was something they used to talk about last year.
They've driven that off the front pages for sure.
Yeah.
Haven't driven it out of this show.
I mean, we slipped over the developments that are there, but they've done the best they can to make that go away.
But that really has broken faith with his base that is there.
And I think that's part of the issue.
I'm not sad to see the MAGA coalition go away because it is a coalition that has coalesced around an individual, not around principles, not around the Constitution, isn't it?
Yeah.
MAGA is what I say it is.
That's what he told, I think it was Tucker Carlson in the response to his break with Tucker Carlson.
He said, well, he's not MAGA.
MAGA is what I say it is.
Well, that's funny.
I remember the expression, make America great again, long before Trump was out of high school.
I mean, there have been Make America Great movements for a very long time.
And the idea, you know, this is supposed to be a government of laws and not a people.
And that should have been drummed into the American people from the earliest age, but it's not by whim or caprice, whatever the dear leader says.
We don't have dear leaders in this country, or we're not supposed to.
So when somebody runs on a platform of ending these awful, counterproductive, elective regime change wars on a program, he should be shamed by the people to the ends of the earth if he breaks that vow.
And he did.
He did.
And not only had it, but everybody that was running with him.
You had Tulsi Gabbard, you had JD Vance.
All of them were adamant that we're going to not do this regime change war.
Now, what are we doing?
We're doing the regime change war.
Yeah, I wonder, and I like Tulsi Gabbard very much.
And I debate with myself, and maybe you have a thought about this, but I think, well, she's got to make a statement and she's got to resign.
And, you know, they're marginalizing her at every extent, if not insulting her as well.
She's got to make a statement and resign.
We know on the record what she stood for, and we know what she said.
And then I think, you know, maybe she feels obligated to stay in there and do what she can to minimize the damage.
I don't know what the answer is.
And JD Vance, by the same token, I'm not, you know, JD Vance has always been a question mark for me.
I mean, I've trusted Tulsi, but JD Vance, I'm not sure.
You know, he says a lot of good things, but I've never been exactly comfortable or sure.
And now we're watching this.
And I think, you know, the only thing he can, honorable thing he can do at this point to me, if it were me, I would resign.
I'm not trying to say that that's what he must do.
Maybe he, you know, maybe he knows that Trump will be gone before the end of this year, as I surmise.
And he wants to be there to pick up the threads.
I guess that could be part of his reckoning, but maybe that's wise.
And maybe I'm foolish by saying, you know, somebody's got to resign because that has a tremendous clarifying effect on the people.
It'll be the topic of discussion for months if he were to do that.
And maybe it would have a salutary effect.
I agree.
And of course, when you talk about Tulsi Gabbard, I think resigning would be the best thing that she could do if she wanted to try to minimize what Trump is doing.
Mike Johnson's Twisted Fund00:05:55
What better way to do it than to lead people away from this and to foment a rebellion against this illegal war?
But for her own personal benefit, I don't see how it benefits her to stay there and deny all of her principles and become a boot-licking lackey like the rest of them.
It's just amazing.
But speaking of Congress, we talked about Congress being essential to declare war.
Look at what our Congress has done.
They basically said, I don't want this hot potato, and they kicked it away.
They don't want to have a, they shut down a resolution to hold a vote on this.
And then you've got Mike Johnson saying, well, they attacked us.
They hit three of our embassies after you unleashed a barrage on them.
That's the most twisted thing I've seen out of all this stuff coming from Mike Johnson.
It's so twisted.
And he's twisted right along the way.
He actually is one of the ones among many who said, well, this is not a war.
So he's been twisted.
And it's not just that.
I mean, he is the one that, for example, there was a movement.
I guess Nancy Mace led it.
There was a movement to open up the slush fund.
There is a congressional slush fund to pay off people who charge Congresspeople, elected officials, with sexual harassment.
They don't pay it themselves.
Their insurance company doesn't pay it.
We pay it.
We pay it.
And so there was a movement to open the books, take a look at it, see what John Cornyn has done, if he's one of the perpetrators and see what kind of a rat's nest this place in Washington is.
And of course, they couldn't have that.
I mean, that's so flagrant.
That's so, it's embarrassing to this country.
It's embarrassing our moral character.
You look at Dennis Hasser, longest serving Republicans, Speaker of the House.
And he was a pedophile.
They picked him.
He was a wrestling coach.
They picked him run for Congress and put him as speaker.
And, you know, we've seen this happen over and over again.
He was on with Rush Limbaugh defending, what was it, Tom DeLay, I think, in terms of pay their war.
Yeah.
And he was saying, oh, it's just politics from the Democrats.
There's nothing there.
Same stuff that Trump is doing now with the Epstein files.
And it truly is amazing that that has become so endemic, the sexual misconduct in Congress and their slush fund that they want to keep all that stuff.
They've got their own fund to pay for it.
I guess that's one of the perks of Congress, right?
Yeah, they operate with impunity.
Well, you know, I mean, harken back to where we started about a declaration of war.
One of the other virtues of that is that you could hold people responsible for their bad judgment.
When they declared a needless war, it cost the American people and it costs lives.
The people who exercise bad judgment or were pressured into supporting the war by their contributors, which certainly happens a lot.
Well, then at the end of the day, when the dust settles, we can run them out of office and they could be shamed for their lives too.
But they operate entirely with impunity and they only get in trouble when they cross the deep state.
And then, oh, boy, they unleash the big batteries of guns.
Oh, yeah.
What do you think about boots on the ground?
We talked about likelihood of escalation in many different ways.
And we don't know where this is going.
And the guy who's running it doesn't know where it's going.
But there's a lot of uncomfortable movement about boots on the ground.
What's your take?
Yeah, this is the camel's nose in the tent business, as far as I'm concerned.
What have I seen recently?
They were talking about, well, we'll put some troops in, some special forces on Karg Island, you know, for special operations to protect shipment, protect oil.
We'll do that.
And then, oh, by the way, we'll arm, we'll arm the Kurds for an operation in northern, western Iraq.
I'm thinking, you morons, you know, Erdogan is not going to like that.
Turkey is not going to like that.
You're going to use the Kurds again for American cannon fodder as we've done in the past.
And that will be the end, in my view.
I mean, Turkey is a NATO ally.
That will be the end of NATO if they do that, because Turkey, I can't imagine they would put up with that for a minute.
So maybe that's good.
I mean, the NATO and NATO alliance has been nothing but trouble anyway for several decades.
Well, of course, Charles, that begs the question.
When we saw everything that was happening with the Strait of Hormuz and being choked off and the people realizing what the consequences are going to be finally, and then Trump throws a life preserver to the market and says, don't worry, we'll protect the Strait of Hormuz.
First, he said we'll do it with the Navy, and then the Navy shot that down.
I said, we can't operate there.
You can't put us there.
It would be too vulnerable.
Then he's talking about putting special forces on the island.
The reality, though, is it just emphasizes, I think, the fact that there was no thinking, no planning, no strategy to any of this stuff.
If you wanted to do regime change and use the Kurds, wouldn't you have started that right away?
Had them ready.
Now they're reacting to what Iran is doing.
And I think reading between the T lines, tea leaves, that kind of tells us that maybe things aren't going the way they thought they were going to go.
And why, if you understand the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, why wouldn't you try to secure that area as one of your primary strategies?
I don't understand any of that.
But it looks to me like they haven't thought through any of this stuff.
Well, answer me this.
I mean, if shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is dangerous enough to your 10 million barrels of oil that you're shipping through there, that Lloyds of London doesn't want to insure it at any cost.
Trillion Dollar Debt Trap00:11:26
Why should the American taxpayers pay to secure it and to insure it for oil that we're told we're energy sufficient?
We produce our own petroleum in this country.
Why should we pay to secure that petroleum that's going to places like China and other nations?
You know, or just it's sort of a global socialism.
You know, everybody benefits, and the benefits are socialized to the whole world, to the global American military empire, but the costs land in the lap of the American people.
That's right.
And, you know, it's not that that would be right under any circumstances, but these are very perilous circumstances.
You've got, you know, now we're virtually $39 trillion in debt.
That's the visible portion of the debt.
You know, most of the debt is under the waterline and unfunded liabilities.
But it is debt that cannot be paid.
It simply cannot be paid by any of the normal mechanisms.
You know, as creditors start to back away, I was looking at these numbers yesterday.
China, not too many years ago, was a creditor of the United States.
For your listeners that don't listen to these things or pay attention to these things, you know, when they buy U.S. Treasury bonds, they're loaning us money.
And the U.S. Treasury says, yeah, give us $10 million.
We'll give you this bond and we'll redeem it.
We'll give you all your money back plus 4% or 5% interest, whatever it is.
So China lends us a lot of money.
So not so, and as do a lot of other.
In fact, we are dependent on the kindness of foreign nations.
But as so many others do, China loaned us, they were one of our top creditors.
So a few years ago, they were up to almost, well, over $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasuries that they had owned.
In other words, that they had loaned to the United States to keep the U.S. government, to keep Washington spending going.
They loaned that money to the United States, and now they're backing away.
They know perfectly well the only expedient available to the United States to pay off that debt is to print more money and devalue the dollar.
So they're down 50% in the U.S. Treasuries that they owned.
And the rest of the world clearly is backing away from the dollar.
Look, these foreign central bankers, you know, they know the money printing game.
They know the fiat money game perfectly well.
And they don't mind fleecing their own people with it.
But they just don't want to be fleeced by our money printing any longer.
And so that's why, you know, reserves are flowing to gold and alternative global monetary systems are being erected and stuff.
And, you know, we're our own worst enemies.
As they're moving away from the dollar anyway, because it's not a trustworthy vehicle anymore, we're driving them by our weaponization of the dollar, by freezing assets all over the world and claiming that people aren't entitled to their own money.
And then when we release their own money to them, Sean Hannity and the other nitwits on Fox start screaming, we gave them.
We gave them all this money.
Well, we didn't give them any money.
We released the money that they owned that we had stolen from them to begin with.
I agree.
Yeah, he said it's like a global socialism.
And of course, I think that's part of the goal of government and socialism is to create dependency, right?
And so if he can use us and the debt, the massive credit card that just keeps building and building, if he can use that to get people in debt to us.
But of course, another thing has kind of surfaced in Lindsay's gloating, and that is the idea that the empire now, as you point out, it's an empire of lies, but it's also an empire that is trying to set up a global hegemony on oil.
That's exactly what Lindsey Graham was saying.
He said, we're looking at the combined control of Venezuela and Iran's oil, two of the biggest ones that are there.
Yeah.
I wonder how the American people could countenance.
We're self-sufficient in oil.
We've been told repeatedly.
And yet somehow we can go around the world and steal the production, the oil of other countries.
You know, there will come a time when we're not the big gun in the world anymore.
That's right.
You know, nothing lasts forever.
These empires don't last forever.
They collapse.
There is a syndrome that I write about in Empire of Lies Fragments from the Memory Hole.
There is a syndrome called imperial overstretch.
It didn't start from me.
It's well known.
It's well recognized that these empires in extremists, as they see their global hegemony or their control of places far and beyond their own borders, as they see their hold beginning to slip, they react to it and they react to it typically violently.
But, you know, their hegemony such that they had their dominance and stuff was the result of their economic might, was a result of their productive capacity, was result of the work of the people and the wealth and the riches that they had produced.
That's what enabled the creation of the empire in the first place.
But when it starts to crack, as we're seeing now of the United States, the geniuses in Washington, the statist, the deep state, the establishment, they react to it as though it is a threat to their military dominance.
And so they divert even more funds from the productive economy to beef up the military.
This is exactly what we're doing now in Iran.
I mean, we're spending a trillion dollars a day in new money there.
I think the president just asked for another $50 billion supplemental.
We spend more than the next, I don't even know the number anymore.
Was it the next seven, eight, nine countries in the world combined?
We spend more on war.
We call it defense, but it's spending on war.
We spend a trillion dollars a year.
And three or four weeks ago, the president said, no, we need to bump that up to 1.5 trillion.
We need a 50% bump in our military spending.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that's what we're doing.
And when we look at this, you know, especially if they want to get into a long war with Iran, the asymmetric warfare is one of the things that has consistently been our downfall.
The boots on the ground and trying to do regime change and nation building.
I don't know how he thinks people don't see this as they say, well, we're not going to do nation building.
Well, they want to take the oil.
They want to change the regime.
I mean, aren't you talking about putting boots on the ground and trying to control the people that are there after you have rained death and destruction from the sky, as War Pete says, and boast about it?
It's amazing to see him revel in the carnage like this.
Yeah, and it's not just that we want to replace the leadership.
We want to make sure we name our own guy.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
Sure, that'll go over well.
You know, years ago, this is kind of vague memory, but anybody interested in these kinds of issues that we've gotten on now should look up a story by Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books.
I think it was in Blink.
And he wrote an account of Millennium Challenge was a, I think, 2002 military exercise.
And there was the red team and the blue team.
And it was a Pentagon-run military exercise.
It had to do with the Gulf, had to do with the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and a war with Iran in 2002.
And the A team was what we are today.
Well, we're more advanced, but it was the same thing.
You know, it was high-tech, electronic warfare, remote missile launching, and whatever they had, the equivalent of what we have today that is remote and high-tech.
And the B team were the stragglers, the asymmetric warfare guys that didn't have anything.
And the guy that led the B team was a general by the name of Paul Van Ripper.
And instead of using like interceptible messaging and cell phones and things, he used couriers on bicycles.
And instead of big Navy craft, you know, he used little speedboats that zipped in and zipped out.
And I mean, it was all this downscale, primitive warfare against Goliath, the behemoth of modern technology and America's superior military budget and high-tech equipment.
And guess what?
The B team won.
And it was so embarrassing before they could declare victory, the Pentagon called off the exercise because, you know, they were being humiliated by some inventive stragglers using primitive means of communication, smoke signals, light signals, and so on.
Wow.
So somebody ought to look that up.
Yeah, you've got the Machiavellian industrial complex that's out there.
They're making a lot of money off these very complicated, expensive weapon systems.
And yet, we've already seen at the beginning of the Iran War how Iran did not, the decapitation strike didn't affect them the way, obviously, the Pentagon thought it would, because they have decentralized leadership, decentralized command and control.
And then they attacked our highly centralized radar systems based on what I've heard several analysts say.
And that appears to be the case.
And so we have these very, very complex systems that are incredibly expensive.
And of course, that's to the benefit of the people like Raytheon who are making these things and the people that they keep in Congress like Lindsey Graham.
That benefits them.
They are the we who are making a lot of money off of this stuff.
But it doesn't really help the United States.
And certainly this adventurism, this empire abroad, does nothing for the safety of Americans, which has nothing to do with national security.
National security is like continuity of governance and continuity of the empire.
It doesn't have anything to do with the safety of the American people because they are putting us at risk by creating enemies everywhere.
Yeah, everywhere.
It is said that Osama bin Laden's fondest hope was to lure the United States into a war in Iraq, that he hoped to do that to break the global powerhouse, to drain it, to bleed it dry, not thinking that he and a bunch of other guys in fatigues off in the mountains of Kandahar someplace could prevail militarily, but they thought that they could take America down financially if they could drain them long enough, much like we thought,
much like Brzezinski thought that we could do to the Soviet Union with his Afghanistan initiative.
And what they're trying to do, the Soviet Union with Ukraine as well.
We're using the Ukrainians as our cat spaw and figure that we're bleeding the Russians dry.
And I've heard people like Lindsey Graham boasting about that.
Look at how many soldiers and tanks and all this kind of stuff Russia has lost in this war.
That's what we want.
So it's a war of attrition.
And yet we get suckered in by that same strategy on the other side.
And it's so short-sighted.
It's not even short-sighted.
It's blindness.
I have no vision at all to wonder, I mean, what happened to the economically drained and crippled nation of Germany after World War I and with the perpetual payments from the Versailles Treaty of Reparations?
I mean, what do a broken, are a broken down people with no hope and no direction susceptible to the fringe elements like Hitler?
Well, of course they are.
So what do you think is going to happen if you if you topple the Russian government, you topple Putin and everybody else in the Kremlin, and you break the bank of the Soviet, the Russian economy, which is what they openly talk about hoping to do is collapse the Russian economy.
Overthrowing The Shah00:12:26
What do they think will take its place?
It was only a generation or two ago that they had the Lubyank prison.
They had walls and barbed wire.
They had the Gulag archipelago.
I mean, what do they think is going to arise in the place of these guys?
Have they given that any thought?
Well, again, on precedent, no, because they never give anything any thought.
It's just destroy, destroy, destroy.
That's right.
Yeah.
What is the regime change going to look like in Iran, for example?
And the bottom line is our history with Iran began with regime change.
It began with a coup back in 1953.
And that has blown this whole thing up.
They always start the clock 47 years ago with the Iranian revolution against the Shah, the guy that we put in and equipped his secret police.
It's just very bad story.
Yeah, I blanch when I hear them say we've been at war with them for 47 years.
Where do they get that number?
Do they think, you know, it's the Iranian revolution.
Do they think those millions of people that turned out in the street to cheer on the abdication or the fall of the Shah, they think that they poured out in the street because they lived under such a benign and lovely government?
Of course not.
They lived under a cruel despotism.
You know, the historian laureate of the Reagan people was a great, it was a great scholar by the name of Paul Johnson.
And all the Reaganites read his history books and they all thought they were great.
I guess they've been slipped down the memory hole too.
But Paul Johnson wrote a short account of exactly what the reign of Pahavi, the Shah, was like.
We were told, the American people were told, because, you know, well, we don't want communism and we don't want to visit communism on these people.
Well, the elected government, Masada government, was no more communist than, you know, the prevailing beliefs in the Republican and Democrat platforms these days.
He just didn't want us stealing his oil and not getting paid for it.
But in any event, the Shah that we instituted, I wrote a piece for this.
It was published by The Blaze a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, it was published by the Libertarian Institute and anti-war.com.
I wrote a piece called The Deep State Wants to Restore the Reign of the Persian Stalin.
And it's hard to swallow when we've been told that the Shah was so great.
But, you know, when we installed him, when Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, ain't it peculiar how CIA heads always seem to show up in these deals, just like Brennan showed up in toppling the Ukraine regime.
He checked in under a false name, but Dulles was out in the open and he escorted Pahavi to the Peacock throne when the Mosada reigned.
You know, we hired thugs, we hired revolutionaries, we hired the worst elements possible in the streets to foment a revolution there like we do.
And then they escorted Pahavi to the Peacock throne and he proceeded to, oh, one of the things he did was he put the Mossad and he put General Schwartzkopf.
This is a good one.
People will remember, people of our age will all remember Storman Norman, General Schwarzkopf from the first Gulf War.
But his father was one of the guys that was sent in to help the Shah, along with the Mossad, learn how to torture his opponents.
And that's where the cruel and notorious SAVAC were born out of that.
But of course, the expatriates, the people that fled that were on friendly terms with the Shah and live in Los Angeles now and are urging the United States to go to war and put in the Shah's son.
Of course, they want us to do their fighting for them.
But the people that turned out in the street in 1979 weren't all there because the rule of the Shah had been so enlightened and liberating and prosperous.
It was a very ugly time for all the mainstream media news events where they would show the Shah and his family and show Iran.
It's like, look, he's modernizing Iran.
He's making it like America, you know, that type of thing.
And yet when I was in college, that was my frame of reference for Iran.
I was surprised to see all these Iranian students that were at the engineering college where I was.
And they could get over here if they were an engineering student, but they were out there protesting Iran.
I thought, what are they doing that for?
I mean, it's like he's creating the kind of environment that they want to live in.
And they were wearing these balaclava masks.
And so I asked some of them, because I had a lot of them in my classes, I said, so what's going on?
What's up, all the masks and everything?
That was the first time I seen anybody protesting wearing a mask.
And they said, well, because the SAVAC.
I said, what is that?
And they filled me in on what was going on there.
It's horrific what was done.
The CIA misadventure point, I didn't know that Schwarzenkopf was, his dad was a part of that as well.
But that has been the history of the empire the CIA sets up.
And that is murder, coups, assassination, torture, secret police, all the rest of this stuff.
And we have to ask, why do we think that we're immune to that here?
And of course, we're not.
And if you're paying attention, you've already seen a lot of these aspects already in operation.
They just haven't become so pervasive and in your face yet.
Well, you jogged my memory by you jogged my memory by talking about your student days because I remember it was after my student days, but being just a little bit horrified about these mobs out in the street burning American flags in Iran and chanting death to the American to America and the great Satan, I didn't really understand.
And most Americans didn't.
And that is the fault of our education, I guess.
But it's the fault of the media.
It's the fault of the state that whitewashes and sanitizes all of its deeds and it doesn't want anybody to know anything else.
But I remember being shocked at what is wrong with these people.
And it took a few years for me to really understand.
You know, I have been on a book tour talking about my book, Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.
And one of the surprising things that I hear, I mean, you would think out of all the sloganisms and the reasons to actually go to war, it'd be something more substantial than this.
But I hear, I have heard many times from different people, well, you know, they call us the great Satan.
And these are the people that have been chanting death to America for 47 years.
And I go, so what?
Is that a thin pretext for a war or what?
Do you remember Ronald Reagan getting ready to do his radio address?
And he said, okay, we're bombing the Soviet Union and the bombs start falling in five minutes.
And the leadership was horrified.
But this goes on all the time.
John McCain ran around the country going, singing like he was some crazed beach boy, bomb Iran.
He was a presidential candidate.
So they hear what we do, but we don't hear what we do.
We only hear what they say.
And the things don't translate very well anyway.
Well, you know, Charles, I've heard some people, I listened to an Iranian official who was being interviewed, and he said he's actually a teacher in the university.
He said, we tried to tell the students what it was like under the Shah.
They just didn't believe us.
They didn't believe what we were saying about the Americans.
Now they see it.
And that's the issue.
When we do these types of things that we're doing, that shows people the character of our government.
And now he said, now they understand.
If they wanted regime change, the thing to do would have been to just sit back and let it happen.
It was already in a process.
But instead, they snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory because then what they did was they made themselves the greater enemy that's there.
And of course, part of what was happening was also a pushback against westernized abortion and other things like that in Iran coming in.
They didn't like that.
That was part of what they were saying was satanic.
And we just saw the burning an effigy of Baal, or Baal, the pagan god with symbols of the U.S. and of Israel.
That's the way they see us.
And so they burned that in effigy.
They did that at the beginning of the revolution.
And, you know, when they took over the embassy, that is the starting point of Americans understanding anything about Iran.
To them, basically, Iran didn't exist.
We don't know anything about these other countries until that happened.
And then you had this long thing every day, day number one, day number 10, day number 11, on and on.
It went through the nightline doing that.
And America held hostage by Iran.
That was ingrained in the memory of people.
And it was done without any context at all as to why they would take over the embassy.
And of course, they held him hostage, but that was extended because of the Iran-Contra affair.
We certainly don't remember the Iraq-Iran war in which we provided, you know, when the weapons inspectors went into Iraq looking for the missing weapons of mass destruction, what they did find was leftovers from the Iraq-Iran war.
They were inert by that time, but they found some.
This was technology.
These were precursors.
This was technology and targeting and stuff that the United States gave to Saddam Hussein.
Oh, he's worse than Hitler.
But we were giving him technology to underwrite his war with Iran.
We encouraged it.
We provided him resources, illegal resources, I might add, to pursue that war.
And I don't remember the number after all these years, but I think it was at least 200,000 Iranians died.
They had to send kids out in the battlefield.
The population was being drained so much by our, and we don't remember.
I remember, you remember, the Iranian Airbus that was shot down with 290,000 civilians killed by the USS Vincennes.
And Bush had the nerve to award the captain of that awful incident, I think, some kind of medal of common relations.
Oh, it was an awful event.
I've talked about that many times.
You know, that's what this Iranian official was saying.
He says, yeah, I've told the kids, and he still believes it, that that was deliberate, deliberately done by the U.S.
And I said, well, you know, I've said for the longest time, I didn't think it was deliberate.
I thought it was accidental because I thought they did the same thing with Flight 800, having naval exercises.
It's just that when it happens over American territory, they can cover it up, but they couldn't cover it up there.
And I said, you know, I thought it was remarkable restraint.
Of course, what could Tehran really do about that?
But the key point that you're making there about Saddam Hussein is that after they had suffered for a couple of decades under the Shah, which basically just means it's Persian for king, after we overthrew their republic and their democracy, and we installed a king who had a secret police that tortured and killed people for the longest time, we did two decades of that.
And then after that, we, I think, helped to instigate Saddam Hussein attacking them because as it was a new government, a new revolution, thought they would catch them at a weak point.
And yet Saddam Hussein really wasn't doing very well with that until we jumped in with additional equipment and intelligence and other things like that.
And then the tide started turning towards Iraq versus Iran.
And so all of that history is just ignored.
And all the history of our intervention, our preemptive attacks, our empire wars of lies, all of that stuff is just forgotten.
We don't have any context for this at all.
It's totally forgotten.
Shredded Documents And Lies00:10:24
And the subtitle of my book is, well, it's Empire of Lies, Fragments from the Memory Hole.
And as people will remember from reading 1984 by George Orwell in high school, in this dystopian future, the Ministry of Love is where dissidents went to be tortured.
They took them to the Ministry of Love.
Everything was inverted.
The Ministry of Truth is where the protagonist in the novel, his job, was rewriting history.
And he'd take the old history, we rewrite the history, put out the new truth.
And then the old truth was consigned to an incinerator that was called the Memory Hole.
I want to mention, since we were on the topic, the U.S. embassy in Iran, and I talk about this in Empire of Lies, it is now a museum of what the people there went through under the Shah of Iran and the spying CIA.
They took, oh, yeah, at the time that the embassy was stormed, the employees began shredding documents furiously.
Imagine this.
The students, they were supposed to be these crazed out-of-the-mind students.
They went through the laborious process.
I think it must have taken them years of pasting all those shredded things together and reconstituting all the destroyed documents that the CIA and the embassy staff destroyed about what had gone on there.
And you see case after case they have rooms where there were the eavesdropping room.
This is where they did this.
This is where the CIA did that and so on.
And they have reconstituted those documents so that the people in Iran can familiarize themselves with the politicians that we were paying off, the freedom movements that we were subverting, the measures that would liberate the country, the measures that would empower the central government more at the expense of the people or engage them in warfare at the Iranian people's expense.
All those shredded documents of CIA spying for years and running the government and bribing and paying it off are all there for the Iranian people to see.
Now, the American people don't know anything about that.
But it's been reconstituted.
And so when you wonder why they say death to America, they have within the within the recall of living Americans, they have an idea of what we were doing at that time.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
Well, maybe they could do us the same favor for the Epstein documents, what do you think?
With some Iranian students to come over here and piece together that.
I'm sorry.
Epstein, the name rings a bell, but I'm not sure I remember.
It's slipping down the memory hole too.
That's right.
Well, I guess they can't put together those shredded desk drives that are a different challenge.
That's right.
Now, tell us a little bit about the book, The Empire of Lies.
Yeah, the book is, it's not just a collection of the sequential lies of the empire.
It also covers the media and the media as the lapdog press that furthers the deep state.
I'm pretty clear about these terms.
I don't toss them along casually.
The deep state is identified.
I identify the deep state as the executive arm of the global American empire.
My executive arm, I mean, they call the shots and they are a collective.
They are like bees in a hive.
They don't sting one another, but they have different jobs.
The deep state is not coordinated by a central authority, but they all work like the bees in the hive for the good of the hive.
And of course, it is a mistake.
It's common enough for people to believe that the deep state is consigned to a few actors, you know, like Brennan and Clapper, who both lied to Congress, by the way, and felt no repercussions for having done so.
I remember Clapper, Clapper said, well, when he was caught lying about the U.S.'s surveillance on American citizens, illegal surveillance, he answered under oath in Congress.
I think it was Senator Wyden that asked him.
So, no, we don't do that.
No, no, we don't do that.
And when he was caught up, he offered this excuse.
Well, I gave the least untruthful answer I could give.
But when these people are sworn in, they're not sworn in for the least untruthful answer.
They're sworn in for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
But it's not just those guys.
The deep state works its way all the way down through a bureaucracy of minor petty bureaucrats.
And one of them that I cite just to represent the case is Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Vinman, who was on Trump's National Security Council in the first term.
And he's the one that set the wheels in motion for the first Trump impeachment.
And what was the graviment of his complaint against Trump?
It was this, and he told, he said this to Congress.
It was, well, the problem with Trump, he said, is he is not following the interagency consensus on Ukraine.
And we have to ask ourselves, what is an interagency?
And where does that appear in the Constitution?
And how does it operate?
And does it vote?
And who gets a vote?
And where does it fit in the balance of power and the checks and balances?
And who's a member of the interagency?
And can I be a member?
And who do they benefit?
And where are the records of their meetings and so on?
I mean, it's pure balderdash, but that is the deep state.
And that's not just the heads of the CIA and the NSA or the FBI.
That is all the way down the bureaucracy.
And yet it's so typical.
And then if you'll indulge me one more thing is the role that the lapdog press plays in this thing.
And there is a, I identify this, I think is very worth reading just if it were just this alone, is this syndrome.
You won't find this in any standard psychiatric diagnostic manuals, but I have identified it, and I think it should be in the manuals.
And I call it combat envy.
And it's very, very ubiquitous in the halls of government, this combat envy syndrome.
You know, you could run into a guy, I suppose, at a bar at some point in your life that tells you tales of Daring Dew about, you know, I was a Navy SEAL or Green Beret in Vietnam and stuff.
And it doesn't do her really any harm.
But when these elected officials are leading newscasters and opinion makers in the United States make up these lies about where they have been and what they have done in cheering on our wars for national television audiences, it's pretty destructive.
Fox News had a guy named Wayne Simmons that they used for years.
And he was a national security former CIA expert.
And he came on there with the most nonsensical, warmongering, crazed advice.
And they liked him.
And that's why they brought him back year after year because he fit the network's agenda.
He'd come up with stuff about, you know, well, you know, we need a ground investment 10, 15 years ago.
We need a ground invasion of Iraq.
So eventually, I guess some of the real CIA guys got a little tired of his balderdash and they blew the whistle on him.
And it turned out he wasn't a national security guy and he wasn't a former CIA guy.
He was a doorman and a hot tub manager and a felon too.
So they've had to get rid of him.
But look, you had Brian Williams on NBC.
Brian Williams made up his own personal tales of close calls talking about, well, in the first Iraq war, I was part of this helicopter assault and we flew in and then the RPGs were flying at us and it was harrowing and we had to do a corkscrew landing and I came within the, and then with each retelling, he would embellish the story and it got worse and worse.
Oh, I saw an RPG and it was headed right down and I could see the tube and it was headed right at us and it was that and it got bigger and bigger.
And finally the guys that were actually on the mission and by the way, the name of the mission was Big Wendy.
I guess they anticipated Brian Williams' role in it.
But the guys that were actually in the mission told the story to Stars and Stripes.
So Brian Williams got found out for his embellished tales of combat envy.
And when he was found out, he said, oh, I must have had a brain tumor as he tried to excuse himself.
And the network that, you know, we trust for feeding us reliable news and information, having known now that their primary anchor was lying to us, they suspended him for a while.
They didn't care enough about the credibility of their network or their news anchors or the trust that the American people might lodge in them to get rid of him, to apologize for him.
They suspended him and then they gave him back another slot.
I think he anchored MSNBC for years after that.
So this stuff goes on.
You know, there are countless officials that engage in this combat envy stuff.
There are commentators the next time we visit, or maybe people want to just buy the book and read the story of, oh, this is a good one, Bill O'Reilly on Fox and his Combat Envy.
It borders on the ridiculous.
So I chart some of these things so people can see this is the deep state and how it works.
This is the establishment, the American political establishment.
This is their role.
This is the lapdog press.
But the point of it all, I tried to direct people to is if we do not begin to honor, to demand, and to honor the truth of our press, of our public officials, of the so-called American establishment, if we don't demand the truth of them, then this is our fate.
And I'll walk you right up to the ragged edge.
This is our fate if we don't.
And there is no sign yet that the American people have turned and maybe this Iran war will be the last straw and people will wake up.
Let's hope so.
And it is good to go back and to remind ourselves of how we got here and this long trail of lies and deceptions, which is what your book does.
You know, we're hearing this week, we've got this echo chamber throughout media, both left and right, of the short-term pain, long-term gain.
And they're all repeating this slogan all the time.
Echo Chamber Of Short Term Pain00:03:15
Like you talk about the complicity of the media and you talk about people who present themselves as intelligence experts.
I, I worked at a, at a place where that person was Steve Pieczenik that kept coming back on and he was selling one lie, a crazy lie after the other.
It was much worse stuff than um, what um you were talking about, from the uh NBC anchor.
But uh again, nobody ever pays any penalties for that.
The people, they know that that if they lie to people and if it's sensational enough, they get viewership and they know that once they're caught in that lie that it's not going to affect them whatsoever because you know, people are entertained by it and I, I think there is a certain aspect of it that they don't really care if it's true as long as they're entertained by it.
Right right, they don't.
They don't really care if it's true.
You know, you mentioned earlier we didn't really talk about it but uh, you mentioned earlier um twa, flight 800 and it was so peculiar amidst all the misinformation, eyewitnesses to the event testified that they saw a streak of you know come up from the horizon or come up from the sea and hit the aircraft and stuff, and uh, and they gave, they gave statements to the FBI.
They were.
They were dumbfounded later at the end of the investigation when they're they got a chance to see the statements that they had given themselves, the FBI, and they'd all been changed.
Yeah, they were a little dumbfounded by it.
But the CIA this was, this was unprecedented.
The CIA actually put out a video.
I remember seeing it on youtube and it was this comical 1950s announcer style and they said and it was in, like you know, all caps, red letters underscored and stuff.
In this video they put together, the people did not see a missile.
Take down Twa 800 and okay, whatever you say, sure that that works, magic bullet too, that's right.
Yeah, they got Voice OF America.
They're used to uh, that kind of, that kind of broadcast style.
It just doesn't cut it anymore with most people.
It also doesn't help when you've got people who are air traffic controllers saying uh, the FBI came by and stole the records that we had showing what was going on with this missile.
So yeah, the FBI I refer to them as Fed's Blocking Investigation, because that seems to be what they're doing more often than not.
But thank you so much for for reminding people again.
The book is Empire Of lies fragments from the memory hole.
We need to be reminded of this long history that we have.
It's bipartisan and it is what the true government of our country is.
Forget about these elections.
It's the true government that's running it, which is the uh, the deep state, as you're talking about this bureaucracy that remains there from whoever wins the election.
Uh, they're the ones who are really calling the shots and calling the coups and the wars as well.
Thank you so much for joining us, Charles Goyette, and you have a website I do, it's Charlesgoyette.com.
Okay, I have another one, empireoflies.com.
You can find a little bit of information about the book there and uh, links to uh, to buy it like on Amazon.
So great that would be, that would be great.
And uh, I think everybody will find it very compelling.
Deep State Runs True Government00:01:31
It is.
I actually i'll tell you.
Actually David, it's pretty juicy too.
Certainly sounds like it.
I i'm anxious to see it myself.
Thank you so much for joining us, Charles.
Yeah, thank you David, I appreciate you very much.
Thank you, the common man.
They created common Core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
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