System Update - Glenn Greenwald - The US and Israel Liberate Iran by Setting it on Fire, Poisoning the Air, Bombing Schools
Aired: 2026-03-09
Duration: 23:28


=== The Myth of War Liberation (04:09) ===

[00:00:16]  Anybody who is American and is over the age of, say, 35 has lived through an extraordinary amount of war propaganda.
[00:00:23]  Obviously, beginning with the propaganda and manipulations that led Americans to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq, even though they had nothing to do with 9-11 and the claims about why we had to do it all proved false.
[00:00:35]  Going into the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan that accomplished nothing, the war in Libya that destroyed that country.
[00:00:41]  The war in Syria that devastated it for many years.
[00:00:44]  Obviously, you can put the bombing of ships off the coast of Venezuela and the endless arming and funding of the war in Ukraine.
[00:00:50]  And if you're over 65 or 70, you certainly can add a major example to the list, which is the war in Vietnam, where the government not only lied us into that war, but lied continuously throughout about how we were on the verge of winning, even though as the Pentagon paper showed, they knew internally they couldn't.
[00:01:05]  This is one of the most extraordinary things of American war propaganda is that the script, the propagandistic script never changes.
[00:01:13]  And I could go on for hours about all the components of that propagandistic script that are so blatantly, transparently false and deceitful.
[00:01:24]  But it's effective because it's geared toward our psyche.
[00:01:27]  It's been studied and developed over decades, in fact, centuries, to instigate our most primal instincts of tribalism and wars and a lot of other primal emotions that all of us have, including the claims of benevolent intent that we have to free the peoples of the world from their repression and to save them from all the horrific things their governments are doing,
[00:01:51]  even though the governments which we've installed and support and align with and finance to this very day are some of the most savage journeys on the planet.
[00:01:59]  And of all the different claims that genuinely shock me in terms of their efficacy, despite how many times they've been debunked, at the top of the list is the willingness of some Americans.
[00:02:10]  Increasingly, many are being extremely skeptical, as the poll shows now, but many Americans still are willing to believe or pretend to believe that the reason we go to war, such as the war in Iran, is because we're going there to liberate the people, to bring them freedom and democracy or save them from all sorts of repression.
[00:02:30]  And that was obviously what the whole bit about pretending to care so much about the protesters, the Iranian protesters, gun down in the street, or the Iranian girls in their hair.
[00:02:38]  That's what all that was about.
[00:02:40]  You can't get a population to keep cheering for wars, watching people blow up as a result of our bombs and our government, things being incinerated, unless you can really give people a reason to say, no, no, even though it seems really hideous and heinous and evil, we're doing it for a good cause.
[00:02:57]  And of all the different propagandistic planks that should not work, that one should be at the top of the list, that we're going to fight a war of liberation, that we're bringing people freedom and democracy, that we're saving them from a repressive regime as if the U.S. government cares in the slightest, let alone the Israelis care in the slightest about Iranians or Iranian schoolgirls or whatever.
[00:03:18]  And it's not just the fact that the governments that start these wars, the U.S. and Israel, don't care.
[00:03:22]  It's that because they don't care, they're going to fight a war that has nothing to do with those ostensible aims.
[00:03:29]  The war is going to be designed not to save the people of the country that we're attacking or to liberate them.
[00:03:37]  The war has other goals to destroy the country, to shatter it into pieces so we can take it over and control it and install in a weak country a government that serves our interests.
[00:03:46]  And to do that, you have to actually harm and kill huge numbers of the people the government's pretending to save and liberate.
[00:03:55]  And that's exactly what we're seeing now.
[00:03:57]  Just a week into the world, war or the war.
[00:04:00]  You have Pete Heckseth boasting about the fact that we no longer abide by all these rules of engagement, which is another way of saying the laws of war.
[00:04:10]  You have Lindsey Graham and Pete Heckseth and even Trump going around seemingly taking extreme happiness and pride, even entertainment, and the fact that we're killing with greater abandon than we ever did before.
[00:04:25]  And you're seeing the results of that.

=== The Horrifying Reality of War (05:36) ===

[00:04:26]  Let's start first of all with what happened yesterday when the Israelis bombed a large oil refinery in Tehran that not only destroyed what is supposed to be the backbone of Iranian revolution,
[00:04:43]  which is their oil economy that will feed the prosperity of the people we claim so much to care about, kind of a weird thing to start attacking their most vital and valuable resources if you want to save a country that depends on that economy.
[00:04:57]  But also it's not only terrorizing and constituting terror, but it's incredibly dangerous and destructive, not for today or for this week, but for the long term for the people who are trying to save.
[00:05:09]  is one verified video of what people in tehran the people were trying to save the running people who we care so deeply about what they saw when the israelis attacked the oil refinery i want to ask a question
[00:05:39]  If you saw this, you're riding with your kids in a car and you saw this, I don't even want to call it a fire.
[00:05:46]  It's a raging inferno, but it's not an inferno burning, an inferno burning trees or forest.
[00:05:53]  It's an inferno born, inferno burning poison, emitting poison into the air in the thickest, most unnaturally black clouds you've ever seen.
[00:06:06]  On top of which, you have news from the day before that the United States accidentally accepts that, but nonetheless, bombed a schoolgirl, a school filled with 150 schoolgirls, filled with more than 150 actually, but killed at least 150, 180.
[00:06:26]  And you're seeing bombs go off all throughout the city in which you live.
[00:06:29]  Are you going to say to your kids, hey, look, we're being liberated.
[00:06:31]  We're really grateful for these countries that are dropping these bombs as you see the most terrifying scenes a human being can see.
[00:06:38]  It's like out of a really out of a horror film.
[00:06:41]  But that's what these wars entail, despite how pretified they are.
[00:06:46]  Here is another view of the aftermath of this Israeli attack.
[00:06:54]  Look at that liberation.
[00:06:56]  That's freedom and democracy what you're seeing.
[00:06:59]  That's liberating Iranian girls by filling their lungs with cancerous toxins, with things that cause respiratory disease and failure that are going to poison the region as the wind takes it.
[00:07:15]  It is actually horrifying to watch.
[00:07:18]  It really is.
[00:07:19]  And here's just another video.
[00:07:21]  And all these are verified.
[00:07:22]  I'm not just showing you videos floating around on the internet.
[00:07:24]  These are all verified from Iran on that day.
[00:07:26]  Here's just an example of what a random white car looks like in Tehran.
[00:07:35]  Obviously, that's what's in people's lungs as well.
[00:07:38]  It was in the air.
[00:07:39]  People are breathing that.
[00:07:40]  And that's just a little bit of an illustration of what you're seeing.
[00:07:44]  I don't know.
[00:07:44]  I just feel like that does not look like liberation to me.
[00:07:50]  Now, I want to just Here's a couple more important illustrations of what that is.
[00:07:58]  So here you see the account Osnet Defender that is reliable.
[00:08:01]  And again, this is all verified.
[00:08:02]  Tehran is covered in thick black clouds of smoke this morning after a series of Israeli airstrikes struck multiple oil depots and a refinery.
[00:08:10]  Local reports that the morning rain was black and oily.
[00:08:15]  And there are even videos of oil and the water and in the rain also exploding from fires.
[00:08:22]  just on the streets where people drive, where people live.
[00:08:26]  Here is some evidence about that is really that the American airstrike that blew up that school were filled with young Iranian schoolgirls.
[00:08:38]  Ironically, the people were trying to say we're trying to build the future.
[00:08:42]  We liberated 170 of them, 180 from their lives within the first couple of days of the war.
[00:08:48]  And at first, the United States denied it or didn't really deny it, actually, just said we're investigating, even though they knew they did it.
[00:08:55]  Trump came out yesterday or the day before and said, and lied and said, I think Iran did it.
[00:09:02]  Iran blew up their own school.
[00:09:05]  And then he said, isn't that right, Secretary Hagseth, referring to Pete Hegseth, who never controls, I mean, the entire Trump administration is deliberately filled with the most ruling sycophants who are stand when President Trump's in the room are not allowed to sit, address him as sir.
[00:09:19]  He calls them by the first name.
[00:09:20]  Everything's designed to kind of create this dynamic that this is the king.
[00:09:25]  And Pete Hegseth is the most sycophantic, which in his defense is part of the military mentality.
[00:09:31]  He's the commander in chief.
[00:09:32]  But even when he, there's no war, that's how Pete Hegseth is around Trump.
[00:09:35]  A lot of them are, but he in particular.
[00:09:37]  And Trump said, isn't that right, Pete?
[00:09:39]  The Iranians did this.
[00:09:40]  And even Hegseth refused to endorse what Trump was saying and said, sir, we're investigating.
[00:09:46]  But the evidence is now overwhelming that it was, in fact, the United States.
[00:09:51]  Here's a report from Bellingcat, which I have criticized many times for being extremely pro-U.S., funded by all sorts of Western intelligence agencies, being very loyal to the U.S. government.
[00:10:00]  And even they, it's so transparent, are analoging the footage.

=== Terrorized But Not Into Submission (07:34) ===

[00:10:03]  And they said, quote, new video footage shows a U.S. tomahawk missile hitting an IRGC facility in Manab, Iran on February 28, showing for the first time that the U.S. struck the area.
[00:10:14]  The footage also shows smoke already rising from the vicinity of the girls' school where 175 people were reportedly killed.
[00:10:20]  So that's a pretty strong piece of evidence that it was a tomahawk missile that did it, given that the Israelis don't have tomahawks, nor does Iran, Iran, only the, I said Iran, like I am from a place where it's barely a country that they've ever heard of.
[00:10:36]  It's not tomahawk missiles.
[00:10:41]  And here is drop site news, adding a little bit of information based on reporting.
[00:10:44]  Confirmed footage reviewed and geolocated by Bellingcat confirms that the U.S. Tomahawk missiles hit the girls' primary school in southern Iran that killed 180 people, most of them children.
[00:10:55]  Researcher Trevor Ball notes, Israel does not possess tomahawk missiles.
[00:10:58]  The United States does.
[00:10:59]  And they went on to add that obviously the United States, obviously, Iran doesn't have those either.
[00:11:07]  In addition to just killing people and filling their air with all kinds of poison, I actually want to just show you this notice that everybody in Iran got, or at least in Tehran got, about this oil refinery.
[00:11:21]  This is from Financial Times yesterday.
[00:11:23]  Tehran residents warned about inhaling poisonous gases after strike.
[00:11:27]  Residents of Tehran are being warned that inhaling poisonous gases is more dangerous than acid rain after Iran's oil storage facilities were attacked overnight.
[00:11:38]  Quote, inhalation of these gases is definitely more dangerous, state media said, pointing to nitrogen and hydrocarbon gases released into the atmosphere.
[00:11:46]  People are being urged not to go outdoors.
[00:11:47]  And if they do to wear a face mask with filters such as the N95 or FFP2 as dark clouds fill the sky over Iran's capital, I should be quick to add that it's not just Iranian state media saying that.
[00:11:59]  Every environmentalist is warning of it.
[00:12:00]  People who are exports in oil, who I've talked to, who are trying to get on the show to come on in front of the camera to explain not just this disaster, but also the shock to the oil flow of oil in general, the global economy, the hits we're going to take, we're going to endure from it.
[00:12:17]  It's not a dispute that if you burn and blow up an oil refinery in the middle of a highly densely populated city, huge numbers of people are going to suffer for a long time, including the Iranian girls and Iranian children for whom this war by the Israelis and the United States is being so valiantly fought.
[00:12:35]  Now, it's not just, and here, by the way, is the New York Times report on a different horror, which is that either the United States or the Israelis have been attacking the desalination plants in Iran, blowing them up.
[00:12:53]  President Trump was asked about this and he said, who cares?
[00:12:57]  Desalination plants?
[00:12:58]  These are the most evil people on the planet.
[00:13:00]  They cut women in half and cut babies' heads off.
[00:13:03]  I guess he was referring to the lies Israel told about October 7th.
[00:13:07]  The babies were beheaded and women were chopped in half.
[00:13:09]  None of that ever happened.
[00:13:10]  But that's President Trump's response to the Iranians complaining that they cut off, that they bombed desalination facilities.
[00:13:16]  The reason desalination matters, especially if you're caring to pretend about pretending to care about the Iranian people, is because those are what provides fresh water to the populations in that region.
[00:13:28]  They can convert saltwater into fresh water.
[00:13:30]  They're the drinking supply.
[00:13:33]  I guess we're liberating the Iranians and Iranian girls and women by blowing up their schools and poisoning their air and preventing supplies of fresh oil, of fresh water, and maybe even their food supply.
[00:13:54]  Now, I'm not saying the U.S. military is purposely blowing up schoolgirls, but it doesn't matter recklessly, negligently.
[00:14:03]  It's the very foreseeable, predictable, inevitable result of bombing Iran in a very intensive way.
[00:14:11]  According to Lindsey Graham, the next two weeks will be of a different category of bombing than what we've seen thus far.
[00:14:18]  The Israelis are signaling that too.
[00:14:20]  And yet, in just the first week, this is already what we're doing.
[00:14:23]  This does not look like liberation to me.
[00:14:25]  It is not liberation.
[00:14:26]  It's certainly not the results that will induce the Iranian people to welcome the Israelis and the Americans as liberators.
[00:14:33]  Instead, it will make them hate the United States and Israel even more intensely than they already do for generations, with very good reason.
[00:14:39]  I think any country would hate the governments and countries that are bringing this to their country as well.
[00:14:44]  Now, it's not just schoolgirls.
[00:14:45]  Here is the New York Times with a new article today on the bombing of an airstrike of a boys' school, video captures a parent strike near boys' school in Iran.
[00:14:54]  It turns out only one, only one student died.
[00:14:58]  But again, this is the sort of thing that's going to happen if you cheer on wars, which is why I wish the people who did that would at least not pretend that they were doing so out of some benevolent concern for the people in that country.
[00:15:12]  Here's Reuters exclusive U.S. investigation points to likely U.S. responsibility in Iran's school strikes, or says.
[00:15:18]  So it's even the U.S. government's own investigations that are causing that to be the conclusion.
[00:15:28]  Here is that, here's the car that I showed you earlier.
[00:15:32]  I just want to remind you, I saw Pete Hegseth and other people saying over the last few days that the reason why American wars went so poorly in the past, including Iraq, is because our military was too constrained by rules of engagement, meaning laws of war, that they were being too careful about not blowing up civilians, and that caused them to fight with one hand behind their back.
[00:15:54]  That was the excuse of Vietnam, even though we napalmed that country, dropped Agent Orin on it or Agent Orange on it, caused cancer and all kinds of diseases.
[00:16:03]  We did the same in Fallujah.
[00:16:06]  And yet somehow the justification for this new war is, oh no, we're going to win this time.
[00:16:11]  It's going to work this time because those other wars, we were too restrained, Vietnam and Iraq, with a dirty war in Syria launched by the CIA that just destroyed that country.
[00:16:21]  Just want to remind you, for those of you who didn't live through it, or those of you who have forgotten that the explicit strategy, military strategy of the United States and the UK when it attacked Baghdad was called shock and awe.
[00:16:35]  And it was intended to be an unprecedented display of terrifying air power that would be so destructive in such a short period of time all at once that it would terrorize the entire, not just the Iranian military, but the Iranian civilian society to just almost instinctively kneel in submission and be rendered incapable of fighting.
[00:16:59]  Here's what it looked like beneath all of this emergency teams raced across the city.
[00:17:30]  All right, I think you have the idea.
[00:17:32]  The very dark and dreary idea of what that looked like.

=== Terrorized, Not Into Submission (05:50) ===

[00:17:38]  I said it's for people who didn't live through it or who don't remember it, so I don't want to give you any spoilers, but I will say that it actually didn't work.
[00:17:47]  They weren't terrorized into submission.
[00:17:50]  They were terrorized, but not into submission.
[00:17:54]  It did impede the prediction that we would be welcomed as liberators because generally people who live under that don't see those who are bringing that to them and their family.
[00:18:03]  Imagine your parents, your elderly parents, your young children, siblings, loved ones dying in that, living through the terror of that.
[00:18:13]  You're going to be like, I'm so grateful for the foreign militaries that brought us this.
[00:18:18]  I mean, such an obvious distortion of what we all know instinctively, reflexively about human nature.
[00:18:24]  Would anybody be grateful for that?
[00:18:29]  And yet this is the propaganda we're constantly hearing.
[00:18:32]  You think the people in Iran are going to be welcoming those who are doing all this as liberators?
[00:18:38]  You think they want this?
[00:18:41]  Some do, especially the ones who live far away in the West, the Iranian diaspora.
[00:18:46]  Sure, some in Iran think it's worth it as well.
[00:18:49]  But here's what happened today in Revolution Square in Tehran, which as the name suggests, is kind of like the Tiananmen Square of Tehran.
[00:19:02]  The United States, of course, killed the spiritual leader of Iran on the first day, Ya'atol Khomeini.
[00:19:08]  Killed a lot of senior Iranian government leaders, including ones Trump said, are very pragmatic and moderate who are negotiating with us and could have governed Iran, but unfortunately we just kind of killed them, or the Israelis did.
[00:19:18]  Oops.
[00:19:21]  And Yesterday, the Assembly of Experts in Iran responsible for choosing the successor when the leader dies chose his son, the Ayatollah son, who's not only regarded as more hardline in general than his father, but last week, not only did his father die in an Israeli airstrike, so did his wife and siblings and other relatives.
[00:19:51]  You think he's going to be in the mood to negotiate?
[00:19:54]  You think he's going to be a friendlier pro-U.S., pro-Israel leader?
[00:20:01]  You think he's going to be like Delsi Rodriguez in Venezuela, willing to jump through hoops the U.S. wants?
[00:20:08]  So we went from regime change.
[00:20:10]  We got one Khomeini to the father to a son.
[00:20:12]  The son's more hardline.
[00:20:14]  And obviously in Bittered, how would you feel toward the United States or the Israel if they airbombed your apartment and killed your father and your wife and a bunch of your siblings and other relatives?
[00:20:28]  So here are the Iranian people reacting both to the appointment of this new leader, the new spiritual leader, as well as the Israeli and American attack on their country.
[00:20:39]  And I want to just give you a hint that even if you don't speak Farsi or Persian, that they are not there to celebrate the United States and Israel.
[00:20:46]  They're not thanking us.
[00:20:47]  They're not welcoming us as liberators.
[00:20:51]  They're instead commemorating the memory of their spiritual leader, the appointment of their new leader, and expressing rage and anger and resolve toward the U.S. and Israeli attack on their country.
[00:21:17]  Now, I'm not saying they represent everybody in Iran or even the majority of people of Iran.
[00:21:22]  I've been extremely disgusted by people in the West, including Iranian exiles who have lived in the United States or London or Amsterdam or wherever for decades, purporting to speak on behalf of the Iranian people who live in that country.
[00:21:36]  Clearly, there's a huge part of Iran that wanted the Iranian revolution, the Islamic Revolution.
[00:21:40]  They were reacting to the Shah, who repressed Islam, was a puppet of the United States and Israel.
[00:21:46]  There's still a lot of supporters in Iran of the government for obvious reasons.
[00:21:52]  They've been educated and indoctrinated for decades to support this government.
[00:21:57]  But also, even if you don't support your government, it doesn't translate into, I want Israel and the United States to come to my country again and bomb it and change the government.
[00:22:10]  So I'm not suggesting these scenes are representative of the majority of people in Iran because they would never purport, unlike war supporters, to be able to know or speak for them, to know their sentiments, the majority or speak for them.
[00:22:20]  But clearly, there's a lot of sentiment like this in Iran.
[00:22:22]  And it's not even difficult to understand why.
[00:22:24]  You don't have to speculate to understand why every country, and I'm sure you can understand it if you put yourself in that position, would react in very similar ways.
[00:22:32]  This is already a heinous war.
[00:22:34]  It's an Israelized war, blowing up schools and poisoning the environment and complete disregard for human life.
[00:22:43]  Americans have done plenty of that.
[00:22:45]  But those are Israeli specialties.
[00:22:47]  And Trump today said the war will end when he jointly with Netanyahu decides.
[00:22:51]  It's not a Trump decision.
[00:22:52]  It's a joint Trump-Netanyahu decision, which is pretty much true of all things in the United States.
[00:22:59]  And if you think this war is noble or moral or beneficial or liberatory, If you think the United States will be immune from retaliatory violence as a result, I suggest that you go back and look at the last 25 years of wars under the War on Terror, go back to the 60s with the Vietnam War, and even a basic study of that, or at least just looking Looking at the reality of what's going on, they're ought to change your mind pretty quickly.