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March 27, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:15
COL. Douglas Macgregor : Readying For War With Iran.
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Hello, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, March 27th, 2025.
Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now.
Colonel, it's been a tumultuous week, and I've been waiting all week to be able to chat with you.
Thank you very much for accommodating my schedule with your own.
I want to spend some time talking to you about the American preparation, the American military preparation for war.
Against Iran.
But before we get there, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you questions about national security and the security of defense plans.
So wouldn't operational plans for a military attack be considered secret and to be preserved from...
unwanted eyes, whether technically classified as classified No, Judge, you're getting to something that's very important.
And this entire event was a real surprise to me.
Because my experience, which goes back into the 90s and the early years of this century, was that any time a senior officer speaks to another senior officer or to a senior appointed official, Secretary of Defense, Undersecretary, whatever it happens to be.
You conduct those conversations over secure lines.
It's automatic.
And the reason for that is very simple.
That while the stated objective or theme of the meeting may not be classified, inevitably, you may go and or wander into that territory.
It's natural.
Because people have access to classified information.
They bring that up.
They discuss it because it impinges on the decision or on the planning.
So whether or not, strictly speaking, you're holding a classified conversation, senior officials, as I said, always went through encrypted lines or secure lines.
I've never seen anything like this before.
This comment from the Secretary of Defense is consistent with your own understanding of what you just described.
You described a high level of acute awareness of the need to secure conversations about military movements.
The Secretary of Defense has a slightly different view.
Chris, cut number 13. Doesn't look like war plans.
And as a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plans because they know it's not war plans.
There's no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information.
Put aside the body language, I mean, you can't really...
Well, what do you think of what he said?
He's trying to gainsay the fact that this was an operational plan with timing and military equipment listed, but because it didn't include other things, somehow it doesn't fulfill the requirement of an attack plan.
First of all, he's in territory he's not familiar with, let's face it.
Mr. Higseth has not operated at high levels.
In the Department of Defense or in the Intelligence Committee or State Department or anywhere else that I'm familiar with.
So I don't think he has the background and the experience that he probably needs to fully grasp what he's done.
And obviously, he's trying to defend himself against attacks.
And I certainly understand how he feels because he's watching people attack him for what he considers to be modest or minor in the way that people formerly attacked members of the, you know, the Biden administration, where it was Lloyd Austin or somebody else on what he considers to be equally specious grounds.
The point is, though, Judge, he's wrong.
And, you know, I've been involved in some of these things.
I've stood next to a senior officer who was directed to call the secretary of defense.
And it was not over what you would call classified matter at all.
It had no classification whatsoever.
And so ultimately, whether he likes it or not, he and everyone else who participated in this disaster look foolish and unprofessional and amateurish.
That's the bottom line.
Now, should somebody be removed from being part of this?
You know, that's a matter for the President of the United States to decide.
I don't know what he will do, but I would suggest that whoever set this up, first and foremost, probably deserves to be on the chopping block.
And then the question is, why would anybody, anybody go on to something like Signal or any other non-secure line outside of the Defense Department to discuss any of these matters?
All of this bodes ill for the administration, makes us look foolish.
And it actually robs the president, to some extent, of maneuver room when he makes decisions to do or not do something.
Right. Chris, run the clip of National Security Advisor Waltz with Laura Ingram.
Do we have that?
So your staffer did not put his contact information?
No. But how did it end up in your phone?
That's what we're trying to figure out.
But that's a pretty big...
Probably. That is what we've got the best technical minds, right?
That's disturbing.
And that's where, I mean, I'm sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number.
But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone?
I mean, I'm not an expert in any of this, but it's just curious.
How's the number on your phone?
Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then somehow it gets sucked in.
Oh, someone sent you that contact.
It gets sucked in.
Was there someone else supposed to be on the chat that wasn't on the chat that you thought was on the chat?
I thought was on there, was never on there.
Who was that person?
Look, Laura, I take responsibility.
I built the group.
You know, this was not a 15-minute phone call, Colonel.
This was a series of text messages that went on for a couple of days.
That's Mike Walsh with Jeff Goldberg, the reporter for The Atlantic.
I don't know Mr. Goldberg.
I know a lot of conservative Republicans despise him.
However, he was a mouthpiece for Vice President Cheney's pro-Iraq, pro-Afghanistan propaganda, if you will.
I don't know if Waltz is going to be on the chopping block, but I think he made things worse with this nonsense about data being sucked from one phone to the next.
I'd like you to watch Congressman Crow.
himself a former Navy SEAL interrogating Director Gabbard.
She looks like she'd rather be anywhere else on the planet than listening to this.
And I thought the interrogation was nothing short of brilliant.
Cut number 10. Director Gabbard, I want to direct your attention again to the text chain where it says just confirmed with CENTCOM we are a go for mission launch.
Does that indicate to you that there is about to be a military operation?
Yes. Director Gabbard, earlier in this hearing, we heard about the DOD's classification standards.
I want to now turn my attention to your classification standards.
You're the Director of National Intelligence.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence Classification Guide says, information providing indication or advance warning that the U.S. or its allies are preparing for an attack.
Yes. Yes.
They have in fact done so, haven't they?
Yes. Including MQ-9 Reapers, haven't they?
That's correct.
And that was one of the systems used in the attack recently that's the subject of this discussion, is it not?
Correct. Colonel, can the case be made?
That the Secretary of State committed espionage by failing to safeguard military secrets.
There are two, as you know, espionage statutes.
One prohibits the willful failure to safeguard.
The other prohibits the negligent failure to safeguard.
Potentially, I suppose it is.
Could be prosecuted, certainly.
For negligence, which is what I would chalk this up to.
Again, you're talking about people without much experience.
They're in jobs that are way beyond anything they've ever done before.
And they're doing things that they did when they were civilians.
And that's just an impossibility now.
You can't even walk out of your office and make an off-the-cuff statement.
If you're the Secretary of Defense or the Director of the CIA, Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of State, whatever you say, your words have to be carefully chosen.
Now, they don't seem to understand that anything at that high level involving any potential action or policy that the White House may direct should be treated at least as extremely confidential, if not top secret.
Which means, again, you go back to the The network that you know is encrypted.
I'm surprised that whoever works for Secretary Hegseth did not go to him and say, look, you really need to reconsider this discussion and let's put it on the secure network.
But then again, he may have done these things without consulting anybody in his office.
Who knows?
But I feel badly for Tulsi Gabbard.
She's trying to be a loyal member of the Trump team.
And there's only so much that she can do, and she has to answer truthfully, and she did.
What she said is correct.
I feel sorry for her, too.
The person who needs to answer truthfully is the Secretary of Defense.
I mean, the Vice President expressed an opinion, a good one.
Maybe we should caution against this.
Maybe we shouldn't be doing it.
Aside from what he said, there's no conversation about the lawfulness, morality.
Or military necessity of bombing this residential neighborhood in Yemen.
Well, Judge, those things never come up, I'm sorry to say.
I've never heard anybody bring up those kinds of matters.
Because remember, especially the people in the military, but the people in the Department of Defense are treating whatever policy decision is made as a foregone conclusion and sacrosanct.
So the notion that you would raise that is just not very probable on the defense.
Colonel, is the United States preparing?
No, I think so.
I don't think there's any question about that, unfortunately.
Now, you and I know that this has been going on for a long time, and we've had similar buildups in the past.
The other thing is the Iranians have allegedly been within a week or two weeks or 10 days of having a nuclear weapon off and on for a decade at least.
I don't know how many times I've listened to someone From the Israeli government or one of their supporters inside the United States make that argument.
But this looks very serious.
An enormous amount of firepower is being assembled.
I think it's unfortunate that we photograph bombers and ships and other things that are being assembled for an attack and then broadcast that through our media.
I wish we would not do that.
If I were Secretary of Defense, I would ask the media not to do that, and I probably would ban them from any of the installations where the firepower is being assembled.
Unfortunately, it's too late.
That's been done.
And we don't understand that, allegedly, the Iranians have missiles with a maximum range for precision guidance of 2,000 kilometers.
That's great.
Diego Garcia is just beyond that range.
But the next level, the next ranging level for missiles that both the Russians and the Chinese have, which they could conceivably turn over to the Iranians, is 5,000 kilometers.
Now, if those missiles are on hand or they've already been provided, we just don't know.
That means that when you assemble aircraft or ships or anything else within that range, They're at risk of being destroyed.
And what's to stop an enemy from destroying your aircraft on the tarmac, on the runway, before they ever get a chance to get into the air?
I'm very uncomfortable with all these pictures.
I think somebody probably in Washington says, well, this is great.
We're intimidating the Iranians.
I don't see much evidence for that intimidation.
What I see is evidence for revealing too much of what you might do.
But that's a problem we have.
It's not a new one.
We had it during World War II.
Interrogations of German senior officers indicated that some of the most valuable intelligence they had during the war came right out of newspapers in the United States.
Colonel, several of our colleagues on this show have stated that among the last advice that Bill Burns Who's the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and for four years was the director of the CIA under President Biden,
gave to Director Gabbard and Director Ratcliffe was his opinion that the Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon.
Would the United States follow the political needs of Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Over its own intelligence assessments as to what they're targeting, what they're bombing, who they're trying to kill, what they're trying to prevent?
Well, there's certainly a large body of evidence to suggest that that's the case.
We have to ask the question, why would we want to create this tension that can only lead, ultimately, to the development of a nuclear weapon, not just in Iran, but in many other countries?
If you watch the United States over the last 20, 30 years, the real lesson that you take away from all of it is that if you don't have a nuclear weapon, you are at risk of being destroyed from the air, invaded on the ground, destroyed from the sea.
So you ought to invest in a nuclear weapon.
And that's why I don't think any of the so-called intimidation tactics work.
I think it has the opposite effect.
I think that's what we're witnessing right now today in Iran.
And it may be that inside Iran, in that inner circle, someone has said, we have to be ready very, very shortly to field our own nuclear warheads, because if we don't, we risk being destroyed.
I hope that's not the case, but I worry a great deal about that.
Does Israel risk being destroyed if Israel and the United States attack Iran?
That may be one thing for Iran to attack the United States, given the...
The enormous distance, but quite another for Iran to attack Tel Aviv.
Well, remember, I think the last time we talked, I pointed out to some underlying assumptions that are not questioned either in Israel or in Washington.
And those assumptions include the Arabs, the Muslim states in general in the region can be bullied.
They can be pushed.
They can be steamrolled into whatever direction we care to go with impunity.
That's number one.
Number two, does that include the Turks?
I think it does.
But on the other hand, you have to consider the possibility that we regard the Turks as having been sufficiently bribed or bought off in Syria so as to keep them on side.
Remember, it's always a question of bribe, bully, and then bomb.
Bomb is the last step if the bribes and the bullying doesn't work.
But the second thing is that there's this assumption that we are irresistible, invincible, that the combination of Israeli and American military power, specifically American, cannot be resisted, cannot be defeated.
Those assumptions, I think, are dangerous, and we may yet get a demonstration of just how inaccurate those assumptions are.
Colonel I Colonel, what do you think would be the reaction in Moscow or Beijing to an American attack on Tehran?
I think Russia will stand by Iran.
They have a mutual defense pact.
We don't know the details, all the various codicils and statements in the pact, but I think it's pretty clear.
That from the Russian standpoint, Iran is the keystone and the edifice of the region.
Remember, we talked previously about this road, which consists of rail lines as well as road, that runs from the Indian Ocean coast of Iran, straight up through Iran, all the way through the Caucasus and into Russia, that can carry oil, gas, all sorts of things in both directions, and then ultimately reach Europe.
And again, Iran also sits astride routes between the East and the West.
From the Chinese standpoint, Persia was always the key player on the Silk Road.
And in fact, once you left Chinese territory, the lingua franca for hundreds of years of that Silk Road was Persian or Farsi, was never Chinese.
I don't see the Russians under any circumstances abandoning Iran.
And if we think they will, we're wrong.
And again, I think this is one of the reasons that President Trump wanted a rapid conclusion to the war in Ukraine in the hopes that he could formulate an agreement that would satisfy Russian national security interests and urge the Russians to stay out of any confrontation with Iran.
Well, that's obviously failed.
While we're doing many good things in Riyadh, and I think the team down there really is negotiating good things with the Russians for the future from the standpoint of the United States, and I would argue Europe, towards normalizing relations.
The problem is that this war drags on, and we don't seem to understand that this war is not going to end, frankly, until you get rid of Zelensky.
He and his cabal and his backers in Western Europe are keeping this thing going.
Don't the Chinese receive a fair amount of oil from Iran, and wouldn't they do what they had to to prevent that from being interrupted?
Well, they have a flotilla, a naval flotilla.
It's not very large, but it is in the Indian Ocean, right at the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz.
I don't know the distribution of submarines, but I suspect Russian and Chinese submarines are also in those waters.
So yes, the Chinese absolutely oppose any obstruction of access to the Straits of Hormuz.
By the way, so do the Koreans and the Japanese and others who depend on that oil and natural gas.
I hope that that gaggle of people on the text chat...
about which we spoke earlier in this conversation are intelligent enough to realize the risks of bombing Iran and to inform the president of those risks rather than blithely saying as they seem to on the chat with the exception of the vice president whose hesitance I commend Tell us when you want the bombs to fly.
I mean, they have to know what you're talking about.
They have to understand the extraordinary risk of just blithely going along with what the Netanyahu regime wants.
Well, you're addressing one problem, which is obviously the powerful influence of Netanyahu, the Israel lobby on the White House and the Hill.
That's clear.
There's another problem that is unspoken.
But is unavoidable in this discussion, and that is that we tend to treat target sets delivered to us largely by the Air Force as a substitute for strategic planning.
In other words, we've forgotten strategy.
We've forgotten the questions of purpose, method, and state.
We don't go down that road thoroughly enough so that you arrive at a destination that says, if you do X and Y, You have these potential outcomes and you may not be able to control it.
Instead, we look at target sets.
Oh, look at the targets that we struck.
That was mentioned during the text discussion where they were celebrating the death of somebody that was supposedly a high-ranking member of the Yemeni or Houthi government.
He went into a building to, quote-unquote, see his girlfriend and we destroyed the building.
Treating that as a strategic outcome.
That's not a strategic outcome.
That does not get you somewhere.
It does not promote a solution.
It does not answer the questions of strategic interest.
And this is the problem.
There are too many people that have been treating target sets.
We went through this in Vietnam.
We bomb X, Y, and Z, and the enemy will understand.
We'll send a message and we'll bomb here, here, here, and the enemy will get it.
It doesn't work.
It failed in Vietnam.
Ultimately, it failed in Iraq, which is why we ended up with this ground invasion, or at least that's an excuse for it.
And I don't see much evidence that it's been successful anywhere else.
These are not real strategic solutions.
Thank you.
Sounds as though the president has not surrounded himself.
With people of a sufficient level of intellectual maturity and personal experience to delve into this deadly business of killing people overseas.
The conversation sounded high school-ish to me, but I had a security clearance, but I never participated in the conversation about killing people.
No, I think you're right.
And if you go back and read George Kennan's observations and comments on the...
In other words, it's very difficult for leaders in the United States that are very heavily dependent upon air and naval power to understand that those instrumentalities are not an answer to a strategic dilemma, that there has to be another way.
That's why interests have to be understood.
It's why we continue to not understand the Russians, because we're not really listening.
We're too busy developing messages we want to send to them or messages to Iran.
We don't listen.
If you don't listen, you don't get any answers.
And that's where we are right now.
The answer then becomes a target set.
Show me the target sets again.
I want to make sure one more time.
And you watch some...
A civilian appointee or an Air Force general who is just enthralled with the idea of bombing any opportunity they get and says, oh, well, this target, if we destroy this, that'll bring down the whole regime.
If we hit these people here, that will decapitate the regime.
How many times have we heard that nonsense?
And how often does it fail?
Every time.
Colonel McGregor, thank you for your time, my dear friend.
Thank you for your courageous and insightful comments.
Deeply and profoundly appreciate it.
All the best to you.
Okay, Judge.
Thanks. Thank you.
Coming up later today at 2 o'clock this afternoon on the same subjects, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 3.30 this afternoon on the same subjects.
Professor John Mearsheimer heads up on tomorrow.
The roundtable is at 4 o'clock Friday afternoon and at 5 o'clock Friday afternoon, which is midnight in Yemen.
Pepe Escobar, who's been in Yemen all week while this controversy has been raging here in the U.S., and he'll give us the view from the ground level there.
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