June 24, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Ajudging Freedom. | |
| Today is Wednesday, June 25th, 2025. | |
| Former Ambassador Craig Murray joins us now. | |
| Ambassador, always a pleasure. | |
| We missed you. | |
| I know you've been doing a lot of traveling, but thank you very much for joining us. | |
| And thank you for welcoming us to your beautiful study filled with wonderful books. | |
| So I have been following some of the things you've been writing and saying lately. | |
| And of course, they're very much in sync with what we say here. | |
| But let me get this straight. | |
| A country with an illegal nuclear program that refuses to sign or abide by the non-proliferation, proliferation treaty complains about another country with a legal nuclear enrichment program for civilian purposes that does abide by the non-proliferation treaty. | |
| And the United States gets on the side of the former and decides to bomb and destroy the nuclear enrichment program of the latter. | |
| Do I have that right? | |
| Amazingly, you do have that right. | |
| That is exactly what happened. | |
| And it's also true, I think, that you would never know that was what happened if you got your news from the mainstream media. | |
| I was actually monitoring the BBC for two days around the American Strikes, which is a fairly nauseating thing to do. | |
| But the BBC did not mention once, not one single time in two days, that Israel actually has nuclear weapons, which is a fairly fundamental fact when considering what is happening. | |
| But that, of course, is not part of the official narrative at all. | |
| It is just part of the real world from which the official narrative is increasingly divorced. | |
| The interesting question now, I think, is whether Iran, which is looking like it may now quit the IAEA and quit the NPT, it's certainly threatening to do so, whether Iran will in fact now go on to do something it has always forsworn doing, which the intelligence agencies of the United States have always said it is not doing, whether it will now change its mind and decide to actually develop a nuclear weapon. | |
| And one thing which I think is certain is that the events of the last couple of weeks have made Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon more likely and not less likely. | |
| Very interesting observation. | |
| I would analogize that to Prime Minister Netanyahu persuading the President of the United States to bomb Iran in order to bring about regime change. | |
| It is less likely after the bombing than before. | |
| The Iranians have rallied around the regime such as it is with barely a peep expressing a dissenting view. | |
| The only dissenting views, as you say, are in the West. | |
| But don't the bombers, I don't mean the pilots, but the people that dispatch them, think about these things before they make such awful, dreadful decisions. | |
| Colonel Douglas McGregor, an American Scotsman, has called a PR stunt. | |
| This PR stunt costs the American taxpayer $100 million. | |
| I put a perhaps hopeful twist on it. | |
| I always try to be optimistic. | |
| And one theory I have which could be true, I don't think Trump has fallen for the regime change trap. | |
| I don't think he is stupid enough to believe that you can bomb Iran into regime change because plainly you can't. | |
| As you say, it's counterproductive. | |
| I wonder whether in going for this option of a spectacular, hopefully one-off attack on Iranian nuclear sites, Trump is not quitting himself of his obligation to the Zionist donors who contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to his election campaign. | |
| Whether he's not now, having been boxed in by Netanyahu, having been boxed into supporting the genocide in Gaza, having been boxed into attacking Iran, whether he's now able to say, look, I did this and it was big and it was beautiful and it was successful and destroyed everything. | |
| None of which is particularly true, but that's a spin he wants to put. | |
| I've paid my debt. | |
| I've paid off it. | |
| You can't hold me to anything else for the money you've paid. | |
| Very, very interesting observation. | |
| Apparently, a lot of demands have been made on him by Mrs. Edelman, who gave $100 million to one of the Trump PACs. | |
| And one of those demands, apparently, was that Marco Rubio be his vice president, to which Trump said, no, but I'll make him the Secretary of State. | |
| Well, he's the de jure Secretary of State, the de facto Secretary of State is Trump's buddy Steve Witkoff, who goes around the world doing the negotiations for the hotspots. | |
| But further to what you said a few moments ago, here's the Russian ambassador to the United Nations yesterday at the UN Security Council. | |
| I think you'll find this very telling and you'll agree with it as unpleasant as it is. | |
| Chris, cut number seven. | |
| The actions of the U.S. and Israel directly violated the UN Charter. | |
| They constitute a direct and very dangerous challenge to the authority of the NPT, especially Iran's right guaranteed under Article 4 of the treaty to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, including uranium enrichment. | |
| And all of these actions were carried out by two states, one of which is a depository of the NPT, while the other for decades has refused to accede to this crucial element of international security and has refused to subject its nuclear activities to IAEA safeguards. | |
| By the way, we are a bit surprised at Israel's request to take part in our meeting, which is taking place under the agenda item nonproliferation. | |
| We would like to believe that this decision hints at a potential accession of this country to the NPT, which the entire world would love to see. | |
| Wow. | |
| Israel refused to participate in that segment of the Security Council. | |
| How does this strike you? | |
| Israel is, of course, extremely isolated now at the UN. | |
| Even the United Kingdom has stopped supporting the United States in recent votes on the Security Council on Israel. | |
| I was at the Security Council a couple of weeks ago and had the pleasure of a one-on-one meeting with the Russian ambassador. | |
| That was before the attack on Israel, sorry, before the attack on Iran by the United States. | |
| So we didn't discuss that, but we had a tour d'Ornison of world events. | |
| And I found him an extremely sensible and very pleasant man. | |
| And I think he very seldom, I find, says things in the United Nations which are not spot on. | |
| And I think those comments are spot on. | |
| I think it'll be a shame, in a sense, if Iran does withdraw from the NPT. | |
| But on the other hand, it's very hard to blame Iran, given Netanyahu's constant attacks, his constant warmongering, the fact that Israel has occupied parts of Syria and parts of Lebanon in the last six months and shows no sign of leaving, and it was undoubtedly Israel that attacked Iran first. | |
| It's very hard to blame Iran for if they do want to acquire a nuclear weapon. | |
| I think if I were the Iranian government, acquiring a nuclear weapon to defend myself from Israel would be quite high on my agenda. | |
| How did we get from the planning was brilliant, Secretary Hague said, even though this was planned in the Biden administration, the execution totally obliterated the nuclear capability, even though we know now that the tunnels were empty. | |
| How did we get from gross exaggeration to painful reality? | |
| Well, the Ivanians actually made a public announcement two or three days before the American bombings. | |
| The Ivanians actually announced that they had removed and dispersed all the highly enriched stop you. | |
| That appeared. | |
| I agree with you 100%, Ambassador. | |
| That appeared nowhere in the West. | |
| Nowhere. | |
| No, no, Western media didn't cover it at all. | |
| The Agency Fire Ministry made a formal announcement that they had removed the material. | |
| So there was no point in, you know, they bombed empty vaults, basically. | |
| How much damage they did to the empty vaults is up to consideration. | |
| But we now, of course, know less about where that material was. | |
| America is, in a sense, in a much weaker position than it was two weeks ago, because two weeks ago, it actually knew where the enriched uranium was. | |
| Now, not only does it not know where it is, it has no objective means of proving whether it's been destroyed or not, whether it still exists. | |
| So the United States is in a far weaker position now than it was a fortnight ago. | |
| It appears that the president was receiving his intel from Mossad. | |
| We were told that he actually invited English-speaking Mossad agents directly into the Oval Office. | |
| It also appeared, this is unprecedented, of course, because they don't have security clearances, but that's the way Trump chooses to expose himself and his presidency. | |
| We also understand that American Intel uniformly informed the Director of National Intelligence, Telsey Gabbard, that the Iranians had no nuclear weapon capability and weren't even working on it since 2002 or 2003, 22 or 23 years ago. | |
| And the president chose, perhaps because of the influence of the donor class and the campaign about which you spoke so nicely earlier, Ambassador, to reject the findings of his own intelligence community and accept that of Mossad. | |
| This is a long-winded question. | |
| Now Mossad, which deceived him before, is deceiving him again if they're telling him, as he claimed in Brussels just a few hours ago, that in fact the Iranian nuclear capabilities were either totally destroyed or so locked into the bottom of a mountain that they can't be retrieved for years. | |
| He obviously believes what he wants to believe. | |
| I think that last point is the key point. | |
| I don't think he particularly believed Mossad and disbelieved his own intelligence agencies before. | |
| I think it was simply in his interest to go against what his own intelligence agencies were saying and had been saying consistently since 2007. | |
| I know you've had Ray McGovern on the show, who's very good and specific on this point of how those exercises are conducted. | |
| And I'd add as a side note, it's rather a shame, I think, that Tulsi Gabbard gave into pressure and tried to climb down from a position that she very clearly took when she gave the official intelligence assessment. | |
| But as I say, I'm actually rather hopeful about Trump parroting this false line about the amazing success, because that's his ladder to climb down. | |
| You know, okay, we've done it. | |
| We were totally successful. | |
| It was a brilliant operation. | |
| We finished. | |
| That's his off ramp from continued American attacks on Iran. | |
| And I think the fact that he didn't react, for example, after what was a very token, deliberately weak Iranian attack on the USA base in Qatar, that was another hopeful sign. | |
| So as I say, I'm slightly optimistic at the moment. | |
| Very interesting observation. | |
| Tell me what you think of this. | |
| This is Secretary Hegse and President Trump just about two hours ago answering questions they didn't want to answer. | |
| It's about almost two minutes long. | |
| Chris, number 16. | |
| If you look at the dates, it's just a few days after it happened. | |
| So they didn't see it. | |
| They said it may be very severe. | |
| Do you have a message for the intelligence community, though, in terms of unvarnished information getting to you? | |
| That it's not. | |
| I don't really have a message. | |
| I would say issue the report when you know what happened. | |
| I wouldn't say that it could be severe or maybe not. | |
| They use the word severe. | |
| It could be severe or maybe it's not. | |
| So people like you picked up and said, oh, it's not severe. | |
| No. | |
| The report was not a complete report. | |
| Yeah, the message was probably wait till you know the answer before you leave. | |
| Would you not have a public component to your Zelensky meeting for a tactical reason with President Plus? | |
| Hello, Mr. Secretary. | |
| There's a reason the President calls out fake news for what it is. | |
| These pilots, these refuelers, these fighters, these air defenders, the skill and the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people and the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom. | |
| And then the instinct, the instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country. | |
| They don't care what the troops think. | |
| They don't care what the world thinks. | |
| They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak. | |
| Of course, we've all seen plenty of leakers. | |
| And what do leakers do? | |
| They have agendas. | |
| And what do they do? | |
| Do they share the whole information or just the part that they want to introduce? | |
| And when they introduce that preliminary report that's deemed to be a low assessment, you know what a low assessment means? | |
| Low confidence in the data in that report. | |
| And why is there low confidence? | |
| Because all of the evidence of what was just bombed by 12 30,000-pound bombs is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated. | |
| So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Ford, you better get a big shovel. | |
| I found that to be repellent political claptrap. | |
| What happened to the world that these people ended up representing a nation that contains so many great people that the United States contains? | |
| You couldn't have two more clownish personalities, really. | |
| Hexif always seems to me like he's more like a professional wrestling announcer than he is like any kind of government official, let alone an extremely senior one. | |
| I find that quite astonishing. | |
| Although, of course, the only point of which I have any sympathy is I have as little time for the New York Times as I have for those two. | |
| These people all deserve each other. | |
| Yeah, interesting observation. | |
| Did Netanyahu and his government come to the realization after about two weeks of this war, which they started unprovoked, that Iran was far stronger, far more resilient than they ever imagined, and that the devastation to Israel was far greater than anything they were prepared to confront? | |
| I think that's very definitely true. | |
| One thing that has been shattered completely is this myth of Israeli invincibility, which was extremely important to them. | |
| And the myth that the Iron Dome and the David's armpit or whatever they call it, you know, all these different weapon systems would be able to stop anything getting through. | |
| And they're still retelling what are obvious lies, like 96% of Iranian missiles were intercepted. | |
| Well, Iran must have fired a huge amount of missiles if 96% were intercepted. | |
| But we can see that's not true from video with the evidence of our own eyes. | |
| But that puncturing of the myth of Israeli invincibility is actually very important. | |
| And it may have ramifications in ways we don't yet expect. | |
| For example, the Iranians have done this, but there are Arab populations which have pro-Israeli regime. | |
| And the pro-the-Israeli regimes claim force majeure, among other things, you know, Claim it's not possible to do anything about Israel. | |
| Well, those Arab populations have seen that Israel can be hit. | |
| And people in some of these Arab states are going to think: well, if Iran can do that, why can't my country do that? | |
| Why is my regime so Israeli? | |
| It is possible to stand up to Israelis. | |
| It is possible to hurt them. | |
| We don't have to spend our lives being in fear and trembling of the Israelis. | |
| The ramifications of the loss of the order of invincibility of Israel across the Middle East, I think, are going to be quite interesting in the next year or two. | |
| Why is there a ceasefire? | |
| Is it because the Israelis cried, Uncle? | |
| Surely the Iranians didn't. | |
| I think it is because the Israelis cried, Uncle, their missile defense systems were undoubtedly failing. | |
| We've all seen videos of individual parts of the missile system either being hit by missiles or malfunctioning and blowing itself up. | |
| And these systems, they're highly technical systems, and they're not really expected to operate 24 hours a day full time for weeks and weeks on end. | |
| When they're manufactured, that's not really the kind of tolerance or task they were designed for. | |
| And the Israeli defense system was simply overwhelmed. | |
| On the other hand, Iran also, I think it's quite possible that Iran was not coming to the end of its stock of missiles, but probably using as much of its stock of missiles as it wants to in terms of having sufficient left in case it is facing an actual existential threat, as in a full-on assault from the United States or something along those lines. | |
| I think basically the Israelis, sorry, the Iranians felt they'd wasted enough missiles on Israel for the moment. | |
| So there's an element of mutual pause there. | |
| I don't expect it to last. | |
| I will be very surprised if hostilities don't resume in a matter of weeks. | |
| Is this why you called it a phantom ceasefire? | |
| That is largely why I called it a phantom ceasefire. | |
| I don't expect it to last. | |
| And of course, Israel has never honored any ceasefire. | |
| I was in Lebanon, as you know, I was in Beirut, and I saw Israel bomb Beirut numerous times after the ceasefire. | |
| I saw Israel gun down people in southern Lebanon after the ceasefire who were merely trying to return to their homes as the ceasefire stated they should be able to. | |
| And in fact, that ceasefire has been violated by Israel over 1,000 times in six months. | |
| So I don't expect, I'd be extraordinarily surprised if Israel honors the ceasefire. | |
| I don't think it's ever honored any ceasefire. | |
| And I don't think the Iranians will take it anymore. | |
| I don't think they will be in the mood to allow Israel to bomb them without striking back and striking back hard. | |
| Ambassador Craig Murray, a pleasure, my dear friend. | |
| Thank you for inviting us into your study and thank you for sharing the fruits of your fertile brain and your experience with us. | |
| I hope you can join us again. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I'd very much like to and thank you very much for asking me. | |
| Of course. | |
| Our pleasure. |
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