March 9, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:19
Ray McGovern : Will Iran Decimate Israel ?
Ray McGovern joins Judge Andrew Napolitano to dissect the March 9, 2026, Iran-Israel war, challenging claims that Iran killed 160 civilians in an elementary school by citing video evidence of an American missile. They examine Tulsi Gabbard's leaked pre-war warnings and her subsequent silence, while McGovern warns that Israel's stolen nuclear technology could trigger a global conflict involving Russia and China. Critiquing Senator Lindsey Graham's justification for the violence, the discussion concludes that rising oil prices and economic fallout may force Americans to reconsider the morality of this escalating aggression. [Automatically generated summary]
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, March 9th, 2026.
Ray McGovern will be with us in just a moment on Will Iran Decimate Israel?
And by the way, where's Telsey Gabbard?
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Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend.
Before we get to Iran's destructive power on Israel, there is this sadness here about the killing of 160 little girls and their teachers and the mom of one of them and the three-month-old sibling of one of them.
The sadness is pervasive, but not on Air Force One.
Cut number 10.
Mr. President, did the United States bomb a girls' elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war and kill 175 people?
Based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran.
Is that true, Mr. Hexa?
It was Iran who did that?
We're certainly investigating.
Still investigating.
But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.
We think it was done by Iran.
Can you give us an idea?
They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.
They have no accuracy whatsoever.
It was done by Iran.
So Larry Johnson, as you may know, saw the video of the missile hitting and stopped it frame by frame, and it's clearly identified as an American missile.
Is sickening to accuse the people they're trying to kill of killing 160 little girls.
But I'll let you take this.
This is for you to comment on more than me.
Well, it's a supreme moral issue, isn't it?
Not only lying.
I mean, Trump saying, from what I've been told, it was the Iranians.
Well, give me a break.
But there is an outside chance that Rubio, who controls the information flow to Trump, really told him this.
I mean, other things have happened in the past.
I've watched it happen.
So, and Trump may not only be deluded, but he may be terribly uninformed or misinformed.
You notice that Hekseth interrupted himself.
We're investigating outward.
Right.
The Defense Department.
I'm sorry.
The Department of War is investigating this.
You know, Heks also said brilliantly a couple days ago, we show no mercy.
There will be no mercy.
We are really tough.
No mercy.
Well, my God, you know, is that what we have become?
Actually, if you look at those 100 and actually, it's 170 now up to.
The reason the count was not completely done immediately is because they don't like to double count these Iranians.
They're real strange.
You know, if they see an arm here, well, it could belong to this other arm that the same person let's not count as give me a break.
How bad is that?
You know, I have trouble kind of dealing with this, with this arrogance and with the fact that chronologically, as an analyst, I mean, it could not have been an Iranian missile because the Iranians didn't know they were being attacked for God's sake.
That was the first minutes of the war.
I mean, oh, God.
So, but aside from all I told you, you talked about the moral issue though.
You know, a friend of mine, a tutor, I took several courses by him and Daniel Berrigan was his name.
He was a justice person, and he wrote a poem about this.
I don't know if we have time.
It just takes a minute and a half, but it seems so relevant that I'd like to read it if that's okay.
Go ahead, Ray.
All right.
It's called Some, S-O-M-E.
And here it is.
Quote: Some stood up once and sat down.
Some walked a mile and walked away.
Some stood up twice, then sat down.
I've had it, they said.
Some walked two miles and then walked away.
It's too much, they cried.
Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools.
They were taken for having been taken in.
Some walked and walked and walked.
They walked the earth.
They walked the waters.
They walked the air.
Why do you stand? They were asked.
And why do you walk?
Because of the children, they said, and because of the heart, because of the bread, because the cause is the heart's beat, and the children born and the risen bread.
Dan Berrigan wrote that poem.
He did not publish it.
I copied it off the wall of a Catholic worker unit I was staying at in the Bowery of New York.
He gave it to them as a special gift because it was written at times like these where they needed to be encouraged.
They need to say, well, look, not only is this terribly bad, but we have to be with those who stand and those who walk and those who don't quit.
That's left to us today.
That's what we have to do, in my view.
I don't know who would believe.
It was very moving, Ray, deeply moving.
Who Would Believe the Secretary of War?00:16:18
I don't know who would believe the president and the man who calls himself the Secretary of War.
Even the looks on their faces, I don't think they believe what they were saying.
Does the government care about killing babies?
It does it.
They'll just blame somebody else.
It couldn't care less.
No empathy.
No sympathy whatsoever.
Well, you know, we don't have to be corny about this.
I'll get back to the scriptures, but blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.
Well, even Islam is as much as the Judeo-Christian scriptures on we must be merciful as Allah and Islam is merciful.
The merciful thing is a good thing to be.
So for our Secretary of War to say, we show no mercy.
Well, that's not the America I belong to.
And I think we have to stand up.
We have to walk.
We have to stand and stand and stand.
So at the outset of this war, or before it started, to be more accurate, apparently two members of Trump's inner circle advised against it.
The vice president, Vance, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
The vice president is on a flip and he's now a cheerleader for the war.
But where is Tulsi Gabbard?
And before you answer, watch this from her podcast before she was the director of national intelligence, Chris Cuttenberg one.
When you violently intervene in the affairs of another country, you're doing something like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill.
You can let it go, but you have no control over how it bounces or where it ends.
Iran is a perfect example of this.
What is the cost of war?
Now, if you listen to politicians talking on camera or if you hear some of the conversations that happen in Washington, D.C. amongst the permanent Washington class of elite politicians and those in the media and the military-industrial complex, very rarely do you ever hear them actually talk about, ask the question and try to answer what is the cost of war?
Somehow there is always a blank check coming from Congress spending our American taxpayer dollars to go and wage new wars, a new Cold War, a nuclear arms race, while they tell people back here at home, people who are struggling for clean water or for safe communities or securing our borders, just saying, sorry, there's not enough money.
You never hear them actually talk about and tell the American people what is the cost of war in the form of cost in human lives, the form of cost to American taxpayers, the form of cost to our economy and to our freedom.
Has she made any public statements about the war of which you're aware in the past 10 days?
What's her name again?
Tulsi Supton?
No, she's actually put out a notice of $100,000 reward for information leading up to the apprehension of those who sequestered her.
She's been incommunicado.
I don't know where she was, where she is.
Now, there may be a hint in the fact that somebody, probably somebody who knows about where she stood on this whole war, leaked a report saying the National Intelligence Council, which is directly under Tulsi and which is a community-wide body, advised the president well before this war.
Reports are that it was about a week before the war that it was issued, but you could count on this dialogue going on a month before that Trump totally disregarded.
The warning was that there could be no regime change, whether it's a long war or a short war.
Forgot about Mr. President.
That's the unwelcome news that real intelligence professionals give to the commander-in-chief.
I don't know what his, oh, there it is.
Okay.
I asked Nemo, who is a terrific cartoonist, maybe we could get this kind of the milk carton circulated at all the safeways and all the food lines down here.
And maybe somebody will see her and be able to free her so that she can speak out and say, all right, I quit.
And the reasons I quit is because I care about people.
I care about little girls.
I care about everybody who's going to be suffering, not only the economic consequences, but the human consequences.
As she said, when was it?
What was the date of that interview that we just saw?
Does anyone know?
That was before she was director of national intelligence, of course.
She said great things when she was in Congress about war and great things in the, I guess, during the Biden administration when she ran this podcast, but she's effectively been silent since then.
But you know that I've been back and forth about whether she should resign.
There was a good argument for she could stay in and have her input.
And she did.
And we know the results of that because someone leaked it to the Washington Post.
Now, I think she should resign very publicly, very openly, protect herself with the strongest guys she can surround herself with.
But to tell the truth, because that's what we need now, the truth.
This could end up even worse than anyone expected.
And I notice none of your prior guests today did mention the nuclear possibility, which worries me far and above anything else and has me more concerned than at any time since 1963 when I entered the CIA as a Russian analyst.
That clip of her was January 2023.
So President Biden was still in office.
Here's the Iranian foreign minister yesterday.
He makes a number of interesting statements, the most important of which I'm going to read aloud ahead of time so you and the folks watching us now will catch it.
And that is, quote, and now they want to ask for a ceasefire again.
You'll hear him say this.
Chris, cut number 13.
Obviously, this time is different from the previous time.
Last time we accepted the ceasefire, but this time is quite different.
And the reason is obvious.
Last time they attacked us, they made aggression against us.
They killed our people.
They destroyed our places and then asked for a ceasefire.
And we accepted out of good faith because we were only exercising the act of self-defense.
And when the aggression was stopped, we stopped too.
But, you know, it didn't bring about peace.
And now this year, they again started to attack us.
And again, they have, you know, they are killing our people.
They are killing, you know, girl students.
You know, they are attacking hospitals, you know, freshwater desalinations, you know, refineries, you know, everywhere.
People have been killed, places have been destroyed.
And now they want to ask for a ceasefire again.
Well, this doesn't work like this.
So there should be a permanent end of the war.
And unless we get to that, I think we need to, you know, continue fighting for the sake of our people and our security.
Nowhere in the Western press, maybe you've seen it, I have not, that anybody on behalf of the Trump administration, as you know, they go through an intermediary about 10 days ago.
They went through the Italian foreign ministry that the Trump administration saw it or the Israelis saw it, a ceasefire.
Well, Judge, it looks like the Israelis and the U.S. are indeed going to run out of ammunition.
The Iranians have kept their real ACEs in the hole at the bottom of the deck, their hypersonic missiles.
You just heard Arachi, the Iranian foreign minister, say, we're not going to stop.
We have people like David Ignatius, big fan for this war up until up until this morning.
What was he saying this morning?
Oh my God, the longer and the wider war is what we didn't expect, but now we expect.
And how is this going to end?
Well, that's what concerns me.
How is this going to end?
This is the first time I just counted them.
64 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis that nuclear armed forces are engaged.
On the U.S. side, you have Israel with nuclear weapons.
Now they're contending with Iran with no nuclear weapons, although they could get them soon.
Or you have Russia and China defending them.
So this is the, John Kennedy, in his beautiful Maryland speech there four months before he died said, look, the thing we have to avoid most of all is facing a nuclear-armed state with a choice between disdainful surrender and using those weapons.
Now, that's where we are in my view.
Netanyahu, not going to give up.
His watch is at stake.
He can't give up.
Does Netanyahu have nuclear weapons?
Yeah, he does.
He stole the technology from us and he was part of that stealing.
Do you think, and I just asked our viewers here, who thinks that Netanyahu would hesitate to use a couple of these nuclear weapons in extremis if he had no other out?
Okay.
I think that he would.
And that is a new element.
And that's why there's a premium.
Get this thing tamped down.
And I noticed that Putin has been on the phone with the Arab states and presumably with Trump saying to Trump, look, I told you not to do this.
Gas or oil now is $120 on the Asian markets this morning.
Your own economy is shot.
Now, look, I can act as a kind of, I have ties with Netanyahu, I have ties with everybody else.
I can help you mediate this thing.
Now, whether Trump will be sensible enough to do that, I don't think, as I've said for five months now, Trump is well.
But this has to be brought home to the American people.
We are in danger of a wider war, as now David Ignatius admits.
But this wider war will not end well unless we have some sort of negotiated settlement where Netanyahu will not use his nuclear weapons.
Now, people say, oh my God, Trump would never allow Netanyahu to use the nuclear weapons.
Come on, give me a break.
It's Netanyahu is running this ship, okay?
And even if Trump did so, my advisors, the ones I disregarded before, say that would be not a good idea.
Netanyahu would give him the finger or something else.
The Israelis, as always, would prefer to ask for forgiveness after the fact than for permission before the fact.
It's as we're taping this, it's 10:20 in the morning, so the market has been open for 50 minutes.
It's already down.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is already down 800 points.
Chris also tells me the last time Tulsi Gabbard posted anything on X was February 25, the week before Trump attacked.
What happens to intelligence analysts who tell him what he doesn't want to hear?
Like, hey, Mr. President, this war is not winnable.
They don't get promoted.
They get sent to the library to stack books.
I know that from personal experience.
I was a Russian, a Soviet analyst, and I was completely out of sympathy with the people that thought that Garabachev, Michael Garabachev, was just a very clever commie.
I could see on the first page of Travla that he was extraordinary, that he was doing various things that were revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, if you will.
So I was lucky because I had landed that job as a president's daily briefer for four years, 81 to 85, and I was able to tell Schultz, Weinberger, the vice president, George H.W. Bush, and very rarely, but when he woke up that early, the president himself, look, Garabachev is the real deal.
You can deal with him.
Okay.
And what happened?
Well, we got the Intermediate Forces Agreement, which limited intermediate force.
And who got out of that?
Trump, okay?
Right before he left his first term.
So all I'm saying here is that it was a matter of luck that I was able to tell the real truth because my superiors, here's a little vignette.
Okay.
So I'm in Secretary of Salt George Schultz's ante-room.
And I'm sort of preparing my little, as usual, my two-minute briefing, my five-minute briefing, 10 minutes, if he could.
Okay.
So the Secretary, Mr. McGovern here, gives me a little, in those days, we call it ticker, okay?
It's right off the ticker machine, right?
Hey, Pay, the Secretary of State's been right to go to Moscow by Michael Garabachev.
So I said, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary of State, Oxadi said, I suppose, I suppose your leaders would say this is very bad because he's just a clever commie.
I look at him, I say.
So what do you think?
Well, let me just say, Secretary Schultz, that I don't often agree with my leaders and on Russian foreign policy, I very seldom agree with them.
Now, it wasn't just me.
It was the people who were feeding me real information, the people in the analysis group of FBIS, what it was called.
It was not subservient to Bobby Gates or Bill Casey.
Well, Bill Casey, ultimately, but they were giving me the real poop based on media analysis in those days.
With the Russians, it worked, okay?
All I'm saying here is that I was the exception to the rule because I wouldn't work for the people that Gates put in, his little puppets, his little malleable managers that would say, oh, yeah, Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or the Russians will never change.
But my colleagues, they had a choice.
And the ones that blessed that terrible estimate on Iraq, October 1, 2002, they got pay increases.
Finally, No Shame00:02:08
They got cash awards.
They got great praise from everyone in the agency.
And that's pretty much why I entered into my new career about 30 years ago.
Wow.
Before we go, I got to give you a little bit of heartburn.
Senator Lindsey Graham yesterday, I'm going to tell you right now what he says.
He says spending money on killing Iranians is the best money we ever spent.
He said the same thing about spending money in Ukraine about killing Russians, but this is particularly reprehensible this time around.
Number five, Chris.
A billion dollars a day.
Oil prices up 27% in a week.
You've got the president wanting a $1.5 trillion defense budget in 27.
The idea that the Pentagon is about to come to you for $50 billion on these strikes to Iran.
How are you going to answer?
Best money ever spent.
What's it worth to America to take down a religious Nazi regime who's trying to build a nuclear weapon to deliver to America?
That's a really good investment.
As you say, Judge, he said the same thing about Ukraine.
I mean, I'm thinking of the old McCarthy hearings where finally someone said, Senator McCarthy, have you finally, no shame?
Have you at long last finally no shame at all?
My God, that's not America.
That's not what we do killing little girls so we can escape injury ourselves and profit.
My God, you know, I hate to say it, but if Americans won't look at it from a moral point of view, well, when it becomes $10 a gallon, when the gasoline becomes $10, and I'm not very good at predictions, but I think that might happen, then, well, maybe they'll come around and maybe they'll come around in a way that will show Trump that he's chosen the wrong way and that maybe he'll get some decent advisors and to say, well,
Hope Rather Than Expectation00:00:42
this is how we can repair all the damage and give you a chance to be president for another two years.
That's a hope rather than an expectation.
Very sad stuff, but your analysis is so clear and fearless, Ray.
Thank you very much, my dear friend.
Most welcome, Judge.
Of course, we'll look forward to seeing you at the end of the week.
Who knows where we'll be by then, but already looking forward to you and Larry on Friday.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Okay.
Thank you.
Sure.
Coming up later today on all of this at three o'clock this afternoon, Scott Ritter.
At four o'clock this afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Nepal Town Judging freedom.