April 6, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:30
Alastair Crooke : Claiming Victory While Admitting Defeat
Judge Andrew Napolitano and Alastair Crooke dissect President Trump's April 2026 claims of victory amid Iran conflict, analyzing threats to bomb civilian infrastructure as potential war crimes. They examine the failed special forces operation near Isfahan, where an F-15 was shot down, contrasting Iran's resilient "security for all" doctrine with Western reliance on air power. Crooke highlights how Iran doubled Strait of Hormuz tanker revenue and threatens a $30 billion UAE AI data center, arguing that asymmetric warfare and economic resilience render bombing campaigns ineffective against dispersed leadership. Ultimately, the discussion suggests the West faces strategic failure unless it adapts to modern geopolitical realities beyond traditional military dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Undeclared Wars and Aggression00:14:02
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
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?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, April 6th, 2026.
Alistair Crook will be with us in just a moment on Donald Trump claiming victory while admitting defeat.
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Alstair, welcome here, my dear friend.
A belated happy Easter to you and your family, and thank you for.
Accommodating my schedule.
Before we get into President Trump's various claims and admissions, by his threats to bomb and destroy civilian roadways and bridges and power plants, is he not advertising his intention to commit war crimes?
Oh, absolutely.
These are unquestionably criminal acts, both, I think, under American federal law.
You'd know that better than me, but also, of course, in any other way.
I mean, in terms of international law, it is quite clearly a war crime to attack water supplies and the means for humans to live.
I mean, what we're seeing is really a huge regression in the statements that are coming out of the United States.
It's very concerning to everyone because what is coming out is a huge regression.
Of human standards, just human standards, not just the law.
I mean, the law will have to take its course in due time, but it is a huge regression of standards and of language.
What do you think the Iranian reaction is, either amongst government and military officials or average folks, to the type of profanity laced threat that the president personally wrote and personally posted over the weekend?
Oh, I think just one word they see it discussed.
I mean, this is not the language.
I mean, I think it's really embarrassing for the United States as much as anything else.
You expect your president, I would imagine, to act with a certain and speak with a certain decorum, with a certain standing, with a certain sort of gravitas.
This lacked all of these things.
It was probably signaling desperation more than anything else, but it was also signaling Something rather closer to depravity, I think, in the pleasure and taking and destroying the lives of human beings.
Is Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz actually increasing with the passage of time, given the various levers of control beyond military?
Oh, certainly.
It is both increasing, it's very clear.
That there's no way in which the hormones can be taken now except by a ground operation for which Iran is ready and, in a certain extent, opening the door to it because a ground operation would be perfect for Iran to, if you like, encircle and then destroy American forces on the ground.
But it's also, I think, we've also seen, so that is strengthened.
And just to make it clear what's happened, in the first month of this war, the revenue to Iran from tankers passing through the Straits has doubled.
It's doubled during that time.
Just on Sunday, I think it was seven tankers were loaded at Karg Island, and that was equivalent to about 7.7 million barrels of oil.
Or equivalent to about $850 million, just one day.
So, I mean, you know, they are strengthening.
The amount of income is higher than it was.
It's doubled what it was at any one month in the previous years.
But that's just one side of it.
The other side of it is that they are feeling much strengthened because the threats of an operation against on the nuclear enriched uranium that was supposedly held by Iran.
Obviously, over the weekend, we've seen some failure of an operation to take place.
It started off with an F 15 coming down on Friday, on Thursday night.
By Friday, it was geolocated.
The F 15, if shoot down, was near Isfahan.
What was it doing near Isfahan?
An F 15 with apparently very senior crew on board, a colonel.
Anyway, then the attempt to rescue it clearly went wrong and it was ambushed and it has led to many aircraft being destroyed.
And what seems to have happened is there was an attempt to sort of do two operations together the extrication of the crew of the F-15, and then what Trump has always been seeking, which was.
In, boom, out operation that by Saturday morning they will have come back after having entered into the tunnels at Isfahan, where Grossi, the former head of the IEA, says at least half, maybe a bit more than half of the 60% is sitting in a tunnel waiting to be taken.
And it was, you know, the operation, the Maduro type operation that Trump has been seeking.
Was supposed to take place.
In the end, it's ended with a whole litany of aircraft that have been destroyed C 130 Hercules aircraft, Airbus, also a number of these small helicopters have also been destroyed.
And so that has failed.
It's now very clearly the Iranians can see exactly how the United States was planning.
Special forces operation to seize the uranium, and they counted it and they ambushed the forces at the time, and that operation is now over.
I don't think it can be restarted.
It was not popular within the Pentagon in the first place.
Trump had been warned against it and is now ended disastrously.
There are lots of details of these operations that.
Are not quite clear yet.
But the fact that it has been a catastrophe in terms of an attempt to do, you know, a quick special forces operation like in Venezuela in one evening out the next day.
Right.
This was going to happen.
They were going to Isfahan.
They were just near to Isfahan when they were attacked.
They originally landed on an airfield.
If you look at the geography of Isfahan, it is completely desert.
With mountains around it.
I mean, there's nothing growing at all.
It was a very barren place.
Anyway, it was the site of a disaster.
And so now we're back to where we were with Trump saying, well, now you have an ultimatum.
There are only a few hours left.
And the Iranians have said, no, we're not prepared to talk to you.
We're not prepared.
You have no right to make these demands on us, which have been made through Pakistan.
Now, Pakistan has been trying to forward yet another set of Demands to Iran.
And especially after what has happened over the weekend, I don't think the Iranians feel there is any reason for them to help Trump out of his predicament at all.
He threatened escalation, of course.
One more question about the events on the weekend Do we know if Americans were injured or killed and the Pentagon is not revealing it?
Oh, I mean, almost certainly, yes.
I mean, these two, the two Hercules landed at this desert strip, and it was hard landings.
And the remains that we've seen, the images of the remains, show that it was a real crash that took place.
After that, then the IRGC forces came as America then sent some Airbus bigger with more troops, something of the order of 100 special forces.
Which were probably originally designated for the Isfahan operation.
But then the attempt to rescue the airmen overtook events, and then they still gave the go ahead for the deployment of the special forces to near Isfahan.
And then everything has sort of gone downhill since that period.
So I think almost certainly that there have been deaths involved with that.
But we don't know, of course.
The Pentagon says nothing about casualties or even any clear details about what happened to the crew.
We know one of them seems to be geolocated.
What happened to the other?
I don't know.
Was he rescued?
Where is he?
All these things they are refusing to give any clear details.
It is bizarre.
It is bizarre that the second person on the plane, the one who supposedly spent three days in the mountains and traveled up a mountain five miles with a broken ankle and a broken leg, is the commander, is a colonel.
I mean, normally this is a job given to a low level person.
So he was obviously there.
For some reason, to command the troops that ended up rescuing him, if indeed he was rescued.
I guess we'll eventually learn more about this.
Larry Johnson has a lot on it, and he's coming up shortly after you.
Which side has dominated the intellectual war between the United States and Iran?
Well, I would start off perhaps first by saying because the intellectual war follows.
Iran's Asymmetric Warfare Plan00:11:33
Some really, you know, dare one actually say it now.
But Iran has survived this war in a good state.
It's not readily understood outside.
But the reality is that they've suffered less casualties, human casualties, than the 12 day war earlier in June.
And why?
Because mainly because they learned from that and they evacuated all the buildings, main buildings, the institutions, the hospitals, everything that could be evacuated was evacuated.
So, yes, there's been heavy bombing, there are casualties.
Maybe, you know, up to 2,000 or something killed.
But it wasn't as bad as it might have been at all.
In fact, it was less than the 12 day war.
And their defenses and their air defenses were not traced as claimed at all.
And one of the main reasons was before the war, Iran bought huge numbers of these decoys, these sort of blow up models from China.
And they are very effective.
They're very lookalike.
They're very realistic.
And what I hadn't realized was that they actually give off heat, too.
Actually, these decoys are equipped to project heat so that it's picked up by radars and other sensing equipment as a real target and not just as a decoy.
So many of these claims that the missile launchers and the air defenses have been destroyed.
I mean, I think in the wash up at the end of the war will turn out to have been completely fictitious.
No, they have their missiles.
They have not really been destroyed because they are buried so deeply.
And when we hear that the United States is turning now to threatening bridges, Trump says he's going to be bridges.
And Israel is now urging the United States in the Press this morning, the Hebrew press, Israel is saying, Well, now, you know, there's no point trying to put troops in the ground.
There's not going to be a collapse of the state.
There's not going to be a color revolution in Iran.
So the only thing we can do now is to go to the last element, which is Trump, you must destroy the energy infrastructure of Iran.
Go back, oil, gas, electricity, destroy that.
And they don't say, they don't admit the basic equation, the basic equation that Iran is operating on.
And this is the intellectual part of this, if you like, system that you asked me about, which is the equation today for Iran it is either security for all or security for no one.
It is either prosperity for all or prosperity for no one.
So if you escalate, then they will go up the escalatory ladder another step.
In consequence, they've already threatened to destroy the big AI mega plant that was hidden from Google in UAE.
30 billion, I believe it cost or is projected to cost this big AI mega data center in the UAE.
And they said, you know, you go after our infrastructure, we'll go after infrastructure like that.
Will Trump do this?
Well, I guess we have to wait to hear from him.
But the proposal from the Pakistanis has already been declined by Arachi, who said very, very clearly the United States is in no position to demand a ceasefire from us after the conditions of this war.
Do you have any grasp on what Trump is talking about?
Now, I suppose we could stop right there because rarely does anybody have any grasp on what Trump is talking about.
When he says we're dealing with a new regime, we're dealing with new people, what could he possibly mean?
What I think he means is that he does, he still does not understand and has failed to understand the nature of the changes that took place in Iran during these decades that have led to this asymmetric warfare and the fact that they have a leadership that goes.
Automatically continues.
It's a mechanism of leadership that is dispersed and automatically replaces itself if it is affected or people die or kill during this process.
And that it is all acting to a very carefully pre prepared plan, not just of what the targets are, but of the order in which targets should be selected and also the volume of the war.
The extent of the war was to be carefully controlled for a long war as opposed to a short war.
And because he doesn't understand that all that's happened is that the leadership has gone dark, just like the Hezbollah leadership has gone dark.
They've gone off the smartphones and all the other things that Palantir and the artificial intelligence giants.
Have been using to try and for Israel to try and identify and then murder those people.
But he has not understood that the leadership's there.
And because he doesn't know their names, it doesn't mean they're not there.
It just means they're in the dark, they've gone dark.
Wow.
Can these enormous tankers get through the Strait of Hormuz without insurance?
Yes, I think so largely because, um, the arrangement is that, that it's, it starts off at Carg Island, uh, and, um, the tankers that, um, are buying, taking from, uh, taking from Carg Island,
uh, first of all, given, uh, uh, they are given a password, um, uh, as they load, um, providing to show that they've actually fulfilled the, the circumstances that they, they're, they're, they're buying this in Juan.
And that they are from a friendly state.
And then they progress up and then they give the password when they arrive at Keshem and Larkin Island at the IRGC control point at the top of Hormuz.
They then pronounce their password.
It is checked and verified, and everything is correct.
And they get a military escort through the Hormuz.
To protect them, so they get protection, they have an escort, a naval escort, through the Hormuz to the far side.
And I think that tanker captains, even though they may not get insurance from Lloyds on that basis, think that that is a good enough guarantee for them to pass through, pay the toll, and get on their way.
The fact that if If Trump is to be believed, tomorrow, Tuesday, the military will begin attacking what are indisputably civilian targets.
Aside from that being a war crime, and I don't mean to denigrate the significance of a war crime, what does that tell you about the failure of American military strategy that it is now reduced to attacking what would be the equivalent of the George Washington Bridge?
Well, it tells you of a huge strategic failure in the West.
It's not confined to the United States.
But, you know, since the Second World War, we have bet everything, bet the house on air power.
And we take no account of asymmetric warfare, although we're having to take account because we're learning from Russia and Ukraine that asymmetric warfare, that new technology is changing the face of warfare.
But we're stuck.
In this view, that simply if you drop enough bombs on a civilian population, they will capitulate and you will get what you want.
And it has failed time and time again.
It failed in Belgrade, you know, a thousand aircraft, a huge ship's aircraft, something like 13,000 sorties, a bombing of Belgrade.
In the 1999s.
And it produced, it didn't produce the defeat of the government.
It didn't really even destroy the army at all.
It provided only minimal damage.
And this is what we're seeing taking place in Iran.
They are not defeating the, yes, they're bombing, but it's not effective.
It's not damaging.
It's marginally damaging only their military capabilities.
It's not going to damage their economic future because, as I just described, As things stand, Iran, in control of Hormuz and running its own toll authority through it, could earn something of the order of a trillion dollars a year.
They can rebuild their economy at the end of this war.
So they're not in the point of feeling that they need to concede to America.
This is the failure of betting everything on just air bombardments.
As you know, there's a long history in.
The United States, this was a long argument during the Vietnam War about bomb, bomb, bomb.
And it's never gone away.
And we've never been able to understand the changes that are taking place in warfare or in people's ability to find other solutions to this preponderance of betting the house on air war.
Failure of Air Bombardments00:00:51
Alistair Crook, thank you very much.
A terrific, as always, a terrific analysis.
Very profound and eye opening.
And we look forward to seeing you next week.
All the best.
I know it's a holiday where you are today, but thank you again for coming on at your usual time.
All the best to you, my friend.
Thank you very much for the program.
Thank you.
Of course.
Bye for now.
Bye bye.
Coming up soon, if you're watching us live in 34 minutes at 9 o'clock this morning, Larry Johnson at 10 this morning, Ray McGovern at 11 30 this morning.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 3 o'clock this afternoon.
Scott Ritter.
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