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March 26, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:12
US Intel: Iran Is NOT Building A Nuclear Weapon (So Why Are We Threatening Them?)

The US Intelligence Community’s 2003 assessment that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon was reaffirmed this week, even as the Trump Administration is moving military assets into the area. What gives? Also today: shut down NPR? Please!

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American Nuclear Threats 00:15:08
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing fine.
Thank you.
Excellent.
Well, we want to talk a little bit about what's in the news and what's going on with the Congress.
Congress is involved.
They got involved with some leakage of information to friends and neighbors and who, what's going on?
Why did some people get included?
And what kind of a memo was this?
And I understand you talked a little bit about this already, but it just seems so messy.
It's so unnecessary.
And it's unserious.
It seems, I think it's, you know, everybody suspects it's down to political.
All I know is when I look at the markets, if something like this was like the world was coming to an end, the markets might be a little bit nervous, but the markets, the last I looked at, were very calm.
They didn't care about this that much.
But we should care about it because it has to do with foreign policy.
It really has to do with the dilemma that we've had ever since Trump announced, because will he have different advisors from four years ago?
And what's going on?
I think he does have different advisors, but I'm not sure that he's completely drifting away from the policies that he followed before, that there still is intervention, because there's a few people in his administration dealing with foreign policy that scares me.
Yeah, this whole thing we did talk about a little bit yesterday on the show, Dr. Paul.
But I think, you know, upon some more reflection, because it sort of had just broken when I talked about it, I think the real takeaway from this was that it was to look into the decision-making process when the use of force is on the table.
And I think you could probably make the analogy of making sausage.
It was ugly because it showed the sort of the superficiality of the entire process.
The discussion wasn't, well, will this make us safer?
Is this absolutely necessary?
And in fact, JD Vance jumped on and said, I don't really see why we have to do this now.
Why don't we wait a month and see what happens?
And they all basically agreed.
And then Hegset, the defense secretary, came in and said, yeah, we could, but why not just do it now?
And one of the things that he said is that he said, this is really not about Yemen.
They're talking about bombing Yemen.
He said, it's not really about Yemen.
We've got two messages we want to send to the American people.
Biden was weak, and we are going to send a message to Iran, and we're going to reestablish our deterrent.
And so when you talked about some, he talked about some of the targeting of these strikes and what they were, there was one guy they wanted to hit.
They waited till this guy went into a residential building where his girlfriend lives, and then they hit the building.
So that is, that tells you, A, this wasn't absolutely necessary for the U.S. government to keep us safe.
And two, the wanton and cavalier disregard for life that we saw during the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions has not changed.
In fact, it's at least as bad, if not worse.
If one bad guy is in a building, you blow up the building.
Well, that doesn't show a very moral army.
But anyway, there's a lot more to that.
But segueing from that into our first topic is that Tulsi Gabriel, she was on that call, but she went to Congress yesterday and she reaffirmed what the intelligence community, Big I, Big C, which is the collective agencies of U.S. intelligence, have been reaffirming since 2003.
Iran does not have nuclear weapons.
Iran is not building nuclear weapons.
That's pretty big news.
Yeah, it's good.
And that, of course, is an old argument they made.
A lot of people died over the falsehoods on that whole message back when they were trying to build up the antagonism against Saddam Hussein and the Middle East wars.
Just how much suffering occurred by that.
Oh, they're about to tack us with nuclear weapons.
We even witnessed this glider that was going to call them over here and drop a bomb on New York City.
So that is a shame.
But you know, I see the bigger picture is why do these kind of things pop up?
And I think there's two principles that invice it.
One is that Republicans and Democrats and most everybody in America are interventionists.
You know, they think they've been taught that we have a moral obligation to be intervening around the world and provide peace and prosperity for everybody.
And they're being misled, less so now than it used to be.
But also, what is alive and well, and people don't talk about is the empire does exist, has existed, but it's being threatened right now financially and morally.
Our U.S. Empire is on the skids, and it can do this for years.
I mean, the Roman Empire didn't disappear in a week.
So I think that that's part of the problem.
Then they reach out and they doctor up in one hand, they'll say, Well, let's take care of him.
Let's send more money here.
Oh, we sent this people money, and they're not doing what we told them.
So let's take half of it away from them.
It's all this mischief.
And the one reason why it's going to end is the bribery that we use in our foreign policy is running dry.
And there'll be a limit on how often we can bribe all these countries into doing what we want.
And it would be expected that the philosophic message is going to be very micked because they're interventionists.
Because he already, they're saying, well, we need to, Biden becomes the enemy.
This week, Biden, well, he had a terrible policy.
We got to get that straightened out.
But you know, if we had truly an American policy, we'd be looking to the Constitution and a few other things rather than the political thing that goes on constantly.
Yeah, you make a good point about the sanctions.
You know, we tell the rest of the world, you can't use our dollar, you can't use our dollar.
And they say, okay, we won't use the dollar.
And we're saying, hey, better use our dollar.
Wow, talk about committing suicide.
Let's put that first clip up.
This is from our good friends at anti-war.com, Jay DeCamp.
He wrote up the article, did a spectacular job, as usual.
U.S. Intel says Iran is, quote, not building a nuclear weapon.
U.S. intelligence agencies have reaffirmed there's no evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
This is Tulsi Galbert.
She was before the Senate Intel Committee hearing yesterday and she said, quote, the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.
And Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program suspended.
He suspended in 2003.
So they are not threatening us.
Somehow, we're threatening them.
You know, they're not able to threaten us without this weapon.
Probably even with it, they couldn't threaten the United States.
So what is the point of threatening them?
Well, they say, oh, but our base is there.
They could hit our bases.
Well, let's get rid of our bases.
But the U.S. is threatening them and Trump is threatening them.
The person who promised us no new wars and to end the old ones.
Go to this next clip because this is Trump just a few days ago talking about Iran.
He said every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward as being shot from the weapons and leadership of Iran.
And Iran will be held responsible and suffer the consequences.
And those consequences will be dire.
So he's saying something that's absolutely not true, which is Houthi equals Iran.
It's absolutely not true.
But you're right, what you said earlier, Dr. Paul.
This is the same kind of slate of hand that was used in 2002 to get the Iraq war up and running.
Remember, Saddam equals Al-Qaeda.
Saddam equals 9-11.
He's doing the same with the Houthis.
Houthis equal Iran.
It's the same fake lying game and it's dangerous.
You shouldn't be playing it.
You know, the one thing that you don't hear in the media, every once in a while, the country of Israel comes up and the subject of Israel and Israeli policy, it comes up, but it's never very objective of what's going on.
And yet that is probably one of the bigger issues that's undermining this kind of stuff.
Whether it's Yemen or Ukraine or Gaza, especially.
And it's always American money and not American troops.
They don't need our troops, but they just need our money and our coordination with them.
But it's not a board.
And so there's a lot of conspiracy theories.
People make up stories.
Well, what are you going to believe?
Because, you know, and there's not, even though Trump has a different foreign policy, and to some degrees, it's better, we don't feel that comfortable with it because it's not one that is non-intervention.
It's intervention in a different manner with a twinge of America first.
And that makes America, the American people feel good.
But there's more, there should be more to it than that.
Yeah.
Well, it's good that you mentioned Israel and Netanyahu because actually I just put up an article that our good friend and board member Dennis Kucinich wrote.
And he was reflecting on the threats toward Iran.
And I didn't make a clip of it, but you kind of made me want to mention it during the show because he recounted a hearing in Congress.
I'm sure you were there.
September 12th, 2002, I grilled then former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a congressional hearing entitled An Israeli Perspective on the Conflict with Iraq.
Now, the backdrop is, of course, that 2002, Netanyahu came over to push the war.
Remember, he said, I guarantee you, we will have absolute stability in the region if you only attack Iraq.
Well, here's what Kucinich said.
So he said, during that meeting, he asked Netanyahu, I inquired of him who else he would have the United States attack.
Iran and Libya, he said.
And then here's an interesting part.
I spoke to Mr. Netanyahu, this is Dennis Kucinich.
I spoke to Mr. Netanyahu outside the hearing room and asked him if he was so convinced those countries were a threat, why didn't Israel commence the attacks?
Oh, no, he responded.
We need you to do it.
As if we're surprised.
Right in his face, told him, no, no, we want you guys to do it.
And that's what they want with Iran.
That's what they want with Iran.
Yeah.
And, you know, the other thing about these so-called leaders and champions of liberty around the world are coming getting a lesson learned and described to the people and the Congress and the senators come together and the House comes together and there's a big fanfare.
So we get to hear from Zelensky.
Has he been there more than once?
He's been here a couple of times.
And what about, I mean, it's been going on.
I believe Castro even had to come and do this too.
They go and march in there.
And it's to me that, you know, Netanyahu, he probably can come up anytime he wants.
And then they, it's, well, it's just disturbing because we can take our position and we really don't have to just pick a country and say, you know, we hate your guts because we think you're going to kill us all tomorrow.
And we're responding to the imminent threat.
I don't think there's any of that.
I mean, the wars that we get involved in has really nothing to do with an imminent threat to our freedoms.
There's an imminent threat to our prosperity because we drain ourselves of the money that might have gone into taking care of sick people.
Who knows where the money would have gone?
So that to me is, you know, it's a prop.
It's a propaganda thing when you see these.
And right now, though, Zelensky, Trump hit him hard, but it looks like he's talking negotiating again.
Well, maybe I can work with this guy.
Maybe I could slip something under the table.
Yeah.
Well, the neocons are not going to go easily into that good.
Yeah.
Well, here's the thing, Dr. Paul.
So on the one hand, and I wanted to do this as kind of a juxtaposition, because on the one hand, Tulsi comes out and says the intelligence community stands by its assessment.
Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon.
Of course, even if they were, that's their business.
I mean, as long as they don't attack us.
Nevertheless, there's no justification.
But as she's doing this, the Trump administration is making serious war moves.
And I have a couple of, let me say, exhibits that I want to put forward.
If you put on that next clip, here are some exhibits, Dr. Paul, backing up the idea that the U.S. is preparing for war with Iran.
This is from Confidential News on X.
The United States has deployed over seven B-2 stealth bombers at Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean.
This happens days after Trump threatens to attack Iran.
Go to the next one.
So you got the B-2 bombers.
Go to the next one here.
Several U.S. Air Force KC-135R aerial refueling tankers departed earlier from RAAF base in Eastern Australia and are now circling over Queensland, likely either currently preparing to refuel a pair of B-2 spirit long-range strategic stealth bombers from Whitman Air Force in Missouri, who are believed to be heading to Diego Garcia.
Go to the next one.
Now, here's some C-17s cargo.
Significant movement of C-17s into Diego Garcia over the last two days.
And there are the call signs and one more here.
If we go to that one, lots.
This is Mech OSINT on X. Lots of C-17 cargo planes flowing into Diego Garcia in the last days.
Transporters, transponders switched off after leaving UI, that's the Australian base.
He comments, something is cooking.
Something is cooking.
They're moving military in position to attack Iran.
Yeah, and it's hard to figure exactly what they're cooking.
Sometimes there might be a little bit of disagreement.
They might themselves not know what they're going to do next week.
But the whole idea that the military industrial complex needs an enemy.
They need this activity.
The Danger We Can't Walk Away From 00:08:46
And people point out, oh, look at the danger that we have over there.
We just can't walk away from this because we want to make the world safe for democracy.
Well, I think we had a president a long time ago making the world safe for democracy.
Well, to me, democracy is when you can pick and choose what you want to buy without the government interference and telling you what to do.
Not that kind of democracy, but it's just that they believe that the government can set them up and move in and let them and solve these problems just by planning.
But I think it's so dangerous, you know, what happened, you know, even though World War III didn't break out over the Mideast wars.
But I wonder if anybody's ever totaled everything.
It would be impossible.
Everything that was wasted.
You know, the one measurement is usually the victims are innocent bystanders, you know, the civilian population.
And then also the one that's never measured are the military personnel.
There were a lot of military personnel that were in the guard unit.
And, oh, the guard unit, that's protect us here at home.
But send the guard, you know, how much that, you know, affected family life.
You know, it's just so much cost.
And that's nobody thinks of that again.
Nobody thinks about the cost of the so-called Iraq wars versus this kind of stuff that you pointed out.
So well, it looks like they're samples up.
There's probably more preparation for an old-fashioned war right now than there was back in the early part of the century.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let's move on to a good news story, Dr. Paul.
We're worried.
We'll keep an eye on it.
We hope Trump can back down from the siren song of the warmongers.
Here's a good news story.
Put the next one on.
This is political.
Of course, being politico, they're going to put a negative spin on it.
Nevertheless, they call their article Trump's War on Public Media Comes to Congress.
And it's all about, go to the next one.
This is how they describe it.
President Donald Trump's administration launched a war on public media.
His allies in Congress are eager to carry the banner.
NPR CEO and President Catherine Maher and PBS CEO and President Paula Kerger are set to appear Wednesday.
That's today in front of the House Oversight Subcommittee on government efficiency.
And they're going to talk about the future of publicly funded media, NPR and PBS in the country.
They're feeling the heat from the Trump administration, who has complained a lot about the biases in the public media.
You know, they talk a lot about the Democrats in a quandary.
They don't have a goal.
They don't have a leader.
They don't have a policy to really champion.
And I keep thinking, you know, they could outdo the Republicans very quickly.
Trump is smart.
He knows how to couch his words.
And his America First Thing hasn't hindered the military-industrial complex.
I mean, the evidence is there already that there's no real cuts planned, you know, in a military-industrial complex.
There will be efficiency things, you know, that kind of stuff.
So it's something that I think that this efficiency stuff is great, but it's not going to survive.
But I think the message ought to be that the people that want to get us involved there, they shouldn't be able to do it with our money and our kids and our standard of living.
And that's what they're doing.
But I think the message that they ought to switch to away from trying to outdo Trump on interventionism.
And some of the Democrats will say, see, we were too weak on national defense and da, da, da.
But why wouldn't they revive a true principled progressive foreign policy?
You know, they could, I mean, that's the sort of the thing that the libertarians has done.
The libertarians has carved out a niche for that, even though it's not super big, but it is there.
I think, you know, obviously the foreign policy of libertarians is far superior to Republicans or the Democrats.
But the Democrats used to be decent on this.
So they need that.
And they become, they think they have to fight the Republicans being more like Republicans, you know, and now they're all, there's a lot of hawks in the Democratic Party, too.
But yeah, absolutely.
But on the NPR and PBS stuff, I mean, it's good news that Trump looks like he wants to get rid of it.
Yeah.
Put on that next quip from the politico article.
Trump said in a wide-ranging press conference in the cabinet room in the White House on Tuesday, that's yesterday, that he would love, quote, love to defund both NPR and PBS.
I think it's very unfair.
It's been very biased.
The whole group, Trump told reporters this kind of money is the kind of money that's being wasted, and it's a very biased view.
So a couple of things here, Dr. Paul.
First of all, and I'm going to key it up for you, but he would love to defund them.
He needs Congress's help, which is what you just said a second ago.
He needs Congress to be involved in defunding them.
He can't do it on his own, at least not and make it stick.
But the one thing about this, Dr. Paul, and I bet you have some thoughts on this.
He wants to defund it.
And we agree, that's a great move.
He wants to defund it.
You can leave it up there, actually.
He wants to defund it because he believes it's biased and it's unfair to him.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you would want to fund it, defund it, because that's not what government should be doing.
Absolutely.
And it's such a fallacy in their thinking.
It has nothing to do with the basic principle.
Why should we be funding anybody?
Where's the authority come from?
Where does the money come from?
And then they think that they can enhance our foreign policy.
When you look around, you see all this activity in Yemen and Gaza and all these places, all the money that continues to go.
But I think changing the reporting and to finance all these lies and things.
This is, I think, and that's why I think the Committee on Efficiency is so good because he's exposed and brought it together.
I don't think it's the climactic end and you're going to see all this stuff disappear.
I think if they do make major change, it'll probably be just shifting from here to there.
Most of this stuff is not going to be stopped cold because, oh, oh, that means it'll be turning to that.
Social security is next.
And, you know, they'll work on the emotions.
You know, I think you make a really good point though, which is that there's going to be a lot of shifting, not a lot of ending.
And that's the real danger.
And in fact, I clipped something that sort of suggested that already that I wanted to show that I wanted to show our audience.
Now, if you move ahead, I'll skip those couple of ones from Politico and move to the Tammy Bruce.
It's the blue clip.
Put that one up.
She's basically saying what you just said, Dr. Paul.
Now, here is the State Department spokesman, spokesperson, excuse me, Tammy Bruce.
She's assuring people that don't worry, this stuff's not going away.
She said, our commitment to foreign aid remains.
And just because how it used to look, what it is before it's gone, it means that it's going to just look differently and it will be more efficient.
Go to the next one.
Now, this is her expounding, expanding on that.
This is in a press conference yesterday.
She said, and she's talking about shutting down AID, et cetera.
So there is a disruption.
We understand that.
But it doesn't mean everything has come to a halt.
It doesn't mean it ever did or that it will in the future.
Our commitment to foreign aid remains.
And just because how it used to look, what was before it was gone, means it's going to look differently and it'll be more efficient.
And the waste, abuse, and fraud, which in the beginning of your question, you said in a bit of a snarky manner, I sometimes am snarky as well, et cetera.
So she's saying, don't worry, guys.
We're not going to get rid of this stuff.
See, they're trying to get away with something.
Yeah, we're going to cancel it, but we're going to change it.
We're going to preserve it.
And it won't be so bad.
But, you know, in a way, I think libertarians can make the argument, which I try very hard to make, and that is, okay, they always use as the example the most atrocious thing you could do is taking food stamps away from the poor.
What about food stamps away from the rich?
Alternative To The Empire 00:05:08
You do this.
But, you know, if you take all the dependency, all the welfare payments that seem to help, you know, free education, free medical care, the whole works, that this would be just horrible.
But their case can be made.
How could it get any worse?
Look at what they do with COVID.
And look at what they have done with all these programs.
What have they done to medicine?
And what have they done to education?
So I would say, no, we're not against this.
We're not against education.
We're against the government being involved by getting out of the way and putting the responsibility not only on the states, but on the individual oneself, the parents and whatnot.
And yet this tinkering around or shifting things, that's, I think, what's going to be happening.
Yeah, let's hope not.
That's why we keep kind of pushing them in the right direction.
And we try to at least praise.
Weren't there some shortcomings in that wonderful budget bill they passed and postponed till next summer sometime?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, we'll hold our feet to the fire.
That's all we can do.
That's our job.
But I'm going to close out by thanking everyone for watching the show today.
And I will have a little bit of news to break, actually.
And that's to tell you to mark your calendars because we have decided on the date for our summer conference.
We just finished our spring conference, our summer conference in D.C., i.e. in Dulles, not in D.C. proper.
And that will take place on August 16th.
Mark your calendars.
We are deep in the process of planning, of organizing it, but it is fixed for that date, August 16th, a little earlier this year.
It'll be in Dulles at the Dulles Airport, Hilton.
More details coming.
Look forward to seeing everyone there.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to close by making a couple more comments on a subject I like to visit about and try to get people to think of it in different ways.
Because, you know, making America great, I think everybody wants that.
And we think ourselves as being great.
And there was a time when we were a model for many other countries.
That is long gone, but there's still the idea that we can be.
And I think President Trump has been able to tap into this.
But I don't think it's possible because now when America really was great in the setting and a good example for personal liberty, since that time, we have accepted the principle of interventionism.
We just got done talking about it.
Yes, they'll say interventionists and we have food stamps for the rich and the poor, but we'll hide it differently.
And we'll figure out a way.
We'll finance the debt.
We have a magic cryptocurrency that's going to pay off all the debt.
It's going to be tremendous magic.
But I think the intervention is accepted as a principle.
And I think if you don't do it, things will be worse.
I happen to think if you reject intervention and put responsibility on individuals and local people, things will get much better, not worse.
But also the whole idea of empire, people don't use the word empire, but that's what we're involved in.
That's why we're over there.
That's why we, Daniel just showed us some pictures of our militarism around Yemen and all our positions on trying to aggravate Iran and set the stage for Iran.
Us being involved in Gaza and all these places and says, why haven't we just walked out of Ukraine a long time ago, quit the funding?
And so, no, well, we have to have a real neat peace treaty.
Well, let them work it out.
But no, so the acceptance of interventionism that the government has this responsibility to do what the people won't do for themselves, and also in denial that there is an empire that's been building and it's been building, especially for the last hundred years.
And it's going to be challenged and it will end.
My goal is to make sure that people know that an alternative to the empire that we have today can be replaced.
It could be replaced by the socialists and the Marxists, but it could be replaced with a much more libertarian society.
And that, of course, is our goal here at the Institute, because we want to move and get people convinced that if you want peace and prosperity, it's available to us and it's not difficult.
We have to just give up the idea that we have a moral obligation to use our violence to tell other people how to live and tell our citizens how they must spend their money.
It's not that difficult to understand, and we'll continue at that.
So I want to close by saying thank you to all the supporters, past and the ones that will be coming in the future, to our conferences.
We appreciate this very much because I think the road to peace and prosperity is through the change of people's minds and heart.
Thank you for tuning today to the Liberty Report.
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