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April 17, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
24:31
NY Times Bombshell: 'Trump Called Off Planned Iran Strike.'

When reading the New York Times it is best to treat it like reading Pravda in the days of the USSR. It is the mouthpiece of the deep state. So what are they trying to convey in this lengthy "blockbuster" report that Trump has put a temporary kibbosh on Netanyahu's plan to use the US military to fulfill his long-held fantasy of attacking Iran?

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Time Text
Blockbuster Revelation Revealed 00:02:56
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
As you might be able to guess, Dr. Paul is not here today.
But don't touch that dial because we're going to talk a little bit about a blockbuster story that came out yesterday from the New York Times, known to break blockbuster stories.
We're going to go through the story a little bit and we're going to have some help from some of our friends to explain some aspects of it.
Now put on that first clip because this is what I'm talking about.
I didn't see it till yesterday afternoon.
I must have been sleeping.
Trump waved off Israeli strike after divisions emerged in his administration.
So President Trump, the bombs were loaded in the bomb bays, and President Trump said, hang on a minute, we're not going to do that right now.
Well, as with always the case with the New York Times, you have to read the Times as if you're in 1950 Soviet Union and you're reading Providence.
So you want to know what's the party want me to think about something.
And that's exactly what the Times does.
So of course, on the surface, this is a blockbuster article.
Just like a couple of weeks ago, they had a blockbuster revelation about the Ukraine war, which if you read between the lines, was actually no such thing, but was there to convey a different message.
Now, what I would put forth to all of you watching the show right now is that this is sort of an example of the Hegelian dialectic.
They will present the problem, the solution, and the compromise.
That's what they want you to take away from this article.
And in fact, what it is, is a deep state pushback against Trump for calling it off on the first place.
But the other thing is that it is using the New York Times as a vehicle for the deep state, because they're the mouthpiece of the deep state, to push back at Trump for calling it off, to punish him for calling it off, but to offer a solution at the end.
And my last slide will show you what I think is the result of the synthesis aspect of the dialectic that they are putting forth.
And I will put this next little clip up as exhibit B, perhaps, in my thesis.
They brought out all the deep state writers, Julian Barnes, Eric Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, Ronan Bergman from Tel Aviv, reporting on this blockbuster story.
So let's go back to the tale itself.
Go to the next clip.
Iran had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month, but was waved off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program, according to administration officials and others briefed on the discussions, i.e. deep state actors.
Setting Back Iran's Nuclear Plans 00:07:51
Trump made the decision after months of internal debate over whether to pursue diplomacy or support Israel in seeking to set back Iran's ability to build a bomb at a time when Iran had been weakened militarily and economically.
Now, pay attention to, go back there, Bill Clip, please.
Pay attention to that second paragraph because that is where they're setting us up, guys.
This is the setup here.
Whether to pursue diplomacy or support Israel in seeking to set back Iran's ability to build a bomb at a time.
Now, this is the neocon talkie point.
Number one, at a time when Iran has been weakened militarily and economically, you have to keep that in mind.
They are extremely weak militarily and economically, the Times wants you to think.
In other words, a cakewalk.
Go to the next one.
Israeli officials had recently developed plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites in May.
They were prepared to carry them out and at times were optimistic that the U.S. would sign off.
The goal of the proposals, according to officials briefed on them, pay attention to this, was to set back Tehran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more.
Well, gosh, that sounds reasonable.
Just setting it up, setting it off, putting it on hold for a year or more.
Reasonable goals here, they are pointing out, right?
Almost all the plans, leave that up if you can, thank you.
Almost all the plans would have required U.S. help.
Whoa.
All of the plans would have required U.S. help, not just to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, but to ensure that an Israeli attack was successful, making the U.S. a central part of the attack itself.
Except we were just told that they were weak.
Well, anyway, go back to that first paragraph, and it says the goal was to set back their ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more.
Well, gosh, go to that next clip.
Maybe we have amnesia.
No, we don't.
It's Tulsi Gabbard, who went before Congress at the end of March saying, and now she is the director of national intelligence.
She has access to all of our intelligence agencies.
She says Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not activated the nuclear weapons program.
And you would say, oh, but Tulsi is unreliable.
She's a well-known peacenick.
She must be making this up to try to forestall a war.
Well, in fact, this is the same assessment the intelligence community has made since 2006 consistently, right?
So there's a disconnect.
Well, there's this reasonable plan for the U.S. to help Israel put on hold Iran's nuclear weapon for a year.
Trump didn't sign off on it.
But then you say, what nuclear program?
What nuclear weapons program?
They don't have one.
We've been told by the intelligence community consistently for over a decade that they don't have one.
So what's going on here?
Well, the goal is, as Netanyahu himself has said in statements after he was in town a couple of weeks ago, is the Libya option, i.e. go in and destroy the country completely.
Now go to this next clip because we'll see it here.
Earlier this month, Trump informed Israel of his decision that the U.S. would not support the attack.
He discussed it with Netanyahu when Netanyahu visited last week using an Oval Office meeting to announce that the U.S. was beginning talks with Iran.
And Netanyahu himself, I'm sure you've seen the clip, looked like he had just swallowed a bug.
In a statement in Hebrew after the meeting, Mr. Netanyahu said that an agreement with Iran would work only if it allowed the signers to go in, blow up the facilities, dismantle all the equipment under American supervision with American execution.
So that is his way of sort of getting back from this shock of having Trump say, no, we're going to wait on this.
We're not going to go in at the moment.
So let's go further into the article.
The next one is some American officials were at least initially more open to considering Israeli plans.
Remember this name?
General Mike Carrilla, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and here we have it, Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, both discussed how the U.S. could potentially support an Israeli attack if Trump backed the plan.
Now, here's how the neocons work.
Waltz, as everyone knows, is not smart enough to be a lone actor in this.
He's a conduit for the neocon plans.
He and Rubio are beachheads for the neocons in the Trump administration, and they are pumping in information.
They're making plans.
And they will come with a fait accompli to President Trump saying, it's already settled.
It's already set up.
It's ready to go.
Just say yes, and we'll get it done.
That's what they did to George W. Bush.
We all know that.
He was not the brightest bulb.
He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
And they took advantage of it.
And that's what they're doing right now.
So now go to the next one.
So Tulsi comes in.
And we talked about the divisions in the Trump administration recently about the division, particularly with regard to Iran.
How you've got Wallace and Rubio on one side.
You've got Witkoff and you've got JD Vance and Tulsi on the other.
So Tulsi chimes in.
Inside the Trump administration, some officials were becoming skeptical of the Israeli plan.
In a meeting this month, one of several discussions about the Israeli plan, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, presented a new assessment, intelligence assessment, that said, now, in addition to the fact that they weren't building a bomb, she also said that the intelligence community had assessed that the buildup of American weaponry could potentially spark a wider conflict with Iran that the U.S. didn't want.
And I would add to that, which could actually encourage Iran to speed up its process of developing a nuclear weapon.
And I think it was a reasonable assessment on her part.
And that also may have weighed in on Trump's decision.
Now, so as an aside, that's good news, the fact that he's listening to people in his administration who are not completely insane, who are giving him some sober and rational analysis for him to listen to.
He doesn't have to just sit around listening to Mike Waltz all day and little Marco Rubio.
So now the next part that's interesting is the idea that Iran is going to go into, that Israel is going to go into Iran, but they need our help.
Now go to the next one.
A range of officials echoed Gabbard's concerns in the various meetings.
Now Susie Wilde, she's chief of staff.
Hegseth, who we know is a kind of a radical, but he is also in charge of the DOD, and they don't want a black eye on this.
They don't want, here's my guess.
He doesn't want to go in with the Pentagon full bore and get smacked down hard or get into a quagmire with Iran that's not over quickly because that would destroy the myth of invincibility in the Defense Department,
Iran's Missile Myth 00:13:34
which has already been downgraded significantly after the Ukraine debacle, we would say, because the U.S. threw every weapon systems that had almost virtually every weapon system short of nuclear weapons into that war and lost, is losing and lost.
So credibility already seriously compromised.
Hegseth doesn't want to take a risk.
So he's saying, hold on, put on pause.
And Vice President JD Vance all voiced doubts about the attack.
Now, Vance has been skeptical.
Leave that up, please.
Yeah.
So Vance, leave it up, yes.
Vance has been skeptical.
He is skeptical about Yemen.
He's no anti-war person, but he's also not an idiot.
And he said with regard to the Yemen, if you watch the show, the intercepted or the signal discussion, he said, why do we have to do it right now?
Why can't we wait and see what happens?
So he's also somewhat rational here.
And now you go to this part.
Even Mr. Waltz, frequently one of the most hawkish voices on Iran, was skeptical that Israel's plans could succeed without substantial American assistance.
So that's interesting because they need us.
But on the other hand, the New York Times article is sending another message, right?
Between the lines, read between the lines.
They can't do it without us.
Put the next one on.
Except, here's the New York Times doing New York Times stuff in attacks on Israel in April.
Most of Iran's ballistic missiles were unable to penetrate American and Israeli defenses.
Hezbollah, Iran's key ally, was decimated by an Israeli military campaign last year.
The subsequent fall of government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria eliminated Hezbollah in Tehran and cut off a prime route of weapons smuggling from Iran.
Air defense systems in Iran and Syria were also destroyed, along with the facilities that Iran uses to make missile fuel, crippling the country's ability to produce new missiles for a long time.
So what this is saying, I'll leave this up, what this is saying is something very interesting, is that most of their missiles were completely useless and worthless against Israel.
I mean Iran's missiles in the April attack.
Now some of this stuff is true.
Hezbollah has taken serious beating.
Assad has fallen.
The route of weapons has been disrupted.
There's no question about that.
But pay attention to the part that I have highlighted here.
The missiles were useless in April.
And also, they aren't able to reproduce new missiles now because their ability to make them have been crippled.
Except for one thing.
This is very selective on the part of the New York Times because there was not only an Iranian attack in April, there was one in October.
Now here we're going to turn to our good friend Larry Johnson, who has spoken at Ron Paul Institute conferences.
If you've gone, hopefully he'll speak again.
You'll want to hear him.
You can also hear him all the time on Judge Napolitano's show.
He put out something earlier today where he took apart that little bit, which is extremely important.
Now put that next one up.
This is Larry Johnson that came out today.
And he's talking about the idea that Iran's ballistic missiles were unable to penetrate.
He said, this is pure, unadulterated male bovine excrement.
We know what that means.
The authors of this piece are repeating propaganda about Iran's April 2024 attack.
Iran announced in advance that it did not use its most sophisticated missiles.
Now this is the part that I have highlighted.
Strangely, the authors ignore Iran's October 2024 attack, which featured hypersonic missiles and completely skunked Israel's air defense system.
Oh, well, maybe that's just Larry Johnson being Larry Johnson.
Can't be true.
Well, let's put on that first video because we can see what happened in the October attack.
The October Iranian missile attack, hypersonic missile attack on Israel, striking an intelligence facility, and extremely, by the way, extremely heavily guarded military base in Israel.
Tell me if you think these missiles were completely ineffective.
watch this clip.
So we can see it's a myth that is that Iran is weak.
They use their lesser quality missiles and they blew the hell out of the Israeli military base, heavily guard straight through their defenses.
But here's a couple of contradictions here now in New York Times style.
If Iran is so weak as they've tried to establish, well, why do they need American help?
Why does Israel need American help anyway?
If they can't even penetrate the air defenses, then what the hell do they need with us for?
Why can't they do it on their own?
They want us to believe two contradictory things at the same time, as Orwell warned us about.
So why is Israel so desperate for U.S. participation?
Well, I'm going to play this in this second clip, which reinforces what I said, because this is a rare moment when also a great friend of the Ron Paul Institute, Doug McGregor, Colonel Doug McGregor, was on with a very nice guy, Colonel Daniel Davis, who has a great show.
But it's one of the rare times you see kind of a flash of anger and frustration in Doug McGregor's voice because he's challenging this conventional wisdom that Davis himself, maybe he just put it out there cleverly, that Davis puts out that Iran is weak.
Now, we've just seen the missiles blowing up an Israeli base, which you don't hear a lot in the mainstream media.
But here's McGregor correcting, I think this happened yesterday, correcting Davis on the issue of Iran being absolutely weak.
Put on that second clip.
Let's watch that one.
On the planet can have their embassy destroyed in another country and to have an assassination in their capital city on an inauguration and not go to war with somebody, yet that's exactly what Iran didn't do because they don't have the power to do it.
So that should tell you.
That's a fundamentally false statement.
Which part?
False, false, false.
They don't have the power to go to war.
You haven't looked carefully at Iran.
Iran's arsenal of missiles is enormous.
It could flatten Israel in a day.
They have the power to go to war.
They have chosen repeatedly to avoid war.
And I've said this a thousand times.
No one in the Middle East is interested in a war except Israel and the United States.
What nation?
Yeah, so that's the colonel.
Because this is exactly, and we've talked about it on the show very much.
This is exactly what the neocons did in 02.
They want, on the one hand, it's a cakewalk.
It's a cakewalk.
But we have to go in.
If Israel wanted to take out Iraq in 2002, they could have gone for it.
Iraq was a very weak state at the time.
But they wanted the United States military to do the heavy lifting for them.
So on the one hand, they come here and say it's weak.
It's going to be a cakewalk.
It's no big deal.
Nothing.
By the way, you guys have to take the lead.
You got to take the hits.
You got to take the kills.
You've got to drain the blood.
You've got to drain the treasury.
You've got to do all the work for us.
And they're doing the same thing again now.
That's the same person, Netanyahu, who's doing it.
So on the one hand, they're weak, but on the other hand, they can't do it without us.
And the moment Trump signals a pause, they don't say, okay, well, we're going to go anyway.
No, they don't do it.
So here's another one on this whole they're weak business.
This next one. is a tweet that I wanted to read out because this was the actual Israeli press, the Times of Israel commenting on the October attack.
Now first there is some commentary by Dimitri Lascaris.
He says Israeli media are starting to ask hard questions about Iran's missile strike on October 1st.
Relying on foreign media analysis of satellite images, the Times of Israel notes that 32 Iranian missiles struck Israel's critically important and heavily defended Navatim air base.
If Iran can land 32 missiles on a target which Israel has dedicated so much air defense capacity, it can pretty much hit anything in Israel.
And then Dimitri continues, the Times of Israel concludes, and here's a quote, greater public discussion might either produce, reduce, or raise support for ongoing direct conflict with Iran.
But the public plainly ought to be informed of the stakes.
That's the Israeli media saying our people are not getting full information either.
They're also getting bogus information from the deep state here and from the crazies in Israel that want to have this war, regardless of what it does to the Israeli people, Israeli civilians.
So, now just a couple more things on this piece because I want to point out, go to the next one.
I want to point out just one main point.
So, what is the real purpose of the piece?
Well, we're almost there.
Netanyahu called Trump on April the 3rd.
According to Israeli officials, Trump told Netanyahu he didn't want to talk about Iran on the phone.
He invited Netanyahu to come out to the White House.
We saw that just recently.
He arrived on April 7th.
Well, the trip was presented as an opportunity for him to argue against the tariffs.
The most important discussion, I would say the real reason, was for the Israelis to hear what he had to say about Iran.
When he was still in the White House, Trump publicly announced the talks with Iran.
Again, as I said, Bibi looked like he had just eaten a big cockroach.
When Trump announced this, he caught him off guard.
And so the New York Times in damage mode, damage control mode.
Here's what I think is one of the main things.
First of all, for us to retain this contradictory message in our mind.
It's an easy, it's an easy, it's a cakewalk, but we have to do it for them.
You have to remember that.
Two, Trump is making a mistake.
He's hurting our biggest allies.
They'll turn on Trump.
Now, Trump thinks that these people are his friends, the neocons here and the neo-crazies in Israel.
These are not his friends.
They will turn on him on a dime.
And this is a shot across the bow to Trump.
This is a warning to Trump that we can get you.
We can get you on this.
We can make you look bad.
We can make you look good.
We can make you look bad.
And here's another one that I think is another super big goal.
Now, this is where we come to the synthesis part.
We had the position and the opposition.
And now here's the synthesis.
Here, guys, this is the solution.
Okay.
This is a quote from the New York Times piece.
American officials have long said that Israel, acting alone, could not do significant enough damage to Iranian nuclear sites with only a bombing campaign.
I highlight this.
Israel has long sought America's largest conventional bomb, a 30,000-pound bunker buster, which could do significant damage to key Iranian nuclear sites beneath the mountains.
Guys, this is what they want.
This is the synthesis of the Hegelian argument.
Trump obviously doesn't want to go in.
It needs to be done from their perspective.
Here's the compromise, guys.
Just give us these 30,000-pound bombs and let us go at it.
Why are you withholding this?
We heard this endlessly in the years of the Ukraine war.
Why are we withholding this equipment?
How come no F-16s?
How about no, why no HIMARS?
Why none of this stuff?
Why are you withholding this?
They are on the verge of victory.
This is the neocon swan song.
On the verge of victory, you just wouldn't give us that extra little push.
You guys are cowards.
This is exactly what they're saying about this.
Just give them these bunker busters.
Well, guess what?
One of the couple of those dropped in Gaza, you're going to have Trump's Riviera plan moving forward.
But certainly you're going to have the E.S. eventually getting sucked in because Israel will use those on Iran.
It will get itself deep in the muck.
And what are they going to call?
They're going to call the U.S. military to come try to get them out of it.
It's going to be a big disaster.
So, more of the story.
Read the New York Times, but read it like you're reading Pravda, because on the one hand, they're telling you something, but they're not telling you something that's actual reality.
They're telling you in a way that they want you to think about this problem.
They want you to think these different things about this.
So you'll walk away saying, well, that kind of sounds reasonable.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on this piece.
Read it for yourself.
Read the commentary about it.
See what you think.
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