Part 1 of 2
Bibi Biden & Bibi Blinken
by Ralph Nader
RalphNaderRadioHour.com
Oct 12, 2024
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/b ... bi-blinken
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (retired) joins us once again to give his unvarnished view of the now yearlong ethnic cleansing of Gaza, an assault that has now extended into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Plus, our resident constitutional expert, Bruce Fein stops by to give us a quick take on how U.S. material support of the Israeli aggression in Lebanon, an ally of ours, is a clear violation of The Neutrality Act.
The Institutional Insanity (of) “Defense”
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Colonel Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. Colonel Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia, and for fifteen years he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum.
The Jewish state in the Levant is finished. Now, if it wants to be a liberal democracy— if it wants to become a real democracy, it could possibly remain. But this Jewish state, especially in its current manifestation, which is the ultimate manifestation, has ended. It's through. The rest of the world, if nothing else, will terminate it just as it did the South African apartheid state. And it will happen—and it will happen despite the Empire's (The U.S.) protestations to the contrary. In fact, I predict ultimately when the Empire smells the tea leaves, it will probably join the crowd and tell them they have no choice but to be a liberal democracy—to invite what that means, which is ultimately a Palestinian Arab majority, and to even change their name to Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel or whatever. That's the future. The future is not Bibi Netanyahu.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Netanyahu talks about Joshua who moved on after Moses had given him instructions, and after the leadership had sort of fallen apart, and Joshua takes over. And they go in, and under God's instructions they are to kill everything in sight— leave no human being alive. And that's Netanyahu. Netanyahu thinks he's a latter-day Joshua, and that's what they're doing. They brought a thousand years of history's most rude, most bloodthirsty, most unbelievable procedures in waging war against another state or another people back into vogue again. And we're supporting it.
Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.
The Neutrality Act of 1794 in substance prohibits anyone in the United States from directing or supplying arms or assistance— or otherwise engaging in war—that is against a country with which the United States is formally at peace. The United States at present is at peace with Iran. It's at peace with Lebanon. Indeed, Lebanon's an ally. We already know that President Biden had ordered Navy ships to use their Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense in collaboration with Israel to shoot down Iranian missiles—an act of war. And now they basically said we are combatants with Israel and probably planning covertly to join military forces on the next initiative that Israel takes against Iran. So it's a clear violation of the Neutrality Act.
Bruce Fein: Listeners, you have your Senators and Representatives campaigning, as we speak, in your communities. You ask them to come to your town meetings where they can hear you out, and where you require them to respond. This is their moment of vulnerability before the election.
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Transcript
This is Reverend Dr. William J. Farber, and we are listening to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Scrove, analog of my co-host David Feldman. Hello, David. Good morning. And the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph. Hello, everybody. As we record this program, we see the devastation of Hurricane Helene and the recent devastation of Hurricane Milton. Would the U.S.
Weather Service name them Hurricane ExxonMobil and Hurricane Chevron? We just passed the first anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attack in Israel, followed by Israel's year-long assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza. Reliable sources estimate that when the dust settles and the rubble stops bouncing, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians will be dead. Now,
Israel has escalated its aggression against its other neighbors, sabotaging thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies ostensibly destined for Hezbollah hands, carrying out bombings, assassinations, a full-scale ground invasion of Lebanon, and trading missile strikes with Iran. To give us his perspective on the state of the Middle East, we welcome back Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
Regular listeners to the program know that Colonel Wilkerson is a retired Army colonel, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute. Colonel Wilkerson suffers no fools. He's been an outspoken critic of the United States. Reckless, foolish, some might even say, and that would include Colonel Wilkerson,
stupid military policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. So we look forward to his take. on the current state of affairs. And at the very end of the program, we're going to take a few minutes to welcome back our resident international law expert and constitutional scholar, Bruce Fine.
Bruce argues that as long as the Biden administration backs Netanyahu's escalating aggression, the United States moves from being co-belligerents to co-combatants in violation of the Neutrality Act. As always, somewhere in the middle, we'll check in with our ubiquitous corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber. But first, Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened Lebanon with, quote,
destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza, end quote. Can anyone stop him? David. lawrence wilkerson is a retired u.s army colonel over his 31 years of service colonel lawrence wilkerson served as secretary of state colin powell's chief of staff and special assistant to general powell when he was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff
Colonel Wilkerson is currently a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All Volunteer Force Forum. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Thank you. Good to be with you again. Thank you, Larry.
Let's tap into your deep knowledge as a person in the military and State Department because the newspapers really aren't going to go as deep as this interview is going to go, and people need to know. The first is the year has transpired since October 7th, and all the newspapers are talking about it,
and they're starting with the Hamas attack. But the Hamas attack would have been impossible without the collapse mysteriously of the multi-tiered, sophisticated, technologically advanced border security apparatus by Netanyahu. What do you make of this collapse? Well, I think there are several possibilities, Ralph,
and I think this is one reason why Netanyahu is not going to allow investigation to occur, not while he's still got blood pumping through his veins anyway. One is that his cooperation through principally Qatar with Hamas, his funding of Hamas, His desire to have Hamas be the principal representative of the Palestinians, if you will,
because their principal objective also jibed with his principal objective, which was no two-state solution under any circumstances, backfired on him, and he was caught flat-footed. Another possibility is that he actually used those same channels to coordinate with them some event that he knew would be in the future and would come as a surprise to him, cough, cough,
and give him the opportunity, as 9-11 did for some really nefarious people in the United States, to respond wholesalely and finish off Gaza. And then there's a third possibility, and that's a combination of both with the things that led up to the actual October 7th events, really going haywire to a certain extent for both sides.
I don't know where the truth is. There could be a third or fourth option, too. I just don't know where the truth is. Well, there's a bizarre consensus between Netanyahu, Hamas, and Hezbollah to exaggerate the power of these two militias, Hamas and Hezbollah. And they both have different reasons.
Hamas and Hezbollah like to exaggerate their power for obvious leverage reasons, etc., And Netanyahu loves to exaggerate their power because he wants any military position on the borders to be viewed as an existential threat for the very existence of Israel, which is absurd. Israel is a military, economic, and technological superpower backed by the U.S. to the hilt.
And these two groups are militias with small arms, some grenade launchers for Hamas in the tunnels. And Hezbollah has these missiles, which have done a tiny fraction of the damage in northern Israel that Israel has done to Hamas even before the massive attack on Lebanon. What do you see is going on here?
Well, first thing I have to say is I disagree with what you just said. It might have been Israel's intent at one time, and it might have been the truth at one time. But given what Israel has done for the past year and what is happening with what they've done, I would say that Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis,
Iraqi militias, Syrian militias, and others are giving Israel everything it can handle. I got the KIA WIA count, which I think is fairly legitimate, for Lebanon this morning. and they're getting their rear ends handed to them just like they did in what 78 82
2006 and now today so the formidable nature of these terrorist groups is i hesitate to call them terrorist groups they're simply groups that oppose israel and for good reason in both cases In fact, in all cases, with regard to those that I just cited that we call the axis of resistance, indeed they are.
They are an axis of resistance growing more solidified every day to Israeli hegemony over the region. They don't want it. And I can understand. I can understand clearly why they don't want it. Israel is an existential threat to them, ultimately, as it is an existential threat to Jordan and to Egypt.
And I could say to anyone who has water, gas or oil in the region. So I don't agree with your assessment of the gorillas, as it were. And I don't agree with your assessment that that assessment suggests about the power and the invincibility of the IDF. It's being proven every day now that power is ebbing.
The invincibility and the image thereof is ebbing. And no matter how much the superpower, the American empire, backs them up, it's going to be extremely difficult for the empire to stop what is the end of a Jewish state in the Levant. Well, that's an interesting viewpoint. But, you know,
if you look at the casualty levels on both sides, the Israelis have cited less than 365 soldiers killed in Gaza since October. The Israelis lie through their teeth, Ralph. The Israelis have not uttered an official, truthful word since October the 7th. All right, but it's quite clear that the casualties in Gaza are massively greater. Absolutely. They're civilians.
They're babies. They're children. They're women. They're journalists. You just got the figure this morning. They've killed 176 journalists. Yes, 176 journalists they've killed. This is pretty easy to kill journalists, babies, women, children. Yeah, we'll get to the rules of engagement for soldiers of breaking news as we record this.
the blatant YouTube videos by Israeli soldiers in Gaza bragging about their brutality. We'll get to that because I know you know a lot about rules of engagement. But it's quite clear that Hezbollah and Hamas have no air force, no navy, no mechanized army, and they're taking the brunt of the casualties. whether it's 20-fold, 100-fold.
But you don't think that Netanyahu is exaggerating this in order to get more weapons from the US and in order to get more sympathy and support from Western powers so he can say it's an existential threat? I don't think he needs any more support. I really don't.
I mean, he's going to get the support and he knows it, especially from the United States. Now, there are some European powers that are thinking twice and even thrice about continuing this. and the performance he put on at the united nations probably did the rest of the
world the final deed if you will in terms of just declaring israel the pariah state and hoping and praying that it goes away or that the united states support for it goes away which as you insinuated is just not going to happen but i do think there's a prospect for that support to fall off quite a bit
I don't know if it'll fall off with this current administration, but it might fall off markedly if we move through this election process. And there's a big, big unknown. And we get to some place where Kamala Harris, for example, were she to win, has some political space because the polls are turning against both Ukraine and Gaza.
they're substantially turning against it in terms of Ukraine. So if political space opens up, then we might return to an era where US presidents had at least a modicum of courage in dealing with the Israelis. But it doesn't really matter. The Jewish state and the Levant is finished. Now, if it wants to be a liberal democracy,
If it wants to become a real democracy, it could possibly remain. But this Jewish state, especially in its current manifestation, which is the ultimate manifestation, is ended. It's through. The rest of the world, if nothing else, will terminate it just as it did the South African apartheid state.
And it will happen, and it will happen despite the Empire's protestations to the contrary. In fact, I predict, ultimately, when the Empire smells the tea leaves, it will probably join the crowd and tell them they have no choice but to be a liberal democracy, to invite what that means, which is ultimately a Palestinian Arab majority,
and to even change their name to Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel or whatever. That's the future. The future is not Bibi Netanyahu. Well, let's look at the entrenchment position day after day by Biden and Blinken. As you know, ProPublica broke a story a few days ago that AID, directed by Samantha Power, the Agency for International Development,
they basically documented that month after month, the Israeli regime is blocking humanitarian aid trucks. in all kinds of ways, violent, harassment, bureaucratic, seizures of trucks. And the same conclusion was reached by the refugee section in the State Department. So what did Blinken do? He went to Congress and basically denied it. He said, we have no current evidence.
So we've asked Samantha Parr to resign in protest and give the reasons for doing that. But does this surprise you at all? I mean, he overruled agencies, in and around him who have been documenting this and exonerating Israel under Netanyahu. I agree with Ambassador Chas Freeman,
who called Tony Blinken the worst Secretary of State the United States has ever had. I would go further than that. I would say that he and Amos Hochstein, in particular, the so-called diplomatic envoy with Hezbollah for the United States, and Tony Blinken are agents of Israel. I would say they're working for Israel.
Just as I would say Dennis Ross was working for Israel when he screwed up the peace agreements when Bill Clinton was president and Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State, And Dennis Ross colluded with Ehud Barak to foul the talks and blame it all on Arafat and the Arabs. We have a fifth column operating in the United States,
and one of them happens to be the Secretary of State himself. And the President of the United States. We're dealing here with no longer co-belligerents. against Gaza by the United States government. They are now co-combatants from what you've been saying. They're actually working hand in glove with the Israeli military, dealing with Yemen, the Houthis, dealing with Gaza,
dealing with Lebanon, dealing with Iran. And if they were private citizens, they would be violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, wouldn't you say? You're right. You're right. Let me ask you this question here. Iran has sent two salvos of missiles to israel the first one in april was flagged by iran they actually
alerted jordan and others to alert israel in the u.s and they apparently were all shot down very minimal damage mostly from the debris and then the second volley the press said that most of them were shot down but ted postal said when he looked at the videos very few were shot down
intercepted because a huge ball of fire occurs when they're shot down in midair. And he thinks considerable damage was done. And they were only directed toward military targets and intelligent targets. Iran directed at two air base and I think the intelligence building, and they avoided civilians. So there were no casualties either time.
The only casualty was a Palestinian in the West Bank hit by debris from a falling Iranian rocket. So two questions. Do you think that most of the missiles on the second volume landed? And second, did they do much damage? Under military censorship, we can't find out. I think from reliable sources, I have learned that
many of them did hit. I have learned that they did some damage to Mossad's headquarters. And I've learned that they did considerable damage to two airfields. So Israel lies about all of this. They lie about their KIA. They lie about their WIA. They lie about it right now in Lebanon. Their WIA count is humongous right now.
And that hides things. You're talking wounded in action? Yes, wounded in action. That hides the casualty rate, if you will, because these guys aren't going back to war and gals. In most cases, they're not, you know, slight wounds. They're bad wounds. They're amputation wounds and things like that.
And this is getting back within the Israeli civilian communities, too. They're finding out that there are so many wounded in action. And it's not doing much for morale there. On top of that, of course, the continued service on active duty of all these reservists who are out of the economy is causing the Israeli economy to fall apart.
48,000 firms, Shir Eber tells me, an economist living in Europe now, but nonetheless knows the Israeli economy fairly well, have closed down, gone bankrupt. The port of Eilat is bankrupt. Israel is having considerable problems and will have to be propped up majorly by huge transfusions of cash by the empire.
So this is a combination of things that are going to read, as I said before, and much more than this, the end of the Jewish state in the Levant. Are you for a single state with equal rights, Palestinians and Israelis, since it's essentially a single state now? Yes, that's the only solution.
And it's got to be a liberal democracy, a true one that accepts all citizens and all people and doesn't treat people as third and fourth class citizens who happen to be Arabs, or in the future, when the power of the womb overcomes the Jewish content, doesn't treat Jews with third and fourth class citizen status.
That's the reality of what's going to have to happen there. Well, let's look at it from Netanyahu's point of view. Every time he pushes the envelope, people think the U.S. is going to say back off, and he keeps pushing the envelope successfully. He booby-trapped pagers, thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies in Lebanon, blew apart hands, eyes, heads. War crimes.
A lot of them being held by civilians. Yeah, war crimes. Yeah, different war crimes. Lincoln and Biden didn't say anything. Now, the Secretary of Defense in the US is huddling with the Minister of Defense about how and when and where to attack Iran, which would expand the war. So we have at the head of the US government,
in the name of the American people, in the name of coerced U.S. taxpayers, two men who should be called B.B. Biden and B.B. Blinken. So why do you think that Netanyahu is being restrained or thinks he can't push the envelope again and again and again as he blows up... An ally? An ally, Larry?
Levin is considered an ally, and he's blowing it up, and B.B. Blinken and B.B. Biden are supporting him actually, surreptitiously, openly, and in their public statements. Why should he be worried? I think he should be worried because he's put himself in a circumstance militarily, if not politically, though I think the latter too,
but militarily where he's causing the situation to be existential for Israel. Now, I have no doubt in my mind that he will reach to Dimona for the ultimate solution to that. And that's very frightening because I think he will do that if it becomes quite clear to him.
that his ship of state is going to go under on his watch. What do you mean the ultimate? Nuclear bomb? Nuclear weapon, yeah. You've talked about Yoav Galant, and my understanding this morning is that Yoav Galant was held back from coming to the Pentagon. Now, there's two ways that you can interpret that.
Yoav Galant was coming to coordinate with the United States how it would participate in an ultimate response to Iran, which I assume will come after the next response from Iran to the next response by Israel, or maybe it won't even have that iteration. It will just happen from Israel. And Netanyahu got worried about, you know,
Gallant coming to Washington and revealing anything or maybe being rebuffed in certain aspects of what he wanted to do. And so he called him, didn't call him back. I don't think he ever dispatched him. He kept him from coming. So that tells me that one of two things is possibly going to happen now.
Netanyahu is going to respond, and he's going to respond as forcefully as he possibly can to Iran's latest attempt, even though that attempt was, like the one before it in April, fairly circumspect. And he's going to do it in such a way that Iran is going to then come back violently against him,
this time not coordinating with anybody, Jordan, Egypt, the United States, Saudi Arabia, anybody. And they're going to put everything they possibly can on Israel. They're going to do some really extensive damage. So that's probably what's going on right now with this Gallant, Netanyahu, Pentagon, Austin, Biden coordination. Do we do it 1st,
all by ourselves and then they'll have to come in because we'll be an extremist or do we coordinate it and do it together in that case? I think he's worried that we might say, no, we're not going to do it and try to bring some pressure to bear on him not to do it.
So, he wants to go ahead and do it now. Let's just look at what he's going to do. He's already proven, demonstrated to Tehran, the strikes on Hodeidah in Yemen were vicious, brutal strikes where they killed lots of civilians and destroyed lots of civilian infrastructure. But that's an Israeli forte today. That's what the IDF does today.
It kills innocent civilians and it blows up civilian infrastructure. But it did that to demonstrate that it has the legs, the legs with its fighter force, its bomber force, to fly to Tehran and drop bombs. That was 1,800 nautical miles. They tanked. How did they tank? Well, they tanked because over the last 20 years,
Netanyahu's been getting tankers from us and to the point now where he can do 1,800 nautical mile and further strikes. So he would go ahead and do that to Iran. One has to parse closely here, what targets is he going to hit? Is he going to hit the oil facilities? Is he going to hit the nuclear facilities?
What's he going to hit? I suspect he's going to hit them all. Then Iran is going to come back at him with a vengeance, which is what he's trying to get them to do. And then the United States, he thinks, will have no choice but to help him finish off Iran. I got news for him.
Ten years, $5 to $10 trillion, thousands of casualties, and we still won't have beat Iran. just like we didn't beat Iraq, not ultimately, and just like we didn't beat Afghanistan, not ultimately, and just like we left Libya a basket case and really didn't beat anyone except get Gaddafi, the only person holding Libya together,
murdered in the streets in an ignominious way. Just consider extending your remarks. If they have a major attack on Iran, and it's an existential threat, to the Iranian government, isn't it likely that they're going to block the Straits of Hormuz and cut off 12 million barrels of oil going into world markets every day?
If the United States makes the second most disastrous decision, and it might turn out to be the first in the early part of the 21st century, the first one being the invasion of Iraq, if it makes a second of equal or even surpassing proportions stupid decision and backs Israel to the hilt on that, yes, you're right.
We will probably see the Saudi oil fields majorly attacked now, not just pinpricks like the Iranians did before. We will probably see other facilities in the region attack. We'll probably see the Strait of Hormuz closed, which is about 20% of the world's oil. And we'll see the price of oil go to $200 or $300 a barrel overnight.
That'll do real things for the US administration in terms of its relationship with the American people, because gas at the pump will go to $4, $5, $6 a gallon We're looking at all those possibilities. And as I said before, the only way you militarily prevent this or reverse it is by invading Iran.
And that is a recipe for the end of the American empire as we know it. Well, just to intersperse here with your comments and give them a framework, I want Steve Skorvan just to read very briefly the quotes by some former distinguished Israeli politicians and chiefs of staff for prior Israeli governments about civilian casualty targeting. Steve.
Former U.N. Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abe Ibn wrote of Israel under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel, quote, is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name, unquote. Meaning Hitler. Yes, right.
And that was 1982, Larry. I remember those remarks. In 1978, Israel's most prominent military analyst, Ze'ev Schiff, summed up remarks by Chief of Staff Mordecai Gur as follows, quote, The Israeli army has always struck civilian populations purposefully and consciously. The army has never distinguished civilian from military targets, but purposefully attacked civilian targets, end quote.
My student at the George Washington University in 2009, 2010 or so, somewhere in there, maybe it was a little bit later, he served in the IDF. And he took me aside one day after we'd had a particularly boisterous seminar session discussing Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer's then paper with it, which they'd sent me an advanced copy of.
It will become their book, The Israel Lobby. And he told me about his participation in Operation Cast Lead. I was blood curdling, blood curdling. His commanders told him, kill everything in sight. We have to make an example. We have to reestablish deterrence. We have to kill everything in sight.
Kill dogs, cats, women, children, babies, kill everything in sight. He left. Well, this gets me to my next question for you about the rules of engagement. The Israeli soldiers who have returned from Gaza, some of them have been speaking out and saying they were told just what you said,
shoot to kill anybody and anything you want in Gaza. Now, the Israeli soldiers that go into Gaza, they are screened, we are told. That is, if they show any mercy, they're not allowed to go in. That same holds true for the West Bank. So they get the more vicious treatment. brutish soldiers to begin with.
And now they're bragging about it in YouTube videos. Tell us, as a military man, what's the situation with an army that basically allows its soldiers to go berserk and kill anything that moves? I mean, how can Blinken and Biden abide that? It's disgusting, and it's disgusting particularly since 1948, 49,
and Nuremberg and the Geneva Conventions and the solidification of the different parts of what I would call the law of warfare. It's disgusting. But it's not unusual if you go back and look over the last 2,000, 3,000 years of human history. This sort of thing was fairly routine. I mean, you know,
Netanyahu talks about Joshua who moved on after Moses had given them instructions and after the leadership had sort of fallen apart and Joshua takes over and they go in and under God's instructions, God's instructions, they are to kill everything in sight, leave no human being alive. And that's Netanyahu.
Netanyahu thinks he's a latter-day Joshua, and that's what they're doing. They brought a thousand years of history's most rude most bloodthirsty, most unbelievable procedures in waging war against another state or another people back into vogue again. And we're supporting it, Ralph. We are supporting it. We are as disgusting as they.
Which gets me to this amazing situation here. None of this would have happened without Netanyahu's blunder or deliberate collapse. of the border security apparatus on October 7th, which in effect opened the door and lured Hamas in, which he may have desired in order to generate his broader regional plan of violent devastation.
How are all these countries, all these leaders, basically in a level of tumult and risk and wider war? They don't focus on his intent, his blundering, which caused it all. Now, there are six prominent Israelis, as you know, wrote a letter to Congress asking Congress to disinvite Netanyahu from speaking.
One of them was a former prime minister, Ehud Barak. Another was a high official of the Israeli CIA. Others were the leading intellectuals, leading novelists, civic leaders. And they all said the same thing in the letter, that without the collapse of Netanyahu's border security apparatus, none of this would have happened.
Hamas wouldn't have been able to go 10 feet into Israel. How does everybody ignore this? The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Congress, of course, with its supine obeisance to Netanyahu, the U.S. government, the other Western countries, even the ones that are more independent of the U.S., they're not focusing on causality here.
How do you read it? We're talking with Colonel Larry Wilkerson, retired. It's a combination of things, but it still leads to a culmination that is very hard to believe. I don't know if you've seen the video that the Turks made, I'm told. I used it yesterday on Dialogue Works, and I've sent it to Korea.
I've sent it to Istanbul in case it didn't get out really widely there. I've sent it to other places in Europe. It's about a minute and a half video, and it is gut-wrenching. You're in tears when you finish watching it. And it's just a little piece of exposure of what's going on right now, set in the future,
some years ahead. And people are commenting in South Korea, they're commenting in Paris, they're commenting in Berlin, and children are watching the scenes and looking at the monuments that have been built and so forth. And they're asking their parents, Where were you? How did you let this happen? Why did this happen?
Mama, tell me, you approve the killing of babies and women? How did this happen? It's a riveting video, and I hope it gets all over the world, because it absolutely damns Israel, and it absolutely damns the reason Israel can do it, the American empire.
Well, it's not just AIPAC and the Israeli government can do no wrong lobbying in the US. They work with the military industrial complex. I mean, Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon, they're making a lot of money selling all these weapons. Which is why the BDS movement should catch on and go and gain power and gain
results if anybody really cared. We should boycott, divest, and get rid of the principles of cooperation They keep us all alive, especially the war machine keep us all alive. I mean, the bastards amongst us. Well, you have a good network of retired military people who want to wage peace instead of foster the empire. And it's,
boomeranging effect on the U.S., not only free speech and civil liberties, distortion of public budgets, for example, the complete co-optation of Congress, which has enabled all these resources to be sent over there to support Netanyahu. I'm told that the Defense Department and CIA have teams assessing blowback.
Blowback, listeners, is a CIA word for retaliation, like 9-11 was considered blowback. What do you know about the risk of blowback coming into this country, especially with the ease with which armed drones can be built in garages these days very inexpensively and other problems? Do you think the war is going to come to the U.S.? ? Absolutely.
I think there's a huge risk there. And I don't think it'll be the sophisticated things that you hinted at there. There could be some of that. But we happen to enjoy a fairly impregnable geographic situation, if you will. And we happen to have two relatively benign neighbors north and south.
but it's going to come about because they're going to come through our rather porous border i think they're already here one thing donald trump has talked about that i think is absolutely valid and ali soufan for example probably the greatest expert or the best expert on al-qaeda and arab based terrorist groups in general, like ISIS and others,
says that the numbers of Al Qaeda today, for example, far outweigh the numbers of Al Qaeda on 9-11, and that they are going to hit us again, and they're going to hit Europe, and it's going to be a recurring phenomena rather than a one-off here and a one-off there. I think we're going to get hit.
An individual told me the other day, for whose views I have a lot of respect, he was in Morocco, And he said, I will tell you that in every souk, every bazaar, every tavern, every bar, everywhere you go, if you hear 18 and 19 year old women and men talking,
all they want to do is join the fight. They want to bring the fight to America. and they will do it in any way they possibly can. So yes, we have a future of very insecure, and not just because hurricanes are hitting us, but because I think, sometimes I think the divine providence,
if he's up there or she's up there, whatever his or her name is, is angry at us so badly that the climate is being used to batter us. And I think we've got more of that coming too. And we don't have a clue, Ralph, nationally, what to do about it.
despite all the protestations to the contrary, the Climate Corps executive order and so forth. This is just going to get much worse. A senator said to me, Larry, when Wall Street is under 16 feet of water, I don't know where he got to 16, but that happens to be a very carefully calculated figure,
then we might take some action. I said, Senator, too late then. He went back in his office. You know, our country cannot take casualties like that. We go into total convulsions. All priorities domestically are shoved aside. Look at the reaction to 9-11. It cost us trillions of dollars, millions of casualties overseas. I think will fall apart.
I think you're talking about worse than 1860 in terms of some of the violence we might see, and certainly worse than the Civil War actually produced, because it produced a sort of unity in a much more powerful federal republic. This one is going to produce disintegration, I'm afraid. Well, what do you think the Defense Department,
the more sound heads there in the CIA and NSA are thinking about this? Because they know about the risks of blowback. I think they're pulling their hair out if they have any will. Are they conveying that? I don't know, Ralph. I do not know. I do not know.
I know we had a lot of, we, all Volunteer Force Forum, others of us had a lot of hope for General C.Q. Brown, the Air Force general that took Mark Milley's place as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We even tried to get to him.
We tried to use a number of different venues and vias, ways to get to him. We couldn't. And we gave up. And we have been very disappointed in what we're hearing is nothing but a yes man, nothing but an echo chamber between the body of the Pentagon, as it were, and Lloyd Austin.
And all we were hearing from Lloyd Austin was an echo chamber too. Biden had said this, I say this. Biden said this, I say this. Blinken said this, I say this. No contradictions will be offered. Recently, Lloyd Austin at least has shown some kind of drive to deliver a different message.
His message to Yoav Galant in Israel was diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, 21-day ceasefire. We do not need an invasion of Lebanon. Well, the next day, of course, they invaded Lebanon. So it didn't have any impact. But at least he said something, but no one else that we can detect in uniform or out is saying anything at all.
We know those in uniform whom we still talk with are very worried, but nothing's being done. But would you say now, without exaggeration, that the most powerful person in the United States today is Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel? In terms of ability to do damage to the empire? Absolutely. Well,
you remember a longtime member of Veterans for Peace, and they're really trying all over the country with demonstrations, nonviolent civil disobedience at factories producing missiles that are slaughtering civilians in Gaza, but they can't get much access to Congress. Can you see yourself helping bring some of these veterans to their members of
Congress and start some kind of activity there? Because they do have some allies in Congress and they can be expanded in number. There are, I'm speaking to a VFP regional group a couple of weeks from now. They do have some impact and they do influence various and sundry members of both the House and the Senate,
but they're few. And they're few because there aren't very many members who are influenceable. All you have to do is watch with regard to Gaza, for example, Medea Benjamin's group over on the Hill and just watch some of those videos. of what venomous comments are made back to her sometimes by people who otherwise
you would think were pretty straight people. I watched Blumenthal in a tag team press conference with Lindsey Graham the other day. And I was just stunned that these two people could see eye to eye on anything. But it was clear when it was over, clear in the middle of it.
that Blumenthal's love of Israel was transferring over to, yeah, I'll tolerate you, Lindsey, while we talk about these matters. I really don't like you very much, but I'll tolerate you. So there's so many people who are dominating the Hill right now, like Tom Cotton, like Josh Hawley, like Ted Cruz, like Lindsey Graham.
And on the other side, their counterparts. It's mostly over Israel that it's very difficult for a Veterans for Peace organization, regional or the national, to get in and make any impact. It's the same with others, like the Friends Committee for National Legislation, with whom I worked a few years ago on the JCPOA and other groups like that.
They're finding that it's almost impossible to influence anybody. They don't even want to talk to you, Ralph. If you're talking about anything regarding Israel, they don't even want to talk to you. Unless you're coming in waving an Israeli flag or two and bringing some more money for their campaigns. Well, as we speak,
Congressman Jim McGovern from Massachusetts is circulating a letter for co-signatories in the House of Representatives demanding that Biden and Blinken force Netanyahu to open up Gaza for independent reporters from the United States foreign countries i might add and even israel he's been blocking independent
reporters from going in don't you think that if we had our reporters in there it would change the dynamics of carpet bombing and and all the brutal genocide that's going on there it would depend on the reporters you put in there if you put any
from the new york times in there it'd probably get worse the lies would get deeper that rag is just what i said a rag today it's a rag for israel Let's try one more approach, C, if you think it's promising. What if prominent retired Israeli peace advocates who were ministers in prior governments, mayors of major cities,
former generals, former high officials in the Israeli FBI and CIA, asked to testify before the House Foreign Relations, Senate Foreign Relations Committee and their counterpart Armed Services Committee and said, look, you haven't allowed our viewpoints to be heard in Congress in decades. And we want to be heard, APEC notwithstanding. What do you think would happen there?
Well, I think they would refuse to hear them. I really do. That's the latest tactic I'm watching in both houses. And it is shared by the Schumers and the McConnells. It's shared equally that if anyone is coming before this committee that's invited usually, you know,
the course of events is usually that the minority will invite the person who's going to be somewhat conflicting with the current policy or vice versa, depending on the policy. They're colluding now. They don't want anyone in there, period, who's going to testify against what is the structured wisdom of the Hill.
And the structured wisdom of the Hill on Israel is both parties' philosophy and view. So good luck trying to get before a committee. Well, listeners, how many times have we talked about Congress, Congress, Congress? That's where it's got to start, and that's where you have to put your impact on as citizens back home.
Larry, I just wanted to ask you this. You indicated that Iran, if it's attacked in a major way by Israel, backed by the U.S., has the ability to wreak havoc both in Israel and the Straits of Hormuz and so forth. But what's the explanation for their two volleys,
that they literally engaged in self-restraint and they set these missiles up just to show they could reach their target, and even though they were all shot down? Do they have ballistic missiles that can evade Israeli defense counterattacks? Yes, and you just answered your own question.
against a war because they realize that the potential for the United States to come in and do really terrible damage to their country is very, very real. And they have let us know through good offices in Oman and Qatar and elsewhere that they don't want a war. And this is both sides.
This is the Ayatollah on the one side, the Guardian Council, the IRGC on the one side, and it's the new president on the other who has really been adamant about this and even offered a unilateral deal with the United States that would repeat the JCPOA, but just with the United States. as enticement, as bait, if you will.
So they've been very circumspect. They do not want to be the people that start the war. At the same time, they wanted to demonstrate to the bastard in Jerusalem that they do have the capacity to make his life truly horrible if they want to, and that they might do that even as they, so to speak,
went down contemplating the United States joining the the crisis. I don't think Iran even knows ultimately what it could do to us if it really tried and we invaded. It'd be terrible. As I said, 10 years, trillions of dollars, lots of casualties. Try to draft in the United States, Ralph, today. Try to draft.
All of my colleagues that are still alive in the military, and out of the military and the all-volunteer force forum know that half the American youth between 18 and 24 would go to Mexico and Canada in the first 48 hours. They're not going to draft millions of people, and that's what it would take to invade Iran.
So Iran is trying to keep the region from being dominated by Israel at the same time as trying to protect its own bona fides and not go to war with the United States. It could be ruinous for both of us. And yet, Netanyahu is using the tension, the pressure,
and the sold-out nature of Washington to start that war. But maybe he thinks that his air defenses backed by the U.S. can intercept the most modern ballistic missiles that Iran has. Talk to Ted Postol. He'll tell you that's bull. There are missiles, and we know it too, because we examined, you know,
there was a certain truth about George W. Bush's phrase, the axis of evil. There was a lot of work between North Korea, Pyongyang, and Tehran. And that work was on two major matters. One, how to bury facilities so far under the ground that no weapon system known to man presently, other than nuclear weapons,
could destroy them or do major damage to them. That was the first thing. The second thing was the most sophisticated ballistic missile technology the world knew. And Iran has that now. And they have missiles that will make Israel's Iron Dome look like chicken feed. And they have refrained, except a few, on shooting those.
But if they barrage them, Israel would have serious, serious trouble. Steve, read Ted Postol's comment in our previous interview of Ted Postol, the retired engineering professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is a major expert on missile technology. I don't know if you've heard his latest.
I heard it the other day when he was with me on a video. The latest is about what we've done to the MIRV warhead technology so that now we can rest assured that if there are 10 warheads in that missile nose cone, they are not likely to have seven or eight actually hit the missile silo.
All 10 will hit the missile silo. and they will hit it within a circular error of probability of about a yard. So that gives us a much more dynamic first strike capability. We could, for example, eliminate all of Moscow's ballistic missiles in a strike before they could do anything else.
That gives us a first strike capability that we might think we could use. And that is a disaster in my view. Ted Postol said last week in our program, quote, the loss of life in Gaza is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands. It's not in the tens of thousands like are being reported.
There have got to be enormous numbers of people who are buried under these buildings, which have been destroyed by the Israelis. That is a massacre, end quote. Yeah, and I'll tell you something else, and Ted knows this, I'm sure. He's a very impressive guy when it comes to the science of all these things.
The military has developed a template, and that template has about 10, 12, 15, depending on the geography, components to it and what you do is you look at the tonnage drop the type of tonnage drop the type of terrain the type of urban terrain the people the density
and by the way gaza is smaller than the greater london area and you come up with a casualty count using that template it's three hundred thousand three hundred thousand dead yep and counting As they fall from disease, starvation, lack of medicine. There's the kicker.
If you've seen these scenes of the wards such as they are, where these kids are just dying. They got no food. They got no antibiotic. They got nothing at all. They're all going to die too. You're right. It's going to triple. And 5,000 babies born every month in Gaza into the rubble. This is Joshua.
I have God's order. God's order to kill everything in sight. Just before we leave, Larry, would you call what's going on in Gaza the Palestinian Holocaust? Yes, I would. A rabbi in New York and I had a telephone conversation last night, and I said, Rabbi, you remember what we talked about, where the oppressed becomes the oppressor,
and even worse than the previous oppressor? Yes, he said, that's what's happening. And would you call Prime Minister Netanyahu the chief terrorist in the Middle East right now? Absolutely. He has more ability to affect damage on civilians than anyone, and that's the quintessential definition of terrorism.
And still, the corporate media talks about military operations in Gaza instead of terrorist operations. If you look at the bombing runs I was telling you were to demonstrate to Tehran that they had the long legs to do Tehran, if you look at them, what they really did, they didn't hurt the Houthis. The Houthis laugh at them.
They're the most resilient people on the face of the earth, in my view. They laugh at the Israelis dropping their bombs. What they did was destroy civilian infrastructure and civilian lives in Yemen. Well, we could have a whole program that the strategy of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis has not been very smart,
taking on the most massive military superpowers in the world, willing to use every available weapon against them. But that's another program. We've been talking with Larry Wilkinson, retired Army colonel, former chief of staff in the State Department to Colin Powell, and now a vigorous and constant advocate for peace against illegal wars, empires,
and all the other distortions of what's left of our republic and democratic society. Thank you. Take care. We've been speaking with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. We will link to his work at RalphNativeRadioHour.com.