Title: Iranian Retaliation Strikes the CIA
Show: Judging Freedom (Judge Napolitano)
Date: 2026-03-02
URL: https://youtu.be/nJ6yjjr1ogA
Duration: 23:00

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[00:02] Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. [music] Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force [music] must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country, you [music] had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right?

[00:34] What if that [music] government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government [music] is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? [music] What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? >> [music] >> Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is

[01:06] Monday, March 2nd, 2026. John Kiriakou will be with us in just a moment on Iran and the CIA. What has been the CIA's involvement in bringing us to this war? But first, this. >> [music] >> Don't you just cringe when people say, "I told you so"? Sorry, I told you gold and silver would reap the benefits due to excessive money printing, inflation, and global uncertainty. It's here. It's

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[02:09] for 60/20/20, putting 20% into precious metals. They're getting educated [music] and you should, too. Call the best in the business and the people I trust, Lear Capital. [music] Get their reports, get the facts, get some gold and silver. Tell [music] them the judge sent you and get up to $20,000 in bonus gold or silver. [music] Call 800-511-4620 or go to Learjudgenap.com. John Kiriakou, my dear friend, a pleasure. Thank you very much for >> is mine. uh joining us today. Before we

[02:41] get to your uh understanding of the role of Intel in this war, what is your view, big picture, of this uh congressionally undeclared war of choice that Donald Trump started on Friday night? Oh, I'm utterly utterly opposed for a number of reasons. First of all, it's congressionally undeclared. The Constitution is very clear. There should be a congressional declaration of war, and that hasn't happened. Not only has that not happened, Congress hasn't

[03:12] even been briefed. And so, our elected officials have no idea what the policy is. Is is the president telling us the truth when he says that that this is going to last a few weeks? Because later in the afternoon today, he said that this could go on for for months. And what's the goal? It's easy to start a war, it's easy to overthrow a government, it's very very difficult to stabilize a region and then pull out safely. Did we learn nothing in Iraq or

[03:44] Afghanistan? So, I'm I'm gravely concerned about this whole thing. Uh there are reports uh in European media today. I haven't seen any of them over here that over the weekend the Trump administration reached out to the Italian foreign ministry and asked them to reach out to the Iranian foreign industry foreign ministry, excuse me, uh and offer a ceasefire. If true, what does

[04:15] that tell you about the American thinking if they want a ceasefire 48 hours after they started? That tells me that they thought the entire Iranian government would collapse as soon as hostilities were initiated. That hasn't happened and they're starting to worry about a plan B. Also, I learned just in the last couple of hours that the United Arab Emirates has seven days worth of surface-to-air missiles left and Qatar has four days

[04:46] worth of surface-to-air missiles left. Both countries have reached out urgently to the United States asking for replacements and there are no replacements. So something's got to give. These are countries that house American military personnel and Iran is not attacking civilians or even government in those countries. It's attacking the American bases. Do I have that right? For the most part, there have been a couple of Iranian suicide drones

[05:18] uh aimed at the Burj Khalifa, the the tallest building in the world, that's in Dubai, at the Jebel Ali free port just south of Dubai, and then oddly at the port of Oman and a small town outside of Muscat. I'm not sure exactly what what the reason for that would be, especially because it was the Omanis who were trying to negotiate a deal between the US and Iran. But for the most part, the Iranian targets are American military

[05:49] installations. Yes, in specifically the GCC countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Uh we know of 18 casualties, among whom are four uh four fatalities. Uh I don't know the status of the three American pilots whose jet planes were shot down supposedly by mistake by the Kuwaitis. I believe that they bailed out and landed uh safely. If they landed in Kuwait, they're probably safe by now. I mean, Kuwait is not going to

[06:20] >> That's the report. >> harm them or uh or detain them. Right. You heard from uh uh publicly from President Trump or Secretary of State Pompeo or Secretary of State Hagseth for a clear delineation of the goal of this war or a clear articulation of a feasible military goal? I have not, Your Honor. And I'll tell you this reminds me very, very much of

[06:52] the run-up to war with Iraq in 2002 and early 2003, where all anybody in the policy community wanted to talk about was initiating hostilities, and there was no plan to get out. There was no plan to try to encourage a stable uh popular government. It was just move in, overthrow, and see what happens next. And it's like history repeating itself. What What What does the CIA have to do,

[07:25] if anything, with the initiation of these hostilities? For example, on Friday uh when this war started, I guess it was Friday evening uh Iran time, or maybe it was Saturday morning uh Iran time, I think. Were there CIA agents on the ground in Tehran? You know, 24 hours ago I would have said that's ridiculous, but it's actually not ridiculous. The New York Times reported that the truth

[07:57] of what happened on the ground is the opposite of what we were led to believe. We were led to believe that the Mossad had the Iranian government utterly infiltrated from the top to the bottom. But the New York Times reported yesterday that it was actually the CIA that had the Iranian government infiltrated and it was the CIA that passed locational targeting information on the Iranian leadership to the Israelis that the Israelis then used to

[08:28] kill Supreme Leader Khamenei and former President Ahmadinejad and virtually the entire military and nuclear leadership. It was a CIA operation, not a Mossad operation. How did the CIA know uh that the Ayatollah and his family were in his house at one time in one place? Well, I think they knew a couple of different ways. First of all, Ayatollah Khamenei was actually pretty public

[09:01] with a statement that if the Iranian people didn't have bunkers to run to that he would not run to a bunker. And so it was pretty likely that he was going to be either in his house or his office, which were both in the same compound. I don't think anybody could have guessed that his family would be there. I I would have assumed his family had run, you know, into hiding, but when the Israelis bombed the compound, they killed everybody and it turned out to be Khamenei, his daughter, his son-in-law,

[09:33] and a grandchild. Um you know, you have to wonder the Israelis have bragged for years about the number of people that they've recruited in in Iran. And most of them, at least many of them, were Afghan refugees. Refugees in Iran get nothing. They get no food, no shelter, no medical care, no nothing. And so if you approach these people and you say, "Look, I'll give you $100 a month to stand on this corner and write in a little book how often General

[10:05] so-and-so leaves his apartment and what time and what time he returns and what route he took when he left, well, that's $100 you didn't have yesterday. That's $100 that you can use to feed yourself if you're a penniless refugee. And I think now that it wasn't just the Israelis that had these operations underway, it was also the CIA. You know, when I was at the at the CIA, it was virtually impossible to recruit an Iranian. Um, but the CIA was trying

[10:36] to recruit those people at the top, somebody in the the Ayatollah's office or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the IRGC. Maybe they learned a lesson that you should start at the bottom and collect the information from the bottom and use it for targeting because that's apparently what they did over the last 3 days. How do you explain the Israeli passion for assassinations? Yeah, it's it's pretty incredible, isn't it? Going back to the 50s,

[11:08] the Israelis were very happy to assassinate anybody that they deemed to be a potential threat to the stability of the State of Israel. And you know, after the '72 Munich Olympic massacre, it took them years to track down, hunt down every single Palestinian terrorist who was involved in that operation and kill them one at a time. Well, they've continued to do that and the uh >> [cough] >> Excuse me. The Iranian milli or sorry,

[11:40] the Iranian nuclear program was rather easy for them to target because many of those scientists would travel overseas for seminars, academic seminars. And the Israelis would knock on the hotel door, say, "We're with Mossad. You're going to either work for us or you're going to die." And I'm going to assume some said, "Okay, I'll take the deal." But most others died. They're very happy. And another thing with the Israelis, too, they don't have a bureaucracy that

[12:11] the United States has. You don't There's no gang of four, gang of eight that you have to um inform. There's no executive order 12333. You just do it. You want to kill somebody? You just go out and kill them. You uh mentioned one of Ronald Reagan's greatest mistakes. I don't want to deviate too much. 12333 which the uh intelligence community has interpreted as forget about the Fourth Amendment. Just spy on everybody, take down whatever they say from whatever

[12:42] source they have. And even Donald Trump who was himself victimized by that mentality and that uh executive order uh has failed has failed to uh to change it. How vulnerable uh is Israel to uh a continuous pounding by the Iranians? I mean, last time around at the 12-day war, we understand Prime Minister Netanyahu begged the president

[13:12] to call everything off so the Iranians would stop uh attacking Israel. >> [snorts] >> Yeah, this is going to be a problem for the Israelis. Uh the Israelis, I think, were the ones who actually convinced the Americans that as soon as the first strikes began the Iranian government would collapse and it hasn't collapsed. And so I think the Israelis today are saying, "Oh, no. What have we gotten ourselves into?" Another problem that

[13:42] the Israelis are are having and we've already begun seeing it. Here in the United States only 27% of Americans, according to the latest polls, support this this conflict. In Europe it's even worse and for the very first time here in the United States since polls began being taken on this issue, more people support the Palestinians than support the Israelis. Couple that with the unpopularity of this attack and you've turned global

[14:16] public opinion against yourself. Right. So maybe it would have been a better idea to negotiate in good faith rather than to just pretend to negotiate, drag it out as long as you can, tell the Iranians that they have 10 more days to make concessions and then just hit them on day two. Yeah. I mean who would negotiate with the United States again after this? This is the second time in eight months that uh they figuratively speaking killed the negotiators. They attacked the country

[14:48] with which they were negotiating as the negotiators were literally on their way to the next session. And may I add something as well? You know, we're not talking about North Korea today and there's a reason why we're not talking about North Korea because North Korea has a nuclear weapon. And so nobody wants to mess with North Korea. Well, the Iranians weren't building a nuclear weapon. There are two CIA national intelligence estimates that concluded that there was

[15:19] no nuclear weapons program besides the fact that Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa decades ago saying there will be no nuclear weapons program. But Benjamin Netanyahu came to the United States dozens upon dozens of times to try to convince whoever happened to be president at the time and we're going back four or five presidents that Iran was an existential threat and that there was indeed a nuclear program and so Iran

[15:50] had to be destroyed. Well, that was a lie. And now here we are in a hot war wondering how we're going to get out of it. Here is our friend and colleague uh Larry Johnson on this show this morning on A, the absurdity of killing the Ayatollah and B, the number of Iranians killed by the US government. Chris, number 23. The one man that had blocked that was the the the the spiritual

[16:22] uh and actually political force keeping Iran from going ahead with a nuke uh was uh Khamenei. We killed him. Now that he's out uh I cannot dismiss the possibility that his replacement will come in and say, "Look uh for the benefit of protecting the Iranian people for to protect like these little girls, there's 150 little girls, six you know, between the ages of six and 12 that were murdered by the United States. We got blood on our hands. That's why

[16:53] they call death to America. Because we are responsible for a minimum of 300,000 dead Iranians over the course of the last 46 years. Make sense to you? Yeah, Larry's correct. Larry's correct. There was no nuclear weapons program. And you know, killing Ayatollah Khamenei is like killing the Pope. You're not going to bring down Catholicism by killing the Pope. There's just going to be another Pope appointed. And it's the same situation in Iran. There's going to be

[17:26] another Grand Ayatollah or Ayatollah elevated to Grand Ayatollah to supreme leader. It very well could be the Ayatollah Khomeini's grandson who is one of the senior clerics and and an insider and who's far far more conservative than Ayatollah Khamenei was. So, we've we've opened up a Pandora's Box here and I'm not sure that there's a way to close the lid. Yeah. Um

[17:56] should Tulsi Gabbard stay in her job? I mean, they obviously don't listen to what she says. She testifies under oath about these CIA assessments. Uh when she testifies, she's got all the written material in front of her in case the members of Congress want to see it. And Trump just dismisses it and says, "I don't care what she says." Mhm. What he means is what he means is Netanyahu doesn't want to hear this. That's really exactly what it means. And if there [clears throat] is an assessment published that he doesn't

[18:27] like or approve of, he'll fire everybody that was involved in the assessment. One thing about the CIA and I I was taught this in my very first week. The CIA does not have the protections of the the Civil Service Act. The CIA CIA employees serve at the pleasure of the president. And so, if the president doesn't like your face or doesn't like the tie that you're wearing or doesn't like what you wrote in the president's daily brief, he can fire you and there's literally nothing you can do about it.

[18:58] And officers and analysts know this. Oh, yes. Yes. But, the thing is every other president since the creation of the CIA has wanted unbiased analysis. The the No other president has wanted uh a rubber stamp of his own policies, whatever they happen to be. You know, I remember as as a young man, I was still in my 20s, 28 years old, and getting into a written argument with Bill

[19:29] Clinton over uh the Iraqi no-fly zones. And then finally, his briefer said, "You know what? The president just gave up. He admits you're the the expert. He's not. He's going to go with your analysis." Well, that's what what happened in normal situation. Not that everybody's fired, and then you just do what you want to do anyway. Hm, where do you see this ending, John? I don't think this is going to take

[19:59] weeks, and I don't think we'll bring down the Iranian government. One of the things that I noticed, one of the things that I rued the last couple of days, was watching CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or MS Now it's called, and these repeated references to this tiny demonstration in Los Angeles between 200 and 300 people jumping up and down and dancing and singing and and applauding the uh the attack. Well, these are

[20:31] mostly Iranian Jews, most of whom settled in Southern California. Um many of them in Beverly Hills. These were pro-Shah people who fled in 1979, took their wealth with them. That's not the average Iranian. You know, there are demonstrations in Tehran um that are pro-government, that have had hundreds of thousands of people. And so, I think we've grossly underestimated the support, the domestic

[21:02] support, that this uh Iranian government has. And I think that we will not see a quick collapse. Wouldn't the murder of the Ayatollah reinforce that support? Absolutely. You know, this was something that we miscalculated at the start of the Iran war. I remember being in a I was the note-taker in a principal's committee meeting the night before we attacked Iraq. And one of the National Security Council's senior advisers, as we got up to walk out of the room, said,

[21:33] "When we cross that border tomorrow, they're going to throw flowers at us." And I went back to the office and I said to the Deputy Director of the CIA, "Do these people know nothing about history?" And he said, "No. They know nothing about history. And here we are repeating that same mistake that we made 24 years ago." John Kiriakou, thank you, my dear friend. A pleasure pleasure to interview you. I hope we can see you at the end of the week. Thank you so much. I look forward to that.

[22:03] Good to see you. Thank you. All the best. Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8:00 in the morning, Ambassador Chas Freeman. At 9:00 in the morning, Professor John Mearsheimer. At 10:00 in the morning, Aaron Maté. At 12:45 in the afternoon, Scott Ritter. At 2:00, Matt Hoh. These are full days. At 3:00, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. Thank you for watching Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.

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