Ralph talks to Constitutional scholar and Senior Fox News Judicial Analyst, Andrew Napolitano, and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, about the legality and consequences of the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Suleimani.
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Judge Andrew Napolitano was a Superior Court Judge for the State of New Jersey from 1987 to 1995. He has also taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at Delaware Law School and Seton Hall Law School. Judge Napolitano now is in private practice and has been a Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst. He is the author of seven books on the U.S. Constitution, the most recent entitled Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.
“Each American president from the Wilson period on up to the present has utilized the examples of their predecessors to increase their own power. In that respect, Donald Trump is no exception. He just is the present and most extreme utilizer of all of that power. It is dangerous to the concept of limited government. It is absolutely destructive to the rule of law. It’s dangerous to personal liberty. And if a person who happens to be president says, ‘I can do whatever I want under Article II,’ that person is utterly and totally unworthy of occupying the office.”
Judge Andrew Napolitano: Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst
“[Donald Trump] is someone who makes decisions very quickly with minimal information in front of him, then goes back to doing whatever he was doing before the decision time came to pass.”
Judge Andrew Napolitano: Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst and former friend of Donald Trump
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is the distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the college of William and Mary in Virginia.
During the course of his military service, Colonel Wilkerson was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Bronze Star among other awards and decorations. At the Department of State, he earned the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award, as well as two Superior Honor Awards.
“Trump came to Washington to ‘drain the swamp’ supposedly. An alligator jumped out of that swamp, grabbed Trump by the throat and now has him in its total grasp. ‘The Blob’ wants war with Iran. And ‘The Blob’ led by Pompeo, Lindsey Graham, Esper and others is going to have that war come hell or high water.”
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson: former chief of staff to Secretary of State, Colin Powell
“I’m given a slight degree of hope that the leadership in Iran being markedly smarter and more strategic in its thinking than the leadership in Washington, has made a decision that they’re going to respond not in an overly- escalatory way, but in a way that the international community will think is proportional.”
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson: former chief of staff to Secretary of State, Colin Powell
“I don’t even know why the man I spent some twelve plus years with, Colin Powell, isn’t on the hustings, isn’t out doing what he did so well, for example, to sell the war with Iraq. It’s beyond me. These people don’t seem anymore to have a real fundamental interest in the course of this country. And my party, the Republican party is disgusting in that regard.”
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson: former chief of staff to Secretary of State, Colin Powell
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Ralph Nader, I agree with you that Trump is wrong and the only hope I had for Trump based on his campaign that he will not start another war but obviously that is another campaign promise he’s breaking. One additional point, do Not call him lazy. No one, works harder as President than Trump. One possibility, you can call him intellectually lazy. Please keep up the good work, letting Americans know the truth about Trump.
The reason RN and many others are frustrated with the course of America is it has never been a democracy and alot of the public know this. The good guys like RN, AN and CW and Bruce Fein are looking at the Constitution and demanding that it be followed and applied, but what these good guys don’t admit is the Constitution is in many ways a sieve. As the Anti Federalists all feared it would, it set the stage for the eventual usurpation of liberty and freedom. It set the stage for America to become an Empire. It is operated by and for a military industrial oligarchy.
In the 1788 debates on the proposed Constitution, both leading Federalists and Anti Federalists boasted that America was destined to be a great Empire, and literally not one Founder questioned this or challenged this boast. The Monroe, Truman, and Carter Doctrines followed suit: all de facto declared the right and duty of the American Empire to wage wars to contain and disrupt enemies to the Empire, not merely deter or defend the Empire.
Yes he’s lazy
Besides Wilkerson, whose guilty conscience in lying us into the Iraq war motivates his passion against continued endless war, why don’t you have lifelong peace activists who speak out against the military industrial complex
Warmongers wherever they have been effective in involving our might makes right death and destruction DoD like real people for peace,
Medea Benjamin CODEPINK, Phyllis Bennis Jewish Voice for Peace, Max Blumenthal, The Grey Zone, etc.
Having anti war members of Congress like AOC, Ro Khanna, etc.
Thank you for those suggestions. Take a listen to this episode along those lines: https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/iraq-fifteen-year-criminal-war-of-aggression/ with Michael McPhearson with Veterans for Peace. We’ve had him on an number of times.
It is so easy to bandy around the term warmonger.
So easy that some societies have it built into their system and we pretend not to see it. They call it jihad.
What do you do in a world shrinking faster and faster in ways we never imagined about the conflicts between systems. It you decide above all do not have war, i.e. armed conflict, what happens over time?
Is there no difference between societies? Free, unfree, educated, ignorant, socialist, fascist, racist, tolerant, etc. All these dimensions of conflict exist, and they all have points at which there is a happy common medium that everyone can live with.
Oddly it is not the case that because there are ways that we can all behave and legislate so we all get along together, but somehow they do not get discussed or agreed on, nor is any action taken to build some kind of social system that respects all people.
So, who has done the most evolving and refining on that. Is it the African, Middle East or Asian systems, or is it the evolution of what has come to be called rather arrogantly “Western Civilization”?
While there are disagreements in Western Civilization, and progress and regress, in general Western civilization has freedom of expression, rule of law and free markets ( granted a problematic term ). Freedom has a cost to it, defense, but sometimes costs are too high, and defense is inappropriate and doesn’t work so it is sensible to go on the offensive. The killing of Suleimani was such a case in my opinion.
What happens over time when a totalitarian or regimented system or a system geared for war brushes up against its outside world? We are seeing it happening all over the world. What we hear a lot of is to embrace people from systems that are antithetical to our own. This is based on the claim that all societies and all points of view should have equal weight, but they simply do not.
Do Americans or Europeans want to live in an Islamic world, or a Chinese Racist Tyranny world? No! So some decisions have to be made as to what to do, and those decisions cannot be simple-minded happy-faced fairy tales we see in the media, nor can those decisions be based on dehumanizing and fear mongering. Thinking is hard work, and we never get it right, except only to some extent or another.
Comparisons cannot be based on absolute perfection or absolute evil, there exists neither, so it is a human process liable to mistakes and failure, in a time when the stakes are always rising. It doesn’t look good for humanity unless there can be some kind of unifying system. Do we want to unify under North Korea or Iran?
What do we do about the people we see stuck under those systems sometimes forced to attack us. Wha do we do about those systems acting out in the broader world? The killing of Suleimani was justifiable. The Presidency of Donald Trump is up for debate. If we could get rid of Suleimani without the Presidency of Donald Trump it would have been better. So, why didn’t we?
How about the transcript of this show? Looking forward to downloading for my research.
Look for the transcript in the next couple of days. Thanks for listening and good luck with your research!
Great! Thank you.