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Oct. 2, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:04
Aaron Maté : Biden’s Apocalyptic Foreign Policy.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024.
Aaron Maté joins us now.
Aaron, thanks very much for your time, of course, as always.
What is your take on the Iranian response to the Israeli assassination of Nasrallah and others?
The response being the missile attack of yesterday.
The first thing to underscore about the Iranian response is that unlike Israel, Iran targeted military sites.
That's been verified now by multiple sources that Iran was not aiming at civilian areas.
Some civilian infrastructure was struck, but the targets of this were Israeli military sites.
Iran was put into an impossible situation.
It didn't respond immediately after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
And back in April, you know, as you've covered extensively, back when Israel bombed the Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria, Iran telegraphed its response to ensure that there would not be an escalation.
But at this point now, after Israel, Iran was put in an impossible situation.
If it doesn't respond to all this, then it looks weak.
If it does respond, it is inviting another Israeli escalation.
But I think at this point, it made the assumption that no matter what it does, Israel is going to launch some sort of new form of aggression as it expands its aggression into Lebanon.
So it had to do something, and that's what it did.
But the important thing to stress is that Iran targeted Israeli military sites, which is not the same thing you can say about Israel, which is part of its official military doctrine, as we've seen on display in Gaza and Lebanon, targets civilians.
What did you think about, Nets?
I mean, what was his true audience there?
Was it Iranian experts in Los Angeles?
Was it Iranian young people who speak English?
Who could possibly find joy in what the Israeli prime minister, who in Iran could find joy in what the Israeli prime minister says in light of his behavior during his tenure in office?
I think his audience included U.S. neocons, who he wanted to, you know, throw them another bone and say, hey, I'm on board with this regime change goal that you have in Iran, and let's go, you know, support me as I try to entrap the U.S. and enlist the U.S. in my aggression in this region.
Because he knows that there are people in the U.S. establishment who would love to see the government of Iran overthrown.
He was trying to enlist their support because, you know.
So I think that was his main audience.
I also think he wanted to provoke Iran as well by basically saying, I'm going to regime change your government.
He's trying to elicit a response that can then hopefully draw in U.S. military.
And what has Joe Biden done so far?
Well, he sent more U.S. forces to the region.
Jake Sullivan's talked about how we're going to coordinate the response to Iran's counterattack.
He said, we're going to coordinate with Israel, rather than say, as Thomas Massey pointed out, Thomas Massey said, why are you coordinating with Israel?
Why aren't you coordinating with Congress?
If we're going to go to war, shouldn't you, under the War Powers Act, be coordinating with us?
But that's the Biden administration, so in lockstep with Israel, that that is their instinct, is to basically pledge their support for higher escalation.
Back to lockstep with Israel in a moment, but here is that.
A portion of that speech from Prime Minister Netanyahu on September 30th.
So this is after they have murdered Nasrallah, after his incendiary bellicose speech at the UN, but before the Iranian response.
Cut number 15, Chris.
When Iran is finally free, and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think, everything will be different.
Our two ancient peoples, the Jewish people and the Persian people, will finally be at peace.
Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace.
When that day comes, the terror network that the regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled.
Iran will thrive as never before.
Global investment, massive tourism, brilliant technological innovation based on the tremendous talents that exist inside Iran.
Doesn't that sound better than endless poverty, repression and war?
Iran just had an election.
They just elected a moderate, a cardiologist, and Netanyahu is saying, we're going to overthrow your government?
Yeah, what he's trying to do there is take advantage of the resentment that does exist for the government.
The government does not have, you know, It has a strong base of support, but there are many people who are upset.
There is government repression and the economy is struggling.
And the economy is struggling because of the draconian U.S. sanctions that have been imposed on it.
And this is the U.S. playbook over and over.
Make life miserable for ordinary civilians, not for the government, in the hopes that they will turn against the government because the U.S. wants to overthrow the government because...
Iran is a major power, and it can resist U.S.-Israeli hegemony.
And that's why people like Netanyahu and his allies in Washington are obsessed with overthrowing it.
So, as has been the playbook around the world, make the country, you know, suffer.
Put on these sanctions that prevent people from being able to afford all the basics of life.
Deny them access to medicine.
I know people with relatives who have passed away because they couldn't access medicine that they needed because it was blocked by U.S. sanctions.
So that's the playbook.
Nanyahu is coming in to take advantage of that and promise people a better future.
It's basically a mafia tactic.
You know, hold someone at gunpoint, harass them, make their lives miserable, and then finally they'll cave.
And the target here is always a civilian population.
It didn't startle me, but it reinforced my view of his deceptive nature that he should talk about peace.
He's the last person in the region whose name comes to mind when you hear the word or think of the concept.
Extremists in the region or the main extremists in the region who are the obstacle to a peaceful resolution to all this are the Israelis backed by the U.S. Because these are the only two major parties in the region that explicitly reject what has been for decades the global consensus of how to resolve all this, which is Palestinian self-determination.
The Arab League has offered Israel full normalization if it ends the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Withdraws from the occupied territories.
Allows for the creation of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.
That's been the offer on the table for decades now from the Arab League.
Iran in 2017 endorsed a resolution at the Organization for Islamic Cooperation endorsing that two-state solution.
Even Iran did.
Hezbollah did not because Hezbollah calls for a single democratic state in which everybody is equal.
So Hezbollah doesn't recognize Israel's right to create an ethno-state.
And, you know, that's a hard position to argue with because if you believe in democracy, then how can you support the apartheid system in Israel?
But practically, because people just recognize that Israel is a state, it's got nuclear weapons, and that's the only practical solution in the eyes of many people, that's been the solution on the table, the proposal on the table, which also has been endorsed by the Palestinian Authority and even members of Hamas who have basically tacitly accepted.
Israel's existence by saying they would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which for them is a massive compromise.
That's just 22% of the land Israel stole from them.
The only parties, the major parties in the region that reject that are Israel and the U.S. Israel said many times they will not accept the Arab League proposal, and they're backed up by the U.S., which every single year votes against UN General Assembly resolutions.
Has any American president explained?
Calling for a two-state solution out of one side of their mouth and vetoing everything that would bring about the two-step solution out of the other side of their mouth at the same time.
I believe George W. Bush said that the Arab League offer was asking Israel to accept indefensible borders.
So basically asking Israel to accept its internationally recognized borders would be asking Israel to accept indefensible borders.
And what he really means by that is that would mean Israel could no longer defend the illegal settlers it's put in the occupied West Bank in contravention of the Geneva Conventions.
So that's what is meant by indefensible.
Maybe it wasn't George W. Bush.
It was somebody along those lines that these are indefensible borders.
So no, but they don't usually explain it because what they do is all they do is a It's always far off in the future.
We need a path to a two-state solution.
Rather than saying there's actually a solution on the table, which is Israel doesn't have the right to a single inch of the West Bank or Gaza.
It's already a major compromise for Palestinians to even accept that.
But we're so fanatically committed to Israeli supremacy and the expansion of this apartheid colony that we're not going to support it.
No one has the honesty just to say that.
So instead, they pretend to see some Palestinian state far off in the future that they can never define.
Did the White House encourage Israel to attack Lebanon?
Well, the White House certainly gave its green light.
This was reported in Politico that the major figures behind this were Amos Hochstein, an Israeli-born U.S. official who's running point for Biden on the Middle East, especially in Lebanon.
And Brett McGurk, who has served under multiple administrations, served under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump.
So just showing how bipartisan this is.
And according to Politico, they basically gave Israel the green light and saying that Israel's operation in Lebanon, this is according to Politico, quote, will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.
So they saw this opportunity in going after Hezbollah to crush.
You know, this critical pillar of resistance to Israel and gave it the green light.
And what's incredible is the thinking spans generations.
It spans administrations.
It spans parties.
Because this notion that somehow, you know, there's an opportunity to crush Hezbollah and reshape the Middle East, that's exactly what Condoleezza Rice said nearly 20 years ago when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006.
Condoleezza Rice said that this was the birth pangs of the new Middle East.
So it's the exact same agenda.
Let's use every opportunity we can, no matter how many civilians we slaughter, no matter how much we destroy, to crush anybody that can resist Israel.
Back to the Ukrainian fusillade of missiles.
No one disputes what you said, which is that the Israelis aim at civilians, the Iranians aim at military targets.
Joe Biden...
Scott Ritter says it materially destroyed Israel's largest air force base.
I don't remember the name, but it's in the middle of the desert.
It's the place from which the jets came that dropped 160,000 pounds of bombs on Hassan Nasrallah last week.
What do you believe?
Or is it too early for anybody in the West to know?
Well, so in terms of the Iranian missiles launched at Israel and the damage that they did, there's a pattern with Israel where they always deny that they suffered any losses and that everything is fine.
You could tell immediately in the aftermath where you saw that Israeli media was effectively censored from reporting.
On the key details of the damage, that that was an indication that actually Iran had done damage.
You can see from some of the video footage that their missiles got through.
So already today in Haaretz, there was an admission that, yes, an Israeli base did suffer serious damage.
To what extent?
I don't know.
But it's always safe to assume when the Israeli military is censoring a story that it has something to hide.
In this case, to me, it's quite plausible that they're indeed hiding that they suffered serious damage to, again, military sites, not civilians.
Do you think that Netanyahu is destabilizing Israel?
Of course he is.
If you're an Israeli and your sole concern is the fate of your country and the fate of your captives who are still in Gaza, he's basically forgotten about them, left them for dead.
He's done that from the start.
Hamas offered Israel.
To release all the captives before it entered Gaza if Israel promised not to invade.
Israel ignored that because its aim was to destroy Gaza, make it unlivable.
So of course, I mean, but whether it's Netanyahu or somebody else, Israel is by nature a destabilized entity.
It's based on ethnosupremacy.
In that situation, you're always going to have crisis because to survive as an ethnostate, you're constantly having to crush.
The indigenous people of that region impose your will.
Everybody else engage in constant terror and violence.
Lie about it, as has Israel done since its founding.
So whether it's Netanyahu or not, I mean, Israel is inherently a stabilizing force.
Were you, I don't want to put this word in your mouth because maybe you weren't.
Were you scandalized that after his bellicose speech effectively condemning the United Nations,
Prime Minister Netanyahu went to another room in the same building and ordered a murder like a mafia chieftain gave the go-ahead on a murder 5,000 miles away, which murder then occurred.
You know, just a correction.
I initially also thought that he made that order from the UN, but actually, I believe it was from his hotel room.
The photograph of Netanyahu on the phone, I believe, is actually inside his hotel room.
Well, that makes it even worse, because then he's on New York property, not international property, and he committed a federal crime and a New York state crime, both of which prescribed life in prison for a person who orders a murder.
You know, I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes, absolutely.
He ordered an act of aggression that we don't even know the death toll because we don't care about how many people Israel kills.
We don't even count.
But certainly, along with Nasrallah, many civilians were killed because Israel leveled a number of residential buildings to do it.
And the fact that they released that photograph, you know, the fact not only that he gave the order from USO, but that they released a photograph.
What's the message of that photograph?
It's that international law, international consensus, international opinion be damned.
I can do whatever I want.
I'm going to flaunt it in your face.
And he can, because he has full impunity from the Biden administration, which I've never seen an administration enable Israeli aggression as the Biden administration has.
If you go back 40 years, Reagan called up Menachem Begin and said, you know, what you're doing in Lebanon is a Holocaust.
George H.W. Bush tried for a little bit to put some constraints on Israeli settlement expansion.
Bill Clinton.
After the Khanna massacre in 1996, when Israel massacred over 100 people in Lebanon who were taking shelter at a UN base, Bill Clinton then called for a ceasefire.
George W. Bush, when Israel launched strikes on Hamas leaders that also killed civilians, he actually criticized them.
Barack Obama also put constraints, although he gave Israel the green light to attack Gaza.
He ultimately told it to cut it off, which Israel did.
Donald Trump certainly enabled Israeli aggression, but nothing to the extent that Biden has.
For a year of mass murder in a besieged death camp, doing this performance piece where he pretends to be frustrated with Netanyahu, all while arming him to the teeth and blocking every UN resolution trying to call for a ceasefire, and then giving him the green light to expand the aggression to Lebanon.
This is unprecedented.
In U.S. history.
And I wonder, is there anybody around Biden think about their own long-term legacy?
I mean, Colin Powell famously had those doubts about the claims he was making about Iraq but didn't resign.
And, you know, it's a counterfactual now, but if he had resigned, maybe he could have stopped the Iraq War.
Is there anybody around Biden maybe thinking about their own self-interest, their own political future, how they will be remembered for their role in this genocide and whether they want to, especially with Biden's term coming to an end, whether they want to speak up?
In the absence of that, it's just a continued green light, unprecedented impunity from a U.S. president.
The apparent answer to your question is no.
Nobody thinks about their own legacy or even their own personal security since they're committing war crimes and there's no statute of limitations on war crimes.
Let's transition to another issue.
I thought of you when I saw these statements from Julian Assange, because I know you're very courageous yourself and you care about journalism, even journalists who may disagree with you.
Here is his first public statement made just yesterday.
I don't think any of this is new, but the manner in which he relates it is compelling and startling.
It's about two minutes long, but I'd like you to give me your thoughts on it.
Cut number two, Chris.
We revealed the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs, and iPhones.
CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.
It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo's explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian embassy in London and authorised going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks and the planting of false information.
My wife and my infant son were also targeted.
A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife, and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six-month-old This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former U.S. intelligence officials speaking to the U.S. press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.
The CIA's targeting of myself, my family, and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organizations engage in transnational repression.
Such repressions are not unique.
What is unique is that we know so much about this one Due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain.
Does any of this surprise you?
Well, no, it doesn't surprise me because the details have been revealed before.
And they've been revealed, actually, by my colleague Max Blumenthal at The Grey Zone, who reported on this four years ago, what he's talking about.
And we can tie it directly.
To the catastrophe we're seeing in the Middle East right now.
Because so Julian, and by the way, just a personal comment, it's so moving to hear Julian speak in his own words after so many years of torture and being literally silenced, caged in a prison.
It's just very moving to see him speak.
Agreed, agreed.
I was privileged to interview him when I worked for Fox and had my own show there.
Obviously, this is before he was self-incarcerated in the Ecuadorian embassy.
And it was deeply moving for me to see him free and free to say what he wanted after what the British did to him for five years.
But back to your thoughts, please.
Then I want to play another one that he said at the same gathering.
So Julian Assange in that clip is talking about the fact that Mike Pompeo, after becoming the director of the CIA, sees the opportunity to go after WikiLeaks, which he declared to be a hostile...
They're basically saying it's a terrorist organization, essentially.
Pompeo came in and declared war on WikiLeaks.
And one of the things that the CIA did, and this directly ties to the crisis in the Middle East, the CIA worked with the casino and the security firm owned by Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Israel Trump mega-donor, to spy on Assange.
They were basically a front, a CIA front.
In this operation to spy and harass Assange.
And Max Blumenthal at the Grayson had a story about this four years ago, going through all the details that Julian Assange referenced there, the attempt to poison him, to monitor his family, to obtain the diapers of his kids.
I mean, just deep, deep surveillance.
And a Trump mega-donors security firm was used for that purpose.
And all this came out, a lot of it came out.
In court files from a Spanish investigation, which Max got access to and published this story.
So it connects directly to the current situation because it just shows the forces we're dealing with.
the same forces that are backing Israel in its mass murder campaign, you know, mega donors in the ass like Adelson, which play an instrumental role in policy, Trump recently talked about how he basically gave the recognition of Israel's theft at the Golan Heights and the recognition of moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as a gift to Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam Adelson, because they're such big donors to him.
So you can see the influence that they play and the role that they play in enforcing U.S. hegemony by doing things like taking part in targeting the world's most important journalist, the one who's exposed more secrets than anybody else.
And by the way, you know, Julian Assange, you can take a globe and just spin it around and just randomly put your finger anywhere and the odds are high that Julian Assange will have exposed journalists.
Vital information on the negative role that the U.S. has played there or some other powerful government has played there.
And think about Israel and the Middle East alone.
It's from Julian Assange that I learned that according to an email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton in February 2012, Jake Sullivan wrote to Hillary Clinton, Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.
So the U.S. was knowingly supporting an Al-Qaeda-dominated insurgency in Syria.
And why?
Because there's another email.
In the Hillary Clinton archive explained, if we can destroy Syria, we can at least either take out a member of the Axis of Resistance, or we can really bleed other members, including Hezbollah.
And this will be good for Israel.
That was from another email to Hillary Clinton.
And we know of this thanks to Julian Assange.
And that's why the CIA, with the help of a Trump mega-donor like Sheldon Adelson, went after him.
And of course, this is firmly bipartisan.
Joe Biden called Julian Assange a high-tech terrorist.
Hillary Clinton used about droning him.
So you can see the threat that he poses to the system as evidenced by the fact that there's such a targeted effort to take him down.
At one point, I was having conversations with Donald Trump when he was president, and he would almost always call me to ask me about commutations and pardons.
I honestly thought I had talked him into pardoning.
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
And he told me I did, but somebody changed his mind, and I have often thought it was Mike Pompeo.
And also members of the Senate, which came over and told him, because this was back when, at the end of his term, he's facing now a second impeachment over January 6th.
Right.
And he was given a specific warning from Mitch McConnell and others not to pardon them.
And I think the suggestion was that if he does pardon them, they'll lose his support in the impeachment trial.
Here's another clip from Assange.
There's a wonderful phrase in here, which will go down in history.
I pleaded guilty to journalism.
Cut number 21. I want to be totally clear.
I am not free today because the system worked.
I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.
I plead guilty to seeking information from a source.
I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source.
And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was.
I did not plead guilty to anything else.
Very profound, very beautifully stated.
Any final thoughts on this?
Yeah, well, this is the caveat that has to be added to celebrating Julian Assange's freedom.
When we call it a victory, it was a victory that he was free, but as he points out there, it was not a pure victory because he had to commit, because he had to plead guilty to the crime of journalism to secure his freedom.
He basically had to plead guilty.
To what was legit journalistic activities.
He talks about their receiving information from a source and encouraging his source to give him information.
That's journalism.
That's what journalism is.
And to win his freedom, he had to plead guilty to that.
And he faced the choice of spending the rest of his life in prison or accepting this plea.
And he made, of course, the choice anybody would make.
and he accepted the plea, especially after so many years of torture.
But that is an unfortunate Agreed.
Aaron, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure.
I hope we can see you again next week.
It's a plan.
Thank you, Judge.
Thank you.
Coming up, remaining today at 2.30 Eastern, Phil Giraldi.
What does he think?
Did he ever participate?
I don't think so, but we'll find out.
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