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Oct. 24, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:33
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : While Israel Waits
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, October 24th, 2024.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.
Colonel, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
I do want to talk to you at some length on what may be happening while Israel is waiting before it attacks Iran.
But first...
Can you tell us if North Korea has troops in Russia, and if it does, if there's any significance to that?
It looks like they do.
The sources that I have at least think they do.
And I think we heard between the lines in one of the press conferences, I think it was the Pentagon's gentlemen, the Brigadier, Air Force Brigadier that they do.
And it's not enough, if you will, if they're just straight leg infantrymen or artillerymen, not enough really to influence the battle.
So I'm still curious as to why they're there, other than to demonstrate that Putin has out, You know, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee Whom I would describe as a hothead by the name of Mike Turner, he who championed an extension of the portion of the Patriot Act that permits warrantless spying on Americans,
says if this is true, it's time for American troops to be deployed to Ukraine to attack North Korean troops.
Where are we going with this?
Well, that's as insane a comment as the one you referred to about the Patriot Act, and I share your opinion of this gentleman, except mine might be even lower than yours.
There are several in that regard.
God love you, Colonel.
He's just been a dodo.
And we seem to love putting these dodos in committee positions.
Chairman.
It's dangerous because they get an investigative staff that's usually retired FBI.
They have a budget.
They can do all kinds of subpoena power.
They have all kinds of things they can do.
I'm sorry for interrupting.
No, you're absolutely right.
It's one of our weaknesses in our legislative branch and in the party leadership that does it.
A guy like Walt Jones, for example, for whom I had infinite respect, never got a committee or subcommittee because he was such a recalcitrant and level-headed wise man.
Correct.
I think this is just another demonstration, as I said, that Putin has allies and there could be more to come.
Now, our reaction should be that we go to the peace table.
We achieve a ceasefire and we let Zelensky do what he's got to do to get out of this mess because it is not going to get any better.
It's going to get worse.
And it's going to get worse for the empire as well as for Ukraine.
Some of our guests have suggested that Zelensky cannot negotiate a peace treaty because if he does, he'll be taken out by his own people.
That a new human being needs to come in and take the reins of the Ukrainian government.
I agree if it's because we're headed for negotiations and a ceasefire and eventual peace agreement.
If it's because those people who take him out want a rougher, tougher, more violent and more widespread war with lots of other people participating, including NATO partners.
I'm totally against it, because that would be just doubling down on disaster.
Colonel, isn't Ukraine on its last leg, and don't the officials of NATO, the EU, and the neocons in the State Department recognize that at long last?
I think they're being held up in any kind of recognition by, one, stupidity, and I would put the new Secretary General of NATO in that category.
I don't think I've ever heard a dumber Dutchman.
Very, very much a disappointment in terms of changing any views in Brussels.
Two, because of the election of the United States and the pressure being brought on them not to say anything adverse until that election's over.
And three, the fact that there are some military people, most of them, interestingly enough, outside the Pentagon now, retired or having gone their own route.
Who still think that Ukraine has a chance and that if they were allowed to be in the fray, so to speak, that chance would be realized.
Hard to believe.
Why would Secretary Austin have announced another $400 million to Ukraine earlier this week?
Isn't that just going down a rat hole at this point?
Absolutely.
All the money went down a rat hole, Judge.
If my experience with Ukraine over four years at the State Department is any guide, and I think it is a definitive guide, almost all of our money that hasn't gone, and that's probably less than 20 to 30 percent directly to buy munitions, has gone down a rat hole.
Because that's what Ukraine is, a rat hole.
As we speak, before we transition into Israel, President Putin is presiding in Kazan, Russia, over a meeting of BRICS, and he seems very happy at what's happening there.
There will soon be two I's in BRICS.
I don't know if they're going to actually change the acronym, but Iran is joining and Turkey's making noises like it wants to.
How does the G7 work?
How does the G7 react to something like BRICS?
The gross domestic product of BRICS is $60 trillion.
That's many times what the gross domestic product of G7 is.
The G7 has been on its last legs, as it were, for some time.
In 2002 and 2003, when I was Chief of Staff of the State Department, we had some meaningful conversations about it, I guess you'd say.
Under Secretary for Economics and others.
And we were searching for ways to revitalize some group and maybe even not even call it the G7 or the G8 or any other G name.
We were going to call it something else.
Because it's not doing what it should be doing anymore.
And the opprobrium attached to it by, as you just insinuated, the rest of the world, which is now gathering in where?
Bricks in Kazakhstan, Russia.
And they added, I think, I heard Dimitri say the other day, they added 11 or 12 members at this meeting.
So, yes, the G7 is a, it's passe.
It's an economic group of the past.
Here's a very contented President Putin, Chris Cut, number 14. We never refused the dollar as a universal currency.
We were blocked from using it.
Now 95% of all external trade of Russia, it is carried out with our partners in national currencies.
They did all this with their own hands.
They thought everything would collapse.
But no, nothing collapsed.
It's developing on a new basis.
Differently, we are more prosperous today than we were when these sanctions were first imposed on us.
Right, Colonel?
Right.
And if you look at some of the interviews that have been conducted recently, particularly by some of my British friends in the media, they're preposterous.
They start off by asking the Russian ambassador, for example, I forget to what country he was the ambassador, I think it was Canada or whatever, asking him the question, isn't your economy on the ropes?
Isn't your economy collapsing?
Won't it be absolutely defunct by next summer?
And he just looks at him very coolly and says, I've been back to Russia.
Where did you get your information?
The economy is booming.
The economy is doing fine.
We have problems just like any country has problems, but we're working with the problems, and the problems don't outweigh the advantages.
We're doing fine.
And I don't think he was spinning anything at all.
simply telling the truth.
Moving on to Israel and ultimately your views on Israel attacking Iran, what in your view is the significance of the killing of Sinwar?
Is it a serious degrading of Hamas or is it the elevation of a national heroic symbol?
For example, I read a Fairly decent piece by Aaron David Miller and former ambassador to Israel, whom I know a little bit, Dan Kurtzer, which sums it up, I think, pretty well and says, essentially, well, it might have made Israel feel good for a moment, but it isn't doing much with regard to what is chiefly necessary, diplomacy, to end this mess, and it's not going to do much for Israel's strategic or operational.
I don't know if it's me, Frozen, Chris, or if it's the Colonel.
Am I coming through?
Yeah, you're through.
Now you're back.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead, Colonel.
No, I was just saying, I was reading an article, very fresh article by Ambassador Dan Kurtzer, whom I know a little bit, and Aaron David Miller, who I used to work with when I was at State.
And they are...
But they depict this as an almost non-entity situation with regard to Senor's death.
And in fact, their assessment of Blinken's current diplomacy is in diplomatic talk.
Nothing will be accomplished, but it's dismal.
Absolutely dismal assessment of what he's doing.
There is absolutely no possibility That he's going to be successful.
Now, I would hasten to add that I think Blinken is working for Israel all along.
I thought he was working for Israel, just like I think Amos Hockstein is working for Israel.
A lot of other people who have dual citizenship or who look like they're more Israeli than they are American are working for Israel.
And so there never was any intent on Blinken's part to bring about anything other than what Netanyahu wanted.
So all these trips are just camouflaged.
But to have Kircher and Aaron David come out and assess the way they did is significant, I think.
Has Israel defeated Hamas?
No.
No, as long as there's the ideology and at least one Palestinian, and there are quite a few more than one Palestinians, and a lot of Palestinian youth, both female and male, they have not defeated them.
And they are never going to defeat them, any more than we were going to defeat completely al-Qaeda.
Or defeat completely ISIS, ISIS-K, or any variant thereof.
The only way you defeat them is overwhelm their ideology.
You do it the way the Indonesians and others in Southeast Asia did it.
You invite them in from the forest, as it were, because you present them with a political opportunity and an opportunity to get out of the jungle, and they take it.
That's the only way you defeat this kind of movement.
In other words, you create a Palestinian state and make it viable.
Here's what Netanyahu's lawyer thinks about whether the Israelis have defeated Hamas.
Chris, cut number 16. Israel has achieved most of its strategic objectives when it comes to Gaza, all with the idea of making sure that October 7th could never happen again.
In the space of a year, it's managed to dismantle Hamas' military capacity.
It's destroyed a bunch of its arsenal.
It's eliminated its senior leadership, including, most recently, Yahya Sinwar.
This has covered the cost, great cost, to Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Now is the time to turn those successes into an enduring strategic success.
And there are really two things left to do: get the hostages home and bring the war to an end with an understanding of what will follow.
His client will never allow the war to end, and his client will never allow a Palestinian state.
Those are statements of fact.
Are they not, Colonel?
They certainly are.
And just listen to what Blinken said.
Blinken could have been mouthing what he was saying with Netanyahu actually speaking.
Blinken is saying what he's saying.
Because he wants everything to be forgotten that has transpired.
200,000 dead women, children, men, dogs, cats, whatever, in Gaza.
A humanitarian disaster of the first order, genocide.
A war in Lebanon that Israel is taking significant punishment as it pursues.
And a potential war with Iran that will be disastrous for Israel.
So he's wanting it to stop so diplomacy can take over.
What is diplomacy going to create now?
It has no chance of achieving any kind of reasonable objective.
And this is going to play out, I am sad to say.
Colonel, what in your view is the significance of the release on the Telegram website of the two top secret American intel documents showing a couple of things?
Israel, what purports to be Israel's plans to invade Iran, the American intelligence community spying on Israel, the American intelligence community not sharing everything with the other four eyes of the five eyes,
and the rather in-passing reference to the universal recognition of Israel's possession of nuclear weapons on an official U.S. government document.
I'm not.
I think my view on that is fairly fixed, and it is that we did it.
We did it just as we did Nord Stream.
We leaked this.
You will never see a whistleblower.
There will never be a Dan Ellsberg.
There will never be anybody punished.
They'll make all kinds of movements as if that were going to take place, Justice and others, FBI.
We leaked it.
And we leaked it for a number of reasons, one of which was, and I'm not so sure I'm against this reason, to discourage Israel from doing anything in the time between now and the 5th of November, and to send a signal to that effect that if they did, we would punish them.
And I don't know how that punishment would play out, but I could think of a few ways to do it.
Well, let me ask you a little background.
Is this a subterfuge?
That is, was this leaked in order to give the Iranians false information?
Or was this real?
And if so, does it force a delay on the plans of the Netanyahu government?
All of the above.
And I have no idea without seeing the specific contents of the documents and comparing it with other things that I have access to.
I have no idea how to say a positive answer to your question about what does it do to the Iranians, other than to show to the Iranians, and I think they probably are aware of this, that we will do anything in our power to stop anything from happening before the elections.
After the elections, all bets are off, and I think the Iranians know that.
Here's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Yesterday, with harshly critical comments about the culture of the West, cut number one.
Western politicians have been disgraced.
Western policy has been exposed.
They have failed.
This is a major defeat.
No one should speak of the Western civilization anymore.
This is Western civilization.
It doesn't care about taking money from its own people in all sorts of ways and sending it to kill small children, innocent offspring, destroy families, and martyr 10,000 children, leaving thousands orphaned.
It doesn't matter to them.
This is Western culture.
Empty words, or is he going to do something about it?
Well, he's someone to be saying those things.
He was the one who cracked down on the women in Iran when they tried to gain a little bit of power recently, if you recall.
Right.
So, you know, his words of philosophy, as it were, don't mean a whole hell of a lot to me.
But there's enough truth in what he said.
Just as there is resonating truth in and far more of it, what Putin says and what other leaders arrayed around Putin say about the empire to be real and damaging.
Let's just face it.
We have supported now for a year slaughter of human beings on a scale not seen since Adolf Hitler in World War II.
We, the American Empire, the supposed humanitarian protector of the world, we have supported it.
And we've had our Secretary of State there 11 times to lie about it.
You can't miss the truth in that.
I want to go back to the Telegram revelation.
You know better than I the federal statutes and treaties that prohibit the United States from providing military assistance to a country with nuclear weapons that hasn't signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other agreements subject to UN supervision.
Will they ever be enforced against Israel?
Never.
Never.
I've come to believe that Let me see if I got it.
You just said that if Israel were at its doomsday, you would bring everyone around Israel, indeed perhaps the world, to death.
That's exactly what I meant.
The BBC reported that.
The London Times reported that the next day and said, we'd better believe her.
Now, there have been people who said, well, she was telling him that and she wanted the BBC to broadcast it because they thought they were in extremists at that point and they wanted everybody to understand.
So Kissinger and Nixon and Moscow and everybody else would come down and bring pressure on the Egyptians and others to stop the thing.
That's hogwash.
The Israelis were winning.
They started that war.
Egypt didn't start that war.
Israel started that war.
In fact, Israel started every war it's ever been in.
That's the truth.
So, but I believe it.
I believe that Golda was telling this reporter, this BBC reporter, the truth, that if we're an extremist, they wouldn't care about the rest of the region or the world.
When you were the, and again, without violating a confidence, Colonel, When you were the Chief of Staff of the State Department, was there a general recognition, a general below-the-surface acknowledgement that Israel has nuclear weapons based on nuclear technology, which Israel stole from the U.S.?
Yes.
And when we had a particular book come out, I forget the name of it and I forget the author.
I shouldn't because I was beside him at the National Press Club one week.
When he delivered himself of the condensation of his book, who essentially proved it to us, absolutely proved it, that we had been responsible for Israel having the bomb.
And not just we were responsible through negligence or a lack of scrutiny or whatever, we wanted it to happen, all the way up to the President of the United States.
And now we have to live with that.
And we know, we know with great precision that they uploaded one of them during the Yom Kippur War.
Here's the $64,000 question.
Will Israel attack Iran in a significant way?
And if so, what is likely to be the response?
I think Netanyahu is smart enough.
That he'll want to do his repost on this attack, his attack responding to their attack, with some kind of circumspection that mainly hits military targets, maybe strays a few places.
Israel has a real hard time not hitting civilian infrastructure.
They seem to delight in it.
So they may hit some of that too.
But what he's going to base his major response on.
And the response that he knows will bring the United States in is what Iran does back to him for that.
So we'll be somewhere down the road before the thing gets completely out of hand and the United States has no choice but to come in.
Hey, Colonel, what are you doing Sunday morning?
We're going up to meet with a lot of our friends, a lot of true patriots, I think.
And we're getting ready to talk about...
To my great delight, after nearly three years of working with you on a weekly basis, we will finally be in the same room at the same time, and I'll get to give you a big hug.
Well, it'll be a long time since I've seen Scott, too.
He just asked me to write the forward to his new book on nuclear weapons, and I told him, and I write it in the forward.
Should I ask Dan Ellsberg?
I know he would have if Dan were still alive.
Of course he would.
Colonel, I look forward to seeing you Sunday morning, and I thank you very much for your time today.
It'll be great interacting with you in person in New York City, of all places.
I look forward to it.
I understand there are going to be some Italians around, too.
I think so.
Thank you, Colonel.
All the best.
Take care.
Same to you.
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