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Nov. 6, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:02
Phil Giraldi : The US War On the Palestinians.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
Phil Giraldi joins us.
Now, Phil, forgive me for botching your last name and conflating you with Colonel McGregor.
You and Angela are longtime friends of mine.
I know exactly who you are.
It's just been one of those days, late night, last night.
But thank you, Phil.
I think I can accept that.
Okay, thank you.
But does Rupert forgive me?
Well, you know, Rupert is a bulldog, so he's kind of stubborn.
Okay.
Thank you very much for joining us, my dear friend.
I was disappointed to have been reminded this morning that three days ago when candidate Donald Trump was asked who he had in mind for Secretary of Defense, he mentioned the names of Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton.
And I thought to myself, here we go again.
Does it even matter who the President of the United States is if either of these two gentlemen ran the Defense Department?
I heard your question.
I watched you when you were talking about this, and I absolutely agree with you.
This attitude that somehow Trump is going to bring in something new and he's going to really honestly want to get rid of all these endless stupid wars, as he used to refer to them, I don't buy it.
He has said too many things to the contrary, and this simple fact of his naming these two clowns as possible secretaries of defense, that's frightening.
I mean, that is awful.
I mean, these are arch neocons.
These folks are in the Lindsey Graham, Victoria Newland category, although both of them are ex-military.
Yeah, they're ex-military, but again, there are ex-militaries like Colonel McGregor who've actually seen it and done it, and then there are a lot of ex-military who haven't done it.
So I tend to see them as the Lindsey Graham prototypes, where they very often have a job that they could easily be doing in civilian clothes.
So there are a lot of them around.
I mean, one can just hope he made so many promises all across the board from, you know, appointing a serious libertarian to his cabinet to ending the wars to abolishing the income tax.
Obviously, the appointments are his and his alone, but he is surrounded by a coterie of people who will probably influence him, as they did last time as national security advisor was John Bolton, for gosh sakes, who is in the same category as Pompeo, Cotton, and Graham.
Yeah, and in fact, possibly worse.
You know, this is a repeating...
Look at Joe Biden, the people he brought in with him, and the horrible things they've done and not done.
It's like they go out and seem to find the people that are, in terms of character, the weakest, so that the president always looks good or always has deniability.
Does the president-elect of the United States have a $100 million debt to Miriam Adelson?
That has been reported repeatedly and it has, as far as I know, never been denied either by Adelson or by Donald Trump.
So I assume it's true and it's conditional on Trump taking action or rather taking no action when the When Netanyahu and his crew decide to basically take over the West Bank, which is the only remaining part of what was once Palestine that still retains minimal sovereignty in a couple of very small places.
So this is what's on the agenda now to turn the whole place into what would be legally the Jewish state, Israel.
And where are these people going to go?
I mean, they don't care about that.
Phil, is the United States at war with the poor people of Gaza?
Well, in the sense that the United States is also at war with Russia in terms of supplying and paying the bills and turning over the weapons and all that sort of thing and not allowing there to be any censure.
of these actions in international fora.
The United States is at war with, I would say, the Palestinian people, to put it more broadly, and just as they are at war de facto with Russia, and Russia is beginning to explain that, that truism.
General Pat Ryder said the other day, If North Korean troops are present in Russia or Ukraine, they are legitimate military targets.
Well, if American troops are present in Israel, aren't they legitimate military targets for Israel's enemies?
Yeah, absolutely.
This is the same equation wherever it comes up, where the United States gets so deep into these things.
And I would throw in, let's consider other places too, like Syria, Iraq.
I mean, the governments of those two countries have repeatedly asked for U.S. troops to be withdrawn.
And this was also the case under Donald Trump.
And he did nothing about it.
And after complaining about Afghanistan, he did nothing about withdrawing our presence there.
So there's a lot of talk going around about Donald Trump being the man of peace.
And I've heard some of it quite recently.
And I think it's a lot of nonsense.
Donald Trump is a bought and paid entity of a lot of special interests.
And that makes him no different than his...
But, you know, the fact is this is not good.
Our system is up for sale and our ethics are even up for sale.
And this is about as low as it gets.
There were reports that when the Israeli fighter jets flew over Iraq and from the skies aimed their missiles at Iran, Until they were confronted by a resistance with which they were unfamiliar,
that the American State Department did not ask, or excuse me, that the Israeli Foreign Ministry did not ask the Iraq government for permission to do that.
They asked the U.S. I wonder what conceivable, if true, under what conceivable theory could the U.S. State Department Give Israel the authority to fly over Iraq with jet fighters.
There is no conceivable authority for the U.S. to do that, apart from the brute force kind of argument that the United States has a series of bases, maintains a series of bases in Iraq that it claims are there for fighting terrorists.
But the fact is that they are there basically because they are there.
And they are maintaining some kind of edge against Iran, which is friends with Iraq at the present time.
So it's a very weird kind of setup.
And of course, the one thing they did accomplish with their air superiority was to kill the Iranian general, Soleimani.
And that was under Donald Trump.
Right.
So, you know, there's so much of this nonsense going on, and it's just, it's turning...
And this is unacceptable.
I hope that Donald Trump will maybe wake up some morning in the White House and see the light and start doing a lot of things a lot differently.
I mean, I share the same The same hope.
The last time he was in the White House, he called me many times.
I'd be flattered if he called me.
Again, candidly, usually not on foreign policy, but I hope he feels that way.
Phil, has the United States ever been attacked or threatened by Israel's enemies?
Well, this is kind of a parsing.
Stories and things like that.
Certainly, the Israelis would claim that when the Beirut barracks were blown up in the 80s, killing something like 300 Marines, that was an attack by the Hezbollah and associated groups at that time against Americans.
That's the only instance I can kind of stretch into that.
Has there been an attack recently in the past 10 or 20 years?
Oh, no, not at all.
And Iran, who has, of course, been selected as the number one enemy in the region, has, insofar as I know, never attacked the United States.
What benefit does the United States derive from financing Israel's wars against all of its enemies, real and imagined?
Well, the biggest benefit the United States gets out of it is helping the national debt go up.
Because all of this money is not there lying on a table.
This is money that is basically borrowed or given away.
And it makes the debt go up.
And that's the only benefit I see.
I've seen no benefit ever.
From the relationship with Israel, right from the beginning of the state, when you had various conspiracies and things like that, and like the USS Liberty, where Israel has been the enemy of the United States.
And if there had been any justice in the world at that time, the U.S. would have attacked Israel after it attacked the Liberty.
But of course, that didn't happen.
Instead, the U.S. government under Lyndon Johnson did a cover-up.
When Netanyahu spoke before Congress, the loudest and longest applause line that he received came when he attacked the freedom of speech.
He attacked people, two of whom were friends and colleagues of ours, Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal and Larry Wilkerson, three of them.
They were all, I happened to be outside the...
Larry insists, it's typical of Larry, that Netanyahu was referring to him personally.
We don't know to whom he was referring personally, but to take the humor out of this, he did receive the loudest, longest, most sustained applause when he attacked the freedom of speech.
What is the state of the freedom of speech in Israel?
Is it common for an Israeli leader to attack the freedom of speech?
To me, it is profoundly uncommon for members of the Congress who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which includes the Bill of Rights, which includes the First Amendment, Yeah, that was a bizarre scene, wasn't it?
It was essentially taking the side of Israel.
Against American citizens who object to Israel carrying out a genocide, a highly visible genocide enabled by U.S. weapons and U.S. money.
And American citizens were objecting to that in a nonviolent fashion.
And we have our congressmen basically taking the side of the people doing the genocide.
You know, the media doesn't talk about this kind of stuff enough, because that's what it is.
And it's essentially a denial of our rights.
And interestingly enough, in Israel, too, they're starting to move also in that direction.
I think the Knesset last week passed a law, or at least introduced a law, that basically will make it a crime.
For Israeli citizens to be criticizing the war policies of the state.
And so that's a kind of interesting turn, too.
I mean, Israel has been referred to as our best friend and a liberal democracy.
It is really neither.
Right.
It's not a democracy because obviously there are gregations of citizenship in Israel.
Plus, Israel now legally defines itself as a Jewish.
And so it's not a democracy.
It never has been.
The Arabs who were incorporated in Israel as Israeli citizens and carry Israeli passports and everything like that have secondary rights in most respects compared to the Jewish citizens.
So it's never been that.
It's never been an ally because an alliance requires reciprocity.
And that means that if you're going to have a situation where the U.S. is prepared to go to war, it has to be laid out very carefully what the conditions have to be that lead to that.
And there has to be reciprocity, meaning that the other partner has to be willing and able to do the same thing, provide the same service to the United States.
So, no, it's neither.
And never has been anything but.
What it is, basically a state that essentially feels that it can get away with whatever it gets away with, it can do whatever it can.
I don't know how many of the citizens believe that it's because God has willed it that way, but certainly some of them do.
Suppose Donald Trump says to Prime Minister Netanyahu, you have until March 1st, 2025, Well, I think,
first of all, Bibi would energize his people here in the Israel lobby in the United States to start making all kinds of trouble for Donald Trump or whoever would take that kind of position.
And by trouble, I mean gross interference in our political system, using lots of money to disrupt elections, just as they did with the two Democratic congressmen fairly recently.
They invested $17 million to overthrow two elections of Democratic congressmen who were critical of what Israel has been doing in the Middle East.
So they're quite prepared to do all that kind of stuff.
They have enough control over the media where they make sure that they would be able to tell a lot of stories about the incumbency.
Netanyahu has a lot of power that way.
Then Yahoo and Israel have interfered in American elections since as long as I know, and they certainly are doing it more these days.
So U.S. support for Israel does not depend on, does not depend on, who's in the White House and which party controls Congress.
Right.
Israeli control over our political system is bilateral.
It's the two parties, the two leading parties, the main parties.
They don't worry about the Greens or the Libertarians, but they do worry about Democrats and Republicans, and they effectively have seized control of the foreign policies of both parties.
God bless some of the Democrats, the progressive Democrats, who have been pushing the other way.
Thank God they're around, but there are very few of them.
And in the Republican Party, you could count the people that push back against Israel on two fingers of one hand.
That Massey and Paul, they would be the only two that ever make any effort.
You know, Congressman Massey, God bless him, I love him dearly.
They limit his speeches to 60 seconds.
So he crams in whatever he can in the 60 seconds.
And I said to him, do they hiss, do they boo, do they applaud, do they stamp their feet?
He looks at me and he goes, there's nobody there.
It's just the stenographer, whoever's presiding in the speaker chair, a couple of security guards and me.
There's nobody listening to him.
That's the House of Representatives today, if you're not part of the war party, of which, of course, Thomas Massey profoundly is not.
The ceasefire negotiators, Bill Burns, Amos Hochstein, and Brett McGurk, have they seriously been negotiating for a ceasefire, or have they been part of Netanyahu's plans to drag this out, drag this out, drag this out, so the war keeps going, so Netanyahu stays in power?
Yeah, well, that's part of it to keep Netanyahu in power, because he would go straight to jail if he ever were subjected to inquiry by some of the Israelis who are astonished at his behavior.
Yeah, but these American negotiators are a joke.
They go over there, and the mission of a couple of them was to basically keep the war from spreading.
And particularly in terms of spreading into Lebanon.
But they did just the opposite.
They came to the conclusion that this was a good time for Netanyahu to strike Lebanon, to destroy Hezbollah, to create a buffer zone consisting of Lebanon, the southern part of Lebanon, up to the Latani River.
And so this was all the plan.
Unfortunately for them, it turns out that the Lebanese As they have done in the past, we're fairly effective at fighting back.
And it seems that the Israeli ground offensive has come to a halt, although they continue to bomb cities and towns, including the suburbs of Beirut.
I want to play a clip for you from former Israeli Defense Minister Gallant, who was fired the other day.
Perhaps to get some other negative news about Netanyahu off the front page, but who knows what he was thinking.
Gallant gave about a two or three minute statement as to why he was fired.
Chris reduced it to less than a minute, so we hear the core of the reasons.
I'm particularly interested in your view of the last of these reasons.
Now, Gallant is no sweetheart.
He's a committed Zionist, and he orchestrated the slaughter.
But he did, it appears, sincerely want a ceasefire so that there could actually be an exchange of hostages.
He's in favor of the military draft for the ultra-Orthodox.
I don't think that's an issue for Americans.
But most importantly, he wants a national commission of inquiry as to who knew what.
On October 7th.
Here is cut number 6. To return our
sons and daughters, the hostages.
The third topic, the need to implement learning from the mistakes of the war.
I support a deep investigation into looking into who is responsible, and I call for a national commission of inquiry.
At the same time he called for a national commission of inquiry, an Israeli judge lifted a gag order on Shin Bet, which announced that it has been conducting an inquiry of Prime Minister Netanyahu, which started in June.
What's your handle on all of this?
Will these inquiries be whitewash?
Are they independent of Netanyahu?
Will he be compelled under oath to answer questions about what he knew and didn't know?
Well, I think that would be rather interesting if it were to be done properly and to be released to the public.
I mean, the fact is he does not want a ceasefire because a ceasefire would involve the freeing of all the Israeli hostages.
And there goes your reason for continuing to bomb people and kill people.
And so he doesn't want that.
The fact is, interestingly enough, I'm not beating my own drum here, but right from the beginning, I wrote articles saying that this whole thing was a false flag, that the Israelis, meaning Netanyahu, it had to be at his level, had prior knowledge.
They had plenty of prior knowledge.
They used to see the Hamas people training with military exercises inside Gaza.
They had spies in there.
They were warned by the Russians and by the I felt right from the beginning that this was all fake.
And that this was done to allow an incident to happen so that Netanyahu could lower the boom on Gaza and on the Palestinians in general.
So I was not surprised necessarily by any of this and how it played out and how it continues to play out.
These are evil people, particularly of Mr. Netanyahu.
And Galant has been an independent voice.
He basically has said, You know, okay, we're killing a lot of people, and I really don't mind that, in a way.
I'm a soldier.
But on the other hand, what's the plan here?
Where are we going with all this?
And Netanyahu has refused to respond.
The opposition, I mean, in America, the Secretary of Defense probably wouldn't be involved in this, but this is Israel.
He led the opposition to Netanyahu's plan to reform the judiciary so that he, Netanyahu, couldn't.
Go on trial, and Netanyahu fired him for it, and then the next day brought him back.
So this is the second time he's been fired.
The last subject matter, Phil, the so-called BB-gate, these documents, Colonel McGregor and Scott Ritter are of the view that the documents are fakes.
Somebody's in jail for leaking a document that was a fake.
It was classified as top security, but its origins were a fakery to make Netanyahu look good.
Well, I wonder if they have any evidence to support that view.
I mean, I haven't heard that one.
When the documents first appeared, there were a whole lot of different interpretations of what they might represent.
And that may have been one of them.
But I would not want to hold my breath on that one.
There are too many possible players in it and too many options involved for people who want to make trouble one way or another.
Bill Giraldi, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for joining us.
My best to your lovely wife, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Of course.
Aaron Maté originally scheduled at 4 o 'clock today.
He's at 2 o 'clock tomorrow.
But coming up at 5 o 'clock today, the great, we haven't spoken to him in a week, the great Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
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