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Nov. 20, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:04
AMB. Chas Freeman : A Reckless Biden
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
Ambassador Charles Freeman joins us now.
Ambassador, always a pleasure.
I want to spend some time with you, given your experience in the Defense Department and in international diplomacy in the State Department, talking about the reckless decisions that President Biden Or someone on his behalf has just made.
But before we get there to some of these, these are about Ukraine.
Before we get there, Ambassador, some of the latest on Israel, Amos Hochstein, the chief American negotiator for the conflagration between Israel and Lebanon, born in Israel, fought for the IDF, has American citizenship.
But the Biden administration chose him to be the neutral, said that he had an agreement between the Israeli negotiators and the Hezbollah negotiators.
for a ceasefire.
Last night, Prime Minister Netanyahu turned it down.
A, are you surprised?
And B, what kind of negotiating is this?
It seems that every time there is an agreement, the negotiations, Negotiators are big-footed by the Prime Minister.
Well, I think it's typical of the U.S.-Israeli relationship that, in this case, talking about war on Lebanon, the U.S. and Israeli negotiators get together and come up with a proposal in the absence of the Lebanese, and then propose it to the Lebanese.
And if the Lebanese accept, Or if Hamas accepts, or if anybody else accepts, the Israelis then up the ante by adding additional demands.
So this is a pattern we've seen again and again and again.
And I don't think we should be surprised by it.
By the way, Netanyahu's demands with regard to Lebanon basically seem to be a free hand to enforce any agreement unilaterally with the use of force.
In other words, no respect for Lebanese sovereignty and I suspect that even if he had accepted this agreement, many Lebanese would not have done so.
You know, I didn't realize this, but the bribery case against Netanyahu continues while he is in office.
Indeed, he made an appearance in court.
He has been ordered to testify in early December.
Now, they obviously have a different system than we do in America, as you know.
The defendant in a criminal case can never be ordered to testify, but apparently in Israel he can, even if he is the prime minister.
He has asked Shin Bet, the rough equivalent of the FBI, To come up with some excuse to justify his non-appearance in court, and they apparently declined to do that.
At the same time that that is happening, his chief spokesperson has had his bail denied and is about to be indicted for espionage for leaking top-secret documents intended to make Netanyahu look good.
Of course, the public thinks that Netanyahu was behind all this.
All of this leads up to my question.
How stable is he in office?
Well, there doesn't seem to be an obvious alternative.
But as we've discussed before, I mean, Israel is in a powerless condition, divided every which way politically, exhausted economically and militarily.
And of the various items that Netanyahu announced at the outset of after October 7th as objectives for Israel, he has accomplished absolutely none of them.
What he has done is conducted a war of annihilation against Palestinian civilians, claiming that they are performing a function of human shields for Hamas.
But in fact, Hamas, as any guerrilla force, any insurgency, any resistance to occupation, like any of them, is embedded in a civilian population.
there's no distinction.
So essentially, he's used the word Hamas in a way that equates to Palestinians, There is a new movie by an Israeli director coming out in early December called The Bibi Files.
And in the movie, there is a scene where Mrs. Netanyahu...
which apparently he did.
And when they opened up the Coke can and looked at it, apparently, And when Bibi looked at this $42,000 bracelet, he said, oh, it's so Romanian, send it back.
Now, who knows if this happened?
But the movie is banned in Israel.
Of course.
Now, doesn't Israel have a tradition of the freedom of speech?
You prepare a movie, harshly critical.
I don't know if this is factual or not.
I'm recounting what the movie says about the prime minister, and the government can ban the movie?
Well, Israel is essentially under martial law at the moment, and Israel has a wonderful tradition of press freedom, and one of the great newspapers of the world is Haaretz, which regularly is critical of both the prime minister and But in the end,
the government has the ability to ban the collection and dissemination of information.
For example, information about Israeli casualties in Lebanon, about the battle damage done by the Iranian reprisal against Israel, and the Israeli government He's probably the most adept in the world at the manipulation of public opinion globally through propaganda.
It is a master of information wars, and it's not surprising that the Prime Minister would make use of these capabilities for his own benefit.
He is ultimately a man who cares very little about anything except himself.
And then there's this, which took place on the floor of the Knesset just two days ago.
There are 17,385 babies in Gaza, which your system has killed.
Of those, 825 are under the age of a year.
There are 35,055 orphan babies in Gaza.
The blood of all of them will haunt you.
And still in your impudence, You wonder how you are accused in the International Criminal Court.
Benjamin Netanyahu!
What is your vision?
What is your vision?
For over 30 years, you have been a serial killer of peace.
Get off the platform immediately.
A serial killer of peace.
What is your vision?
A serial killer of peace.
Get off the platform immediately!
Now, could you imagine if Senator Sanders of Vermont was on the floor of the Senate accusing Genocide Joe of funding genocide and being yanked out of the Senate like that?
this is the moral equivalent of the same thing.
This is...
And it is also an example of how democracy in Israel, which was exemplary for Jews, if not for the captive Arab populations, over whom it ruled like a tyranny, has deteriorated democracy in Israel.
has lost most of its admirable characteristics.
And instead we see a bloodlust enacted into law.
you The person who was speaking and who was dragged off the podium is named Ayman Odeh, O-D-E-H.
He is the leader of the Hadash Ta 'al, T-A-A-L, party in the Knesset.
Right.
Well, there are still a few people in Israel who are willing to stand up and speak for morality.
But we've just seen how far that goes.
All right.
Switching over to Ukraine.
Over the weekend, the administration announced, I mean, the president was wherever the G20 is.
I think he was in the Amazon region of Brazil at the time.
But the administration announced that the president had authorized Ukrainians to use, which basically means Americans aiming and firing, long-range missiles that can reach 190 miles into Russia.
They fired six of them.
Five were shot down.
One reached a Russian ammunition depot.
when they'd hit it, of course, there were a lot of secondary and tertiary explosions.
Nobody was killed.
Biden himself said two years ago he would never authorize this for fear of a wider war.
Ambassador Freeman, why do you think...
Well, first, let's Recognized it will have no military impact.
It is not going to help Ukraine win the war.
Ukraine fired six of these attackants at the at the arms depot across a swarm attack.
It's very quickly going to run out of attackants and they're not doing anything anyway effective.
Mr. Biden.
It is acting in a politically cynical fashion.
The only purpose of these relaxations of the restrictions, which include, for example, now furnishing anti-personnel mines to the Ukrainians, something he'd earlier declined to do, out of respect for the 160 countries that believe those are illegal under international law.
He is basically trying to prolong the war until he leaves office, so that when the defeat of Ukraine becomes obvious to everybody, as it should be now, actually, it will be laid at the feet of his successor, Mr. Trump.
And he is also cynically laying the blame for Ukraine's defeat on Ukrainian Unwillingness to conscript every last young man in the country.
And so he's setting this up to blame the Trump administration and to blame the Ukrainians for having failed to accomplish his objectives, which are, or were, to isolate and weaken Russia.
And coincidentally, the IMF has now confirmed That Russia has grown into the fourth largest economy in the world in purchasing power terms, surpassing both Germany and Japan.
So it has not been weakened.
It has learned on the battlefield to cope with everything that the West can throw against it.
And it has reoriented itself to China, India, the Middle East, and Africa.
So this war, which has cost the lives
I thought that there would be Whether from the president-elect or his people or some people in the government, more of a pushback to this.
I mean, am I naive when I say there is no legal, moral, and as you point, even military purpose to this?
that Joe Biden is playing with human lives in order to frustrate the incoming administration adverse to his?
How could that possibly be justified?
Or do these people just don't take The president does not have the constitutional authority to conduct a war against Russia.
That is the power reserved in the Constitution to the Congress.
But the Congress has defaulted on its responsibilities for the war power.
So that's the first thing.
Second, the rushing additional aid to Ukraine in ways that are highly questionable in terms of legal authority, that is, looting the Defense Department budget for this in novel ways, is another instance of expediency overcoming any respect for the rule of law.
And of course, we have seen elsewhere in Gaza and in Lebanon, the complete Amaral I think, you know, Mr. Trump says he will finish the war in 24 hours.
I don't know how he plans to do that, but the Biden administration clearly sees a risk that the war may end before Trump can even do that.
Also, yesterday, Ambassador, And you may know the significance of this better than anybody from your days as a Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Biden also reversed himself and did something which two years ago he said he'd never do.
And again, I don't know if President Joseph R. Biden Jr. himself is making these decisions or if he's allowed others to make them in his behalf.
And this is giving the Ukrainians permission to use anti-personnel mines.
I mean, aren't anti-personnel mines illegal under international law?
There is an international treaty that 160 countries have ratified.
The United States, China, and Russia, I believe, are not partying to that treaty.
And so, legally, I guess we take the position that this is not established international law.
There are two kinds of minds.
One are minds which are triggered by an advancing enemy automatically.
And the other are minds that are triggered by somebody who sees an enemy and has control over the mine and can use remote control to blow it up.
The minds we are giving are those that are automatic, that are not under the control of anybody.
And they are intended, apparently, to retard the Russian advance along the battle lines.
They will probably have some effect in that regard.
The rest of the world will condemn us for having supplied Ukraine with them.
I guess you're not surprised that this is happening.
No.
I mean, the stated objective, in effect, from the beginning, was to fight to the last Ukrainian to weaken and isolate Russia.
We haven't succeeded in weakening and isolating Russia.
Ukraine is running out of Ukrainians, and we are now charging them with deliberately excluding some of their young men from being used as cannon fodder in a failing war.
I'm going to get back to Israel because of some breaking news.
This is from our friend and colleague Seymour Hersh.
The government and the Supreme Court in Israel support the settlers and their right-wing organizers and community representatives who themselves live in settlements they are already in.
They feel there is no leadership in the United States at this moment to stop them.
And that is really how the Middle East feels, period.
I'm reading from Cy Hirsch.
This will be the new phase, and suddenly the world's attention will go away from Gaza and Lebanon, and everybody will be talking about the annexation of the West Bank in a month or two.
Now, before you weigh in on this, I'm sure you know this, but I want to make sure that our viewers do.
Benazil, I may be mispronouncing his first name, Smotrich, who is the Israeli finance minister, the rough equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury, has proclaimed himself to be the governor general of, I don't know that he uses that phrase, but something like it in Hebrew, when translated into English, of the West Bank.
And he is acting as if the annexation is a fait accompli.
This has always been the objective of the religious scientists, of which he is a notable exemplar.
I think the assumption in Israel is that the election of President Trump will remove any obstacle from the United States to this annexation.
After all, Mr. Trump said, finish the job.
For the religious Zionists, that is annexation.
It is ethnic cleansing.
And so what we've seen with increasing frequency is pogroms, murders, burning of houses, exclusion of farmers from their fields, the destruction of olive groves, an effort which is a very
And this is all in anticipation of what Mr. Smotrich now plans to proclaim.
Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much for your time, my dear friend.
Much appreciated.
We have an abbreviated week next week because of the great...
Very good.
Keep well.
Thank you, Ambassador.
All the best.
We have a full day coming up for you.
A little bit of a break in the next few hours, but at 2 o 'clock, All Times Eastern, Aaron Maté.
At 2.30, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
At 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi.
At 4 o'clock...
There's more.
At 4.30, Max Blumenthal.
And at 5 o 'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
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