Dec. 17, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Tuesday, December 17th, 2024. | |
| Our dear friend, Ambassador Craig Murray, will be with us in just a moment, live from Beirut. | |
| But first this. | |
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| Ambassador Murray, welcome here. | |
| Ambassador, where are you? | |
| I'm here in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, sitting on the terrace outside the nice apartment we're working out on. | |
| And what brings you to Lebanon in general and Beirut specifically in these dangerous times? | |
| Well, I wanted to come to the Middle East to cover the wars and the attacks by Israel. | |
| How did you get to Beirut? | |
| Report on the ground what's really happening, because there's a tremendous absence of Western reporters giving the truth about what Israel's doing and what it's targeting. | |
| And how long have you been in Lebanon, Ambassador? | |
| I've been here six weeks now. | |
| It's been quite a fruitful six weeks. | |
| Visiting the scenes of the attacks. | |
| I mean, there have been 3,500 people killed in Lebanon, about 11,000 injured. | |
| Some 70,000 homes have been destroyed. | |
| It's really been a large-scale assault. | |
| An assault on military targets or civilian targets, or is the assault indiscriminate? | |
| It's almost entirely on civilian targets. | |
| I mean, I've been over a large number of bomb sites. | |
| I've probably been over certainly about two dozen myself in detail. | |
| I've seen hundreds and hundreds, but I've actually been onto a couple of dozen and looked through the rubble to see if there's any indication at all that these were military targets. | |
| They included a mosque, a church, and the rest of them civilian homes. | |
| And there was nothing that indicated the presence of weapons, of machinery. | |
| What is the Israeli goal in targeting civilians? | |
| To terrify the civilians? | |
| To put pressure on the government? | |
| To cave to the IDF invasion? | |
| I'm sorry, something going off there. | |
| In a lot of cases, it's destroying the infrastructure that sustains civilian life. | |
| For example, they've targeted medical services. | |
| Killed 220 doctors and paramedics. | |
| Over 70 ambulances were destroyed. | |
| Just as in Gaza, hospitals and health centers were targeted particularly. | |
| And then they've targeted water infrastructure, water treatment plants, for example, irrigation plants and other agricultural associated material. | |
| The attacks were based mostly on southern Lebanon, where the Shia population are concentrated, and also on the suburb of Beirut, where the same population is concentrated. | |
| It's like Gaza. | |
| It's the same idea. | |
| It's making it impossible for civilians to live there. | |
| What is life? | |
| Like in Beirut today, can you walk the streets? | |
| Can you go to church? | |
| The students go to school? | |
| Can you go to a supermarket? | |
| Yeah, we've had a ceasefire here now for about a fortnight. | |
| It's a very one-sided ceasefire because the ceasefire says that Hezbollah must stop and other Lebanese groups must stop all military operations whereas Israel must stop all offensive military operations which means of course that Israel still It makes military operations, | |
| which it categorizes as defensive. | |
| And the offensive qualification only applies to one side. | |
| Only Israel can still break the ceasefire, which they do on a regular basis. | |
| But they haven't actually hit Beirut. | |
| Beirut hasn't been struck during a ceasefire. | |
| So there was very, very heavy bombing here. | |
| While I've been living here, we've had many occasions where... | |
| Our windows have been absolutely shaken, and we've seen bombing around us. | |
| And there's still Israeli drones. | |
| There are armed Israeli drones, I'm not sure why, hovering across the city permanently, and they're above me as we speak. | |
| But life has, by and large, returned to normal. | |
| In the capital itself, since the ceasefire, with the remarkable facility. | |
| Lebanese people are very resilient, and they're quite used to war, and the speed with which they bounce back, and the speed of tidying up of the bomb damage. | |
| I mean, there are thousands of damaged homes, so I don't want to exaggerate how much has been tidied up, but the number of places where the glass has been... | |
| And shops and cafes have got operating again, which had lighter damage. | |
| It's quite remarkable how quickly the Lebanese people pick themselves up and get going again. | |
| Chris, put up the clip again that you took of Mary Ambassador. | |
| What are you showing here? | |
| Well, that was one of the poems. | |
| We investigated, and I climbed right up on top of that rubble, and I had other people with me who did burrowing into it, and we were absolutely convinced that these were simply civilian homes that had been hidden. | |
| Are there human corpses or living people buried under that rubble? | |
| Not at that moment. | |
| People had been killed there. | |
| Civilians had been killed there. | |
| But when I was there, they had been removed. | |
| They weren't there anymore. | |
| But I will say that was before the ceasefire. | |
| And we had in that town, that was the town of Baalbek, in that town the day before I went. | |
| 24 hours earlier, 60 people had been killed in Israeli bombings in the town. | |
| And the drones, the armed drones, were back above our heads again while I was doing that. | |
| And in fact, the mayor of the town was meant to be with me. | |
| But because of the drones overhead, he couldn't come out. | |
| He had to stay wherever he was hidden because it was thought much too likely we would be. | |
| We would be hit. | |
| So that was actually quite dangerous to be there on that day. | |
| Is Hezbollah sufficient to defend against this? | |
| Hezbollah has taken a big hit. | |
| I mean, they fought off the Israeli ground offensive. | |
| Israel made determined efforts to make... | |
| In terms of being able to fight back, they can't fight back against... | |
| Just like the people of Gaza, they can't fight back against aerial bombardment. | |
| And now, of course, with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, their supply lines from Iran have been seriously disconnected. | |
| What do you think is the principal cause for the collapse of Syria? | |
| Well, I think the problem was that you had A number of governments combining to undermine it. | |
| I mean, there's no doubt at all that the rebel groups, even though they were Al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, were being funded and supplied by the Israelis and the CIA. | |
| And the United States had been... | |
| Had been doing that for years. | |
| There's plenty of public record that that's what was happening. | |
| In addition to which you had the Turkish army invading from the north into Aleppo, you also have the Gulf states arming and facilitating what happened. | |
| So while you had Russia which had been supporting and backing The Assad government being preoccupied with Ukraine and just not having anything available. | |
| So collapse was bound to come. | |
| It's also fair to say that Assad had failed to make his army in particular, but his government in general, more inclusive. | |
| It had actually become narrower and narrower. | |
| Was the fall of Syria a strategic defeat for Russia? | |
| I believe it is. | |
| I think it's hard to see otherwise. | |
| The Russians are hoping to be able to keep particularly their naval bases. | |
| In Syria, and it's important for them that they do, because at present, they don't have any alternative. | |
| I know there are ideas. | |
| They might turn to Algeria and some other countries for a Mediterranean base, but that may or may not work, and the Americans would be sure to be putting pressure on anywhere else not to give them a base and possibly to outbid them in terms of establishing bases. | |
| So, yes, I... | |
| I think it's impossible not to see this as a strategic defeat for Russia. | |
| Certainly at the time when Russia intervened in order to secure Assad and his government, that was seen as a major success for Russia. | |
| It hardly makes sense to say it was a major success to go in there, but it's not a defeat to leave. | |
| Put up some statements issued by President Assad from Moscow, former President Assad from Moscow yesterday. | |
| It's just a full screen, so I'll read them aloud for the benefit of those who are listening. | |
| My departure from Syria was neither planned nor did it occur in the final hours of the battles. | |
| As terrorist forces infiltrated Damascus, I moved to Latakia. | |
| In coordination with our Russian allies to oversee combat operations. | |
| Upon arrival at the airbase that morning, it became clear that our forces had completely withdrawn from all battle lines and that the last army positions had fallen. | |
| As the field situation in the area continued to deteriorate, the Russian military base itself came under intensified attack by drone strikes. | |
| With no visible means of leaving the base, Moscow requested that the base's command arrange an immediate evacuation to Russia. | |
| Does that seem to make sense to you, Ambassador? | |
| Not entirely. | |
| I think it was more pre-planned than that. | |
| I'm not precisely sure. | |
| We're seeing all these stories planted in the Western media about millions of I don't know if that's true or not. | |
| I don't have a direct source, and it's hard to verify. | |
| But I think there's no doubt that the collapse and the speed of collapse took everybody by surprise. | |
| I certainly didn't predict it. | |
| I don't know anybody who did predict it. | |
| But in a sense, it doesn't really matter. | |
| At what stage Assad knew and how he got out is an anomaly. | |
| It doesn't affect the overall pattern of what's happened, which is really a huge extension of United States influence because you now quite plainly have a US client government in Damascus and a big blow for Iran in particular. | |
| You say a U.S. government in Damascus. | |
| Is there really a government in Damascus? | |
| Does Syria actually exist any longer as a geopolitical entity? | |
| That's a very good and important question. | |
| Of course, Israel has seized more than three times the size of the Gaza Strip in territory inside Syria. | |
| Syria has lost more land in the last couple of weeks than it lost in the disastrous 1973 war against Israel. | |
| And the new government in Damascus has done nothing whatsoever to fight or stop the Israelis. | |
| The Israelis have been able to take anything they wanted without anybody firing a single shot at them. | |
| And of course, for a long time, the Americans have controlled. | |
| They occupy pretty well a third of the country and control probably 40% of it, including all the oil fields in the northeast and east. | |
| And you have Turkey now. | |
| Let me just tell you, who controls the oil fields, the Israelis or the Americans? | |
| The Americans. | |
| The United States controls the oil fields and has done long term. | |
| On behalf of their Kurdish allies, so-called. | |
| But now, of course, the Americans will be able to do this in a much more commercial and substantial way, bringing in the big American oil companies and building pipelines. | |
| And the Turks, of course, have taken Aleppo. | |
| So the amount that the government in Damascus actually controls is really pretty... | |
| Pretty limited, because you've got Turkish, American, and Israeli military occupation between them, the majority of the country. | |
| But let me give you one bit of information with a particular Lebanese flavor. | |
| Lebanon is going to get a new president elected by the parliament, and the election is due to take place on the 9th of January. | |
| The head of the Lebanese armed forces, General Aoun, He's the guy that the United States wants to put in place. | |
| They want to put a military leader in place in Lebanon. | |
| They're generally fond of military leaders. | |
| And remarkably, al-Jolani, the new leader of Damascus, gave a press conference two days ago where he endorsed General Arun as president of Lebanon, | |
| which is just him. | |
| That's the extent to which the United States is controlling things here. | |
| It's put in place its man in Damascus who's trying to help them put in place their man in Lebanon. | |
| Understood. | |
| Before we go, I want to run a clip for you of President Putin who's trying to divert attention from this but who has some very interesting things to say to his defense establishment yesterday. | |
| Today, the military and political situation in the world remains difficult and unstable. | |
| Bloodshed in the Middle East and high conflict potential remains in a number of other regions of the world. | |
| We see that the current U.S. administration, almost the entire collective West, does not give up trying to maintain its global dominance, and continues to impose its so-called rules on the world community, which at the same time changes over and over again, | |
| distorts facts because it is convenient for them. | |
| But in fact there is only one stable rule, no rules for those who do this, for those who consider themselves at the head of the whole world, those who representatives of the Lord on Earth. | |
| Although they themselves do not believe in the Lord and wage hybrid wars against undesirable states and implement a policy of containment, including in relation to Russia, the desire to weaken our country to cause a defeat for us, the United States is send advisors and thereby signaling a future escalation of the conflict. | |
| You'd hear the President of Russia chastising the West for thinking it is the representative of the Lord on Earth and it doesn't even believe in God. | |
| I think one thing which is undoubtedly true is that the hypocrisy of Western states is revealed absolutely starkly. | |
| And we have all this stuff about, well, as great Assad's gone, he was a terrible dictator. | |
| And at the same time, there's alliance with Saudi Arabia, which is appalling. | |
| It may be a hereditary dictatorship. | |
| It's still an appalling dictatorship. | |
| And the Gulf states, most of which are the same. | |
| And Egypt, which has a US-installed dictator. | |
| So the notion that Western foreign policy has anything to do with advancement of democracy is just nonsense. | |
| It's just plainly not true. | |
| It's a line they use when it serves their interests. | |
| And the same with international law. | |
| Terrible genocide going on in Gaza just makes absolutely plain that there's no intention to apply international law evenly. | |
| And the fact that Putin, who can be fairly happy by and large, because I'm Ukraine, which is much more important to him, is going very well for him, but that Putin is wanted by the West to go before the International Criminal Court, and they're all trying to say Netanyahu shouldn't go before the International Criminal Court, | |
| the double standards have become laughable. | |
| And the West is losing its own ruling mystique. | |
| It's losing belief in the values it believes it propagates to an extent that it becomes ungovernable. | |
| You cannot run when your founding principles are obviously being broken by you on an everyday basis. | |
| Ambassador Murray, thank you very much for your time. | |
| Thank you for your courage. | |
| Please stay safe, and we hope you can come back and visit with us again soon. | |
| Look forward to it. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Wow. | |
| Israeli drones flying overhead as he was speaking with us. | |
| Coming up from safer environments later today at 10 o 'clock this morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. | |
| At noon, our old friend Scott Horton with a fabulous new book that I was happy to endorse called Provoked. | |
| Who started the new Cold War? | |
| Two o 'clock, the indomitable Scott Ritter, and at three o 'clock, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. | |
| Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. |
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