Dec. 18, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Thursday, December 19th, 2024. | |
| Our friend, former British diplomat Ian Proud joins us today. | |
| Ian, a pleasure. | |
| Thank you very much for your time. | |
| Ian, why are British elites defending the assassination of Russian General Kirilov? | |
| It's quite strange, isn't it? | |
| The BBC headline was that Russian general and mouthpiece of the Kremlin. | |
| So there's that caveat that he must have been a bad dude because he was a mouthpiece for the Kremlin in their view. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's just this general war to basically dominate the narrative that actually... | |
| Russians are the bad guys, and we're the good guys, and the extraterritorial assassination of a Russian army officer in the center of Moscow is therefore fair game, which is a very worrying position to take. | |
| The Guardian of London is reporting that MI6 was behind this and that the CAA was aware of it. | |
| The duration of the war in Ukraine, we in the West have believed that Ukrainian intelligence doesn't do anything without the knowledge, consent, permission, and often financing of MI6 and CIA. | |
| Is it fair to conclude this? | |
| I might even add Mossad. | |
| This was right out of the Mossad playbook. | |
| A scooter exploding the minute he walked out of his apartment building. | |
| At 6:15 in the morning, the sun wasn't even up. | |
| Yeah, it's absolutely clear that the SVU, you know, the Ukrainian intelligence service does work closely with, you know, US intelligence, UK intelligence as well, and I don't know really about Israeli intelligence, but the links are really close. | |
| I think it's far too early to kind of conclude that actually, you know, we were involved in it, but there is very, very close cooperation. | |
| And as you say, financing, the UK puts in billions of pounds into Ukraine every year. | |
| The departure from office of President Assad was brought about by a variety of causes, the Israelis, the Turks, | |
| the Americans, but not the least of which is this loose gaggle. | |
| of Islamist terrorists and fanatics headed by this guy, Al Jolani. | |
| Mr. Al Jolani has the tag of wanted terrorist on his head by British and American authorities. | |
| Both British and American have characterized his group, HTS, as a terrorist organization. | |
| It is a crime in Great Britain and in the United States. | |
| To provide material assistance to a terrorist organization in the U.S. State Department. | |
| All of that is not enough, but a $10 million bounty on his head. | |
| Yesterday, he met with officials from British Intel and from the British Foreign Ministry. | |
| What the heck is going on? | |
| Well, actually, Stephen Lilly, the guy who met him when I joined him, is in the same intake with me in 1999, so I know him quite well. | |
| You know, there's this rush to recognise the new regime and forget all of their past misdeeds, which include the beheading of innocent children with bread knives on video and that sort of horrific acts that these terrorists have been involved. | |
| We're so glad that Assad has gone because we hated Assad, the dictator, that we're almost delighted that people with affiliations to Al-Qaeda and terrorist groups... | |
| You know, are in charge now instead of Assad, which is quite a bizarre state of affairs, you know, quite frankly. | |
| But the UK is not the only government to have done that. | |
| Other European countries have also done the same, rushing to recognise. | |
| And as part of that as well, also kind of completely changing their immigration policy to say that, well, Syrians can no longer claim asylum in the UK. | |
| You know, Al-Qaeda is in charge now, so you don't need to claim asylum in the UK anymore. | |
| You can happily go back home. | |
| I mean, will the British government remove the terrorist tag from HCS and from Al Jelani personally, which is what he apparently, you know, you and I weren't there, what he apparently requested of your friend and your former colleague and other British officials who visited with him? | |
| Well, of course, he'll want that because he wants sanctions to be removed. | |
| You know, sanctions will remain in place while it's elicited as a terrorist organisation. | |
| And sanctions removal won't be possible without that easing. | |
| So he obviously wants that. | |
| There's been this hasty rebranding of him. | |
| He had some... | |
| He put on a suit yesterday and had this kind of really informal interview with BBC News to show just what a reformed and liberal sort of guy that... | |
| He was now, which is in itself quite a bizarre moment, but absolutely he'll want that. | |
| If you listen to the BBC and to CNN, this guy went from being Osama bin Laden to Thomas Jefferson in a couple of hours. | |
| I mean, I can understand why they're trying to do this, but is it credible? | |
| I wonder if the British government isn't concerned about some sort of retaliation. | |
| I mean, when you assassinate somebody, why do you rejoice in it and almost acknowledge your complicity? | |
| Are we talking about the Moscow assassination again now? | |
| Well, the Russians always, always retaliate. | |
| And in fact, Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and prime minister of Russia, chaired a National Security Council meeting in Russia just yesterday on the back of the assassination happening. | |
| And he said, everybody responsible has to be hunted down and retribution meted out to them. | |
| And we know what that means. | |
| So if there's any... | |
| Yes. | |
| Here's President Putin earlier today. | |
| He had that three-and-a-half-hour annual end-of-the-year press conference, which was quite remarkable. | |
| I watched parts of it. | |
| But here he is calling the murder of General Kirillov a terror attack. | |
| Cut number eight. | |
| Yes, the assassination of the general. | |
| You said that attempt at assassination and I am thankful to you for this because you have acknowledged indirectly that this is a terrorist attack. | |
| Why? | |
| Because this is a murder committed by means that are dangerous to others. | |
| Kiev has conducted such terrorist acts and crimes against many citizens of the Russian Federation. | |
| I guess we should expect some kind of retaliation and it might reach London. | |
| I mean, who knows? | |
| I mean, this was not only a person close to President Putin, this was a scientist who became a general. | |
| The flip side of this is, I know you're not a military person, you're a diplomat. | |
| What conceivable military benefit was served by killing him? | |
| Well, there's no obvious military benefit. | |
| People are talking about his role in pushing on investigations around bio labs in eastern Ukraine and that link to Biden and all the rest of it that we all know about. | |
| The military situation on the ground isn't really affected by his assassination. | |
| He's not really driving the offensive in the Donbass, which is gradually taking bits of land from Ukraine every day. | |
| So there's no real military benefit. | |
| Ukraine had actually just sentenced him in absentia for some alleged crimes against Ukraine. | |
| And this was very much them admitting, in fact, because they have admitted that they were responsible, meeting our justice as they saw it appropriate through an assassination. | |
| Ian, do you think that the same elites who were crowing about the assassination of General Kirilov understand and recognize that the Ukrainian military is on its last leg and really can't go on much longer, | |
| particularly beyond January 20th, when Donald Trump becomes the President of the United States? | |
| Well, I don't think they do. | |
| I mean, even in the Financial Times today, the head of the, you know, the top EU diplomat, Kai Callas from Estonia, was saying, well, you know, don't push Zelensky to negotiate for a peace. | |
| You know, British leaders have been saying, you know, we need to kind of strengthen Zelensky's position. | |
| Well, he's not going to get any stronger. | |
| He's only going to get weaker. | |
| And people have their heads stuck in the sands about this. | |
| You know, Ukraine is losing ground every day. | |
| That's not going to change. | |
| You won't get any more money, you know, from the West. | |
| That's very much kind of on a sliding downward slope. | |
| The situation is only going bad for Ukraine. | |
| So people are just, you know, in denial about that and hoping for some dramatic event which changes the U.S. calculus such that Trump decides actually to stay in the fight. | |
| I may have asked you this last time you were on the show, and if I did, forgive me, but your answer will eliminate us. | |
| Boris Johnson, who's viewed as somewhat of a clownish figure here in the U.S., is purportedly the one who talked President Zelensky out of accepting a ceasefire. | |
| Well, it wasn't a ceasefire. | |
| It was a peace treaty before the conflagration began. | |
| It was one that his negotiators, Zelensky's negotiators, had agreed to. | |
| The Russian negotiators had agreed to. | |
| It was 126 pages long. | |
| Significance of that is they initialed every page. | |
| And then Prime Minister Johnson said, "Don't go along with it. | |
| The West has your back. | |
| We can defeat him. | |
| You can join NATO." | |
| No, people don't really. | |
| Talk about that. | |
| There's absolutely no coverage of that, frankly, in the mainstream media in the UK. | |
| None at all. | |
| You only see coverage in alternative media from time to time. | |
| Johnson has admitted the fact that he did this. | |
| He's been quite open about encouraging Zelensky not to take the deal. | |
| A month later, Liz Truss made a big speech encouraging Ukraine to broaden its war aims to retake Crimea. | |
| Totally deluded position that was. | |
| Almost three years down the track. | |
| There's zero coverage of that in UK mainstream media. | |
| Does NATO generally believe, and by NATO I mean, again, the elites, the EU elites who are the head of government and the head of foreign ministries in NATO countries, do they regard Russia today in 2024? | |
| Well, they absolutely do, at least in narrative terms. | |
| They always talk about Russia as this huge threat that Russia's going to invade NATO at any time. | |
| But the comparison is completely false because the Soviet Union was a direct peer competitor to the US in size, in the size of its military, in size of its population, and so on. | |
| Russia is 24 times smaller than the NATO countries in economic terms. | |
| Seven times smaller in population terms, many times smaller in military terms, and so on. | |
| There is no comparison, and it's actually really cynical to suggest and to liken Russia to the Soviet Union, which was a direct conventional military threat to NATO in the way that Russia isn't and has never been. | |
| The new head of NATO probably is going to have some sort of a problem with the new president of the United States, is he not? | |
| Well, absolutely, because lots of people are digging metaphorical trenches in the EU, hoping to persuade the incoming Donald Trump that actually we shouldn't push Zelensky to negotiate for peace. | |
| But that appears to be the only valid option on the table. | |
| Kellogg actually recommended this way back in April of last year, April of this year, in his very good paper. | |
| You know, Donald Trump at the time, he actually incidentally called out the assassination of Kirillov in Moscow as a real strategic mistake, you know, which is really, really interesting. | |
| So, you know, if people like Mark Rutter, Kayakalas, you know, Keir Starmer really believe they're going to change Donald Trump's view on this, I think they're going to be in for a cold shower on that. | |
| A cold shower indeed. | |
| Is this going to result? | |
| Trump's attitude about NATO, Trump's attitude about Western Europe, Trump's attitude about the role of the United States in defending Western Europe. | |
| I mean, at one point Trump wanted to pull the U.S. out of the NATO treaty. | |
| That would require an act of Congress, but be that as it may, are the NATO countries prepared to spend the amount of money that it would take? | |
| To make up for the lost American contribution to NATO that is likely under President Trump. | |
| Well, you see, the thing is, the European countries of NATO already spend 3.3 times more than Russia spends on defense. | |
| Now, if they increase their spending to 3%, which Donald Trump is recommending... | |
| That figure would go up to five times more than Russia. | |
| The question is, how much more than Russia do you need to spend on defence before you feel safe? | |
| Of course, the USA accounts for two thirds of total NATO spending on defence. | |
| The US Department of Defence has a budget that is almost $1 trillion every year in defence spending. | |
| You know, the USA absolutely dominates NATO in terms of defence spending. | |
| But let's be clear that European defence spending is way above what Russia spends on defence, even next year when it's going to hike its defence budget up to $145 billion. | |
| So we just need to get real about this myth of defence spending. | |
| It's really about lining the pockets of the big arms contractors. | |
| In Europe, also, of course, in the USA, it's got nothing to do, really, with security. | |
| And I don't actually believe that the USA wants to pull out of NATO for the very specific reason that its defense contractors would lose billions of dollars every year in business from Europe. | |
| And Donald Trump is close to those defense contractors and close to the politicians that are in the pockets. | |
| I don't mean in a corrupt way, but they receive substantial... | |
| Yeah, and maybe the Department of Defense audits would have to work more assiduously. | |
| They keep failing their audience of all their defense spending, so maybe there should be more internal scrutiny within the DOD. | |
| For all of their money spent, they don't have anything like the Oresnik, and President Putin mentioned that today. | |
| Chris, I don't know the number, but I think we have a clip of President Putin daring the West to try to shoot down an Oresnik. | |
| Watch this. | |
| There is no chance to shoot down these Oreshnik missiles. | |
| Well, if those Western experts you mentioned think so, that Oreshnik can be shot down, we suggest they, and those in the West and the United States, who pay them for their analysis, conduct some kind of technological experiment, | |
| a high-tech duel of the 21st century. | |
| Let them name some object, let's say in Kiev, concentrate all their air defense and missile defense forces there, and we will hit it with Oreshnik and see what happens. | |
| We are ready for such an experiment. | |
| Is the other side ready? | |
| He had a bit of a smile on his face, but it's rather startling that he made That public offer while he had an international audience in front of him. | |
| Yeah, well, that's classic Putin. | |
| That is absolutely classic Putin. | |
| A, he's playing to his domestic audience by showing that he's a tough guy. | |
| B, he's deliberately kind of taunting the West, knowing that they won't actually stand up to meet his kind of offer, which again plays to the Russian domestic audience, makes him look even stronger. | |
| And he's provoking a really kind of fanatical reaction from the mainstream media in the West, which are calling him out as insane and deranged and all those things, which also plays to his narrative and boosts his domestic popularity. | |
| So that is absolutely classic Putin right there, and that's why he had a very smile on his face. | |
| Chris, do we have the British reporter from NBC asking... | |
| President Putin, if when he meets Donald Trump, he's the weaker of the two because of recent events over which President Putin has no control. | |
| Watch this and listen! | |
| Mr. President, you have failed to reach the objectives of your special military operation. | |
| Large numbers of Russians have died, including a general assassinated here in Moscow this week. | |
| And the leader of Syria, who you supported, has been overthrown. | |
| Mr. President, when you face President-elect Trump, you will be the weaker leader. | |
| How do you propose to compromise? | |
| What are you going to offer? | |
| You asked what we can offer, or I can offer, to the President-elect Trump when we meet. | |
| I do not know when we are going to meet, because he does not speak about that. | |
| I haven't spoken to him for more than four years now. | |
| I am prepared for that conversation at any time. | |
| I will be prepared to hold a meeting as well, if he so desires. | |
| You said that this conversation will take place where I'll be in a weakened state. | |
| I'm of a different opinion. | |
| I think that Russia became much stronger over the past two or three years. | |
| Russia today. | |
| He went on to say, and I would remind you of a famous American quotation. | |
| Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. | |
| Of course, Mark Twain in a very famous one-liner that's been repeated over and over again. | |
| Is Russia stronger? | |
| Well, let's be clear. | |
| Sanctions have been in place for almost 11 years. | |
| And Russia has had 11 years to adapt itself to sanctions. | |
| And yes, there was definitely an impact, short-term impact, on the Russian economy in the kind of six months after the war started. | |
| But the Russian economy is now growing at a faster pace than other G7 economies through this massive fiscal stimulus provided by the military kind of economy footing that it's moved to. | |
| The other factor, of course, is that Russia still has incredible reserves. | |
| Russia's been building up its reserves. | |
| We're good to go. | |
| We're just actually claiming that Ukraine was winning economically against Russia from the war. | |
| It's just more fantasy. | |
| Ian, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Merry Christmas to you and your family. | |
| I hope we can see you again after the first of the year. | |
| Merry Christmas, Judge, and same to you and yours. | |
| All the best. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| All the best. | |
| Coming up at 2 o 'clock this afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, and at 3, Professor John Mearsheimer, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. |
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