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Dec. 25, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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[SPECIAL] - Best of Judging Freedom 2024 - PART ONE
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
It's the end of the year and it's time for us to look back and we did that for you.
Here's the best of Judging Freedom in the past 12 months.
Merry Christmas to you.
A friend of mine Tom Woods says of the American presidency, no matter who you vote for, you end up with John McCain.
It doesn't matter the person's ideology or a political party.
They all want to fight wars and they all want to kill.
But going back to March of 22, almost two years ago, when the Russians and the Ukrainians had a handshake on an agreement that would have saved all this bloodshed.
And negotiated in Turkey.
And then Tony Blinken and Boris Johnson talked President Zelensky out of it.
Did they dupe him?
Or did they really believe that their supply of cash and military equipment would be long enough and endless so as to defeat the Russians?
Well, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't answer what they actually thought at the time.
The writing was on the wall.
It's been on the wall for a long time.
But it was a huge betrayal because there was an agreement and it was undercut by particularly Boris Johnson coming to him.
But America stood behind and said, as long as it takes.
And all that it takes, we will do it in order to defeat Russia.
And, of course, now that offer has been withdrawn.
And it's been withdrawn at a time when money is drying up and weapons are drying up.
And so, no doubt, I mean, Zelensky, I mean, whatever you think of him, but he must feel deeply betrayed by the West, who clearly...
When you say whatever it takes, you mean there's a blank check.
You can draw on it.
We'll stand by you.
For as long as it takes, it doesn't mean until, you know, this year and in January of this new year, you're going to get cut off financially.
So it was a lie and a betrayal.
He's trying to pretend it isn't.
Zelensky is making very optimistic statements about how Ukraine is going to become the sort of the workshop of the world for making weapons.
Well, good luck with that.
Who's going to take the risk of building factories, weapons factories in Ukraine?
They'll probably last about...
20 hours before they're blown up by the Russians.
So, I mean, it's just a big betrayal.
And, I mean, what is so pernicious is that between March and today, how many young Ukrainian men have died?
And for what?
Nothing. I mean, it's just atrocious.
It's appalling, this betrayal.
I mean, I'm sure, you know, even if they believed it was possible, Did they believe it was possible, or was it just wishful thinking?
Were they just fantasizing that they could somehow bring Russia?
I think that at the bottom of all these decisions, whether about Israel or about Ukraine, is no one has done due diligence.
No one has really thought it through.
Like when they put sanctions on Russia, all of these things have had a blowback at us, not at the target.
Because they didn't think it through.
They were told, you know, and advised not to do this.
Just as Netanyahu has been advised by a senior general, General Brick.
And he told him at the beginning, you're walking into a quagmire in Gaza trying to attack Hamas.
I mean, he was a very respected general.
And Netanyahu spoke to him one-to-one several times.
And he said, it's going to be a disaster.
And now we know it is a disaster.
All the other generals are now saying, yes, I mean, we're losing so many men there.
And we don't see either Hamas collapsing.
General Aylan said this.
We don't see them actually collapsing.
We don't see them losing control over the ground in Gaza.
And now we hear that the central southern command of the Israeli forces are saying, oh, no, I mean, this war is going to be one to two years.
Oh, what?
That's what I mean by quagma.
Two years of Hamas.
Max Blumenthal joins us now.
Max, always a pleasure, my friend.
Thank you for coming back to the show.
I have a lot to ask you about, but I want to start right off the bat with the latest from Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Here's what he had to say yesterday.
Excuse me.
Here's what he had to say earlier today with an English translation, and I'd like you to unpack it for us.
For 30 years...
I am very consistent, and I'm saying something very simple.
This conflict is not on the lack of a state of Palestinians, but the existence of a state, the Jewish state.
Every area that we evacuate, we receive terrible terror against that.
It happened in South Lebanon, in Gaza, and also Judea and Samaria, which we did it.
And therefore, I clarify that in other arrangements, any other arrangement, In the future, the State of Israel have to control...
On the entire area from the river to the sea.
This is what happens when you have sovereignty.
This truth I say to our American friends.
And I also stopped the attempt to impose on us a reality that will jeopardize us.
A Prime Minister in Israel has to be able to say no even to the best of friends.
To say no when you need to and to say yes when you can.
When I first saw this, I thought, he's listening to Max.
He knows that you have to be able to say no.
Joe Biden could say no to him.
He can say no to Joe Biden, but Joe Biden can't say no to him.
Well, we have the benefit of live translation there.
The actual phrase Netanyahu used is from the west of the Jordan River.
Basically, Israel has to control everything.
From the Mediterranean to the west of the Jordan River.
So essentially it is from the river to the sea.
That's where the exclusively Jewish state of Israel will be.
Where Israel will have total security control.
Which doesn't actually mean the state of Israel will officially declare itself.
It means the military will control everything.
Or it will control everything through a...
Netanyahu is openly advancing and always has.
A few weeks ago he boasted that he had helped foil the two-state solution.
There's video leaked from a meeting he had with settlers in 2002 where he boasted that he'd destroyed the two-state solution and tricked the Americans that he knows how to move the Americans.
This is Netanyahu's appeal to the Jewish-Israeli public where there is no constituency at all for the two-state solution that Tony Blinken is so disingenuously pushing in place of an actual ceasefire.
And a cessation of this devastating conflict which constantly expands during his 10-country anti-diplomacy tour.
So here's the reality of what the Americans are dealing with, and they refuse to accept it.
And meanwhile, back at home here in the U.S., the presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania were sacked because they refused to ban student groups that declare From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
In other words, Palestinians will not be governed by a military dictatorship from the river to the sea.
So there's just this whole speech by Netanyahu is suffused with irony.
And if there's time, I want to make one more quick point.
He said, anytime Israel retreats from territory it controls militarily, it's faced with terror.
And he pointed to southern Lebanon, which is where Hezbollah...
Israel created Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
When it invaded in the 1980s, there was no Hezbollah.
It was the Shia population that Israel thought it could actually use as a proxy of its own and which it abused.
What is your take on this almost musical chairs, but somewhat instability at the head of the...
How do you read this?
Are these signs of the endgame in the Ukraine government?
Well, first of all, it's a sign of crisis within Ukraine.
And the crisis is twofold.
One is the crisis of reality.
The fact is Ukraine is losing this war and losing this war badly.
You and I have been speaking for some time now about what I've called the impending collapse.
Well, the collapse is occurring as we speak on the battlefield.
Ukrainians are virtually defenseless in the face of...
Russia's military.
They don't have artillery.
Ukraine, for all of its faults, and I've always spoken highly of...
The professionalism of certain Ukrainian units and their long-range artillery was very good, very good at keeping the Russians at bay.
Russia was unable to mass their artillery because of the accuracy and the lethality of Ukrainian artillery strikes.
But now that the Ukrainians have run out of ammunition, Russia is able to mass artillery and once again just literally devastate Ukrainian military positions before sending in their infantry to occupy it.
And then the Ukrainians are unable to launch an effective...
So, you know, Russia will take territory, not get pushed out of it, then take more territory.
So every day we're seeing just the incremental advances across the front by Russia, and there's nothing the Ukrainians have in response.
And so we're looking at a military collapse, which is engendering political crisis inside.
And the crisis is of a civil military nature.
Look, any American who studies history, you know about the struggles between General McClellan and Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, where McClellan thought that he could do it better than Lincoln.
But at the end of the day, when Lincoln relieved McClellan, McClellan stepped aside without question.
We know about Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman and how MacArthur was convinced that he knew best.
Truman did not.
But when Truman summoned MacArthur and fired him, MacArthur stepped aside because that's the way it works in democracies.
Ukraine is not a democracy.
Ukraine is a dysfunctional oligarchy, a kleptocracy, but it's not a democracy.
And what we have here is a situation where General Zeluzny, the commanding general of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, believes he can do it better than Zelensky.
He hasn't.
You know, Zelensky's saying, well, wait a minute, we've got Bachmut.
You chewed up a whole bunch of our guys there.
We got the failed counteroffensive, and we got the ongoing disaster at Adyevka.
And Zeluzky's saying, it's not my fault, man.
You wouldn't let me fight the war the way I wanted to.
If you let me do it my way, we could have won.
We could have gone on the defensive, wore the Russians out, flipped the script on them.
But Zeluzky's also positioning himself.
Politically, like McClellan did during the Civil War, saying, I can do a better job of running this country.
And so Zelensky did what any rational political leader would do at that point in time, eliminate this man who has forgotten what his role is.
But Zeluzny didn't go away.
Zelensky called him in and said, I want you to resign.
And Zeluzny said, no.
And therein lies the problem, because once you get a general standing up to the ultimate civilian authority and saying, no, you have a crisis, this is why Victoria Nuland flew into Kiev, because she needs to go in and negotiate the outcome, let everybody know who's in charge.
And here's the third aspect of this crisis.
There's no Ukrainian democracy.
Ukraine is simply a functionary of the United States, doing that which the United States tells it to do.
And even though the United States is unable or unwilling to cough up the additional $64 billion that Ukraine desperately needs to survive, Ukraine can't declare its independence from the United States politically or militarily or economically.
And so they do Victoria Nuland's bidding.
But what we're seeing right here is...
The political version of the collapse that's taking place on the battlefield.
This is the end of Ukraine.
We're watching Ukraine implode from within.
Do you think that Victoria Nuland was there to put her blessing on, I forget his name, you know his name, the general that's the head of the Intel, whom Zelensky wants to replace Zeluzny?
I think Budanov is the guy's name.
It's not her blessing.
I think she's not blessing anything.
She's dictating.
I think she went in there and sat them down and she dictated the outcome.
She said, this is what will be.
And so they accepted it.
Because it's not just about getting...
Zelensky and Budanov together on the same sheet of music.
It's getting Zeluzny to accept this outcome without causing a civil war.
Remember, when Zeluzny refused to step down, he was backed by the totality of the Ukrainian armed forces.
He basically said, yeah, we backed Zeluzny.
That's the beginning of a civil war.
I mean, that's the beginning of the end.
That's what precipitates a coup d'etat.
So Nuland flew in there to stop a coup, to remind Zeluzny that if he tried this coup, it would be all over.
America would never back him.
That he needs to step aside and then for her to sit there and play kingmaker and say, this is who's going to be, this is going to be.
Because it's not just in the military.
The shakeup is systemic in nature.
It's every aspect of the government, civilian and military, is going to collapse because the current government doesn't have a solution to the problem.
And Zelensky desperately needs to come up with people that will...
Do his bidding.
He's lost the confidence of the Ukrainian military and he's lost the confidence of the majority of the Ukrainian political establishment.
So he needs to recreate a government that will at least adhere to his instructions as dictated to him by the United States.
This is the ultimate form of American control.
We've come in and we're basically eliminating any notion of Zelensky as an independent political actor.
What this does is prove that he is little more than...
A modern-day Pinocchio with a bunch of strings attached, and his puppet masters are telling him what to do.
Is Budanov a Nazi or a nationalist or from one of those hard-right groups in the Ukrainian military?
Well, he's a nationalist.
Whether he's a right-sector Nazi, I don't know.
He's a man who's committed war crimes.
He's the man behind the assassination of Daria Dugina Tartarsky.
He's the man who's trying to kill me.
So Budanov.
Yeah, I know who you are.
But I will also say this, as much as I despise the man, I had a very interesting conversation with a Chechen general who commanded the Chechen forces in Mariupol, and he spoke highly of Budanov as a leader, as a commander,
as an opponent.
And so whether or not I like the guy or I like his politics, it doesn't matter.
Budanov is a very effective leader.
I think if he were able to take control and have the army listen to him, that he could solidify.
But at the end of the day, Judge, Ukraine is building a sandcastle.
Right now, the tide is out.
And like the little kids going forward, they're building a sandcastle.
Budanov can come in and put a spire here and flag it.
The tide is going to come in.
There is no way to convert what they're building to anything other as sandcastle.
And it's going to disappear under the Russian tide.
How bitterly ironic that the grandmistress of Ukraine coups flew there last week to try and prevent a coup from happening.
As we speak, the Ukrainian parliament was considering a draft.
Who are they going to draft?
They don't have the human beings if they're going to consider males within a draft-worthy age.
Well, one of the things they're trying to do is gain access to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men who have fled the country and to create a foundation of law that gives them...
The ability to go out and ask nations to allow them to bring these people back, to make it compulsory, to threaten people with the loss of privileges, of rights, the ability to have employment if they don't come back.
So I think that's the basis.
But the other thing is to open up to categories that previously were closed.
Children of the age of 17 or younger, even 16. Women.
I'm a father of two daughters, and I don't believe in glass ceilings.
I believe that women should be allowed to do whatever they're capable of doing to compete with men, and if they're better than men, to get the jobs.
But war is a separate category, and combat is very physical, and very few women have what it takes physically to function and survive on the modern battlefield.
Today, you see Ukraine forming entire women units, sending them off to battle, and they're going to die.
I mean, that's the reality of these women will not survive.
They're not in rear area support.
They're going to be frontline soldiers, and they're going to be slaughtered.
And if I were a Ukrainian male hiding in Germany or Poland, I would be forever shamed by the fact that I'm hiding while we're...
The women I'm supposed to be protecting are fighting and dying.
Ukraine is falling apart as a society.
When you have women doing the fighting for the men, there's something wrong.
Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now.
There's nothing to laugh at, but one of the viewers, Colonel, just wrote in and said, I'd like to hear Colonel McGregor conduct one of these interviews in a Scottish brogue.
He's asking the wrong man.
By the way, brogue is Irish.
When you say Scottish, they mean burr.
Oh, burr.
Okay. Actually, he didn't say brogue.
He said Scottish accent.
I incorrectly called it a brogue, but thank you for the correction.
There's very little to laugh at, so the humor is out of the way, and I need to speak to you about Israel and Gaza and also Ukraine.
I want to start with Ukraine.
I want your comments on the French president, and I won't characterize them.
I'll let you...
Watch what he said and then you can tell me if you think this is crazy or profound.
President Emmanuel Macron, two days ago.
There is no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, endorsed and sanctioned manner, but in dynamic terms, nothing should be ruled out.
I think there's a lot to unpack there.
First of all, is the essence of it crazy that nothing should be ruled out?
And secondly, is he suggesting...
That French troops may be there in an unofficial capacity.
I think the man is certifiable.
Let's get that straight.
He's talking about effectively declaring war on Russia, and that's what people don't seem to understand.
You send conventional military formations into western Ukraine, you're going to end up at war with Russia.
And I think President Putin has made that clear repeatedly.
He's not going to tolerate any external intervention.
And while he certainly doesn't want a war with NATO, he's made it clear that if any NATO members send their organized forces into Western Ukraine with the intention of fighting Russians, they would be at war.
You know, one of the things that needs to be kept in mind, there is always the outside possibility that Macron made this public statement so that everybody else in the NATO alliance could...
Here's one of those responses, the Chancellor of Germany.
NATO is not and will not be party to the war.
That remains the case.
We do not want Russia's war against Ukraine to become a war between Russia and NATO.
We agree on this with all our allies.
This also means no German participation in the war.
To put it bluntly, as German Chancellor, I will not be sending any members of the German armed forces to Ukraine.
Our soldiers can count on that, and you too can count on that.
Colonel, do you know if there are French or German special forces there, perhaps out of uniform, perhaps called contractors or mercenaries, but they are truly military personnel of Germany and France?
I do not.
I can't confirm or deny it.
I know.
That British and American special ops forces in small numbers have been on Ukrainian soil.
There's no question about it.
And some of the attacks that you've seen with drones at sea and some of the missile strikes, they have undoubtedly been assisted enormously by the British SAS.
I'm told SAS elements or British special ops elements also play a role in Mr. Zelensky's security.
But as far as anything else, no, I can't...
Cannot confirm it.
I wouldn't exclude the possibility that there are others on the ground there trying to help or assist in some way, but I haven't seen it.
When you hear a member of Congress refer to Israel as our closest ally, my argument is they're not an ally at all.
Our relationship with them is not in the best interest of the United States.
There's no treaty of alliance.
It's an absolute misnomer.
It's what AIPAC wants people to believe, but it's a misnomer to call us an ally of Israel.
Look, there is no question, and this crisis makes it manifestly clear, that Israel is an albatross around their neck.
Both from a strategic point of view and a moral point of view.
I mean, we're talking here about the strategic dimension to this conflict, but you also want to remember that there's an important moral dimension.
Because we are siding with Israel and providing Israel with almost unconditional support in its war against the Palestinians, we are complicit in a genocide.
It just doesn't get much worse than that.
Kyle Anzalone from antiwar.com joins us now.
Kyle, it's a pleasure.
My friend, thank you for coming back to the show.
This morning, an Israeli journalist reported and Alistair Crook reported and analyzed on the use by the Israeli military of an algorithm called Lavender, which is apparently AI,
and by which the Israeli computers directed who should be killed.
That the AI system using this algorithm actually put up images of people that the Israelis felt were in or were sympathetic to Hamas and assigned them numbers from 0 to 100, 0 being the must-kill, excuse me,
100 being the must-kill, 0 being stay away.
Does any of this surprise you?
Does any of this absolve?
I can't imagine how it would the Israelis for moral culpability by pointing to a machine or a computer.
Yeah, I guess shocked but not surprised, Judge.
And this is a high-tech genocide, basically, what's going on here.
They're cleansing their genocide.
They're washing their genocide in AI tech, allowing that article that you're talking about is from 972 Magazine, a Tel Aviv-based outlet, where they talk to several Israeli officers.
We're good to go.
If the AI program Lavender recommends a name, they put it on the kill list within 20 seconds.
The only thing they check is that the intended person is male.
They didn't even say they checked the age.
And so it could be some of these intended targets are very, very young.
Absolutely horrifying.
But maybe the worst part of all this, if that's not bad enough, is that the Israelis actually waited until the names on the kill list returned to their houses and killed not only the person on the list, but their entire families.
And intentionally, and the program was called Where's Daddy?
And of course, this is a reference to when kids are excited for their dad to come home after a day of work, they start asking mommy, where's daddy?
Where when the Israelis answer, where's daddy?
It is coming home with a very large bomb.
The same article is interesting.
You mentioned very large bomb.
The same article indicated an Israeli propensity for the so-called dumb bombs.
Even though the AI supposedly pinpoints and targets individuals, now you've informed us it's not only them, but their family, whether innocent or otherwise.
The Israeli preference is for the 2,000 pound or even 500 pound dumb bomb, which destroys anything in sight, as opposed to the more expensive smart bomb that aims for...
It seems like the more we learn about this, the worse it gets.
Last week, we were all...
Does Netanyahu actually think he can absolve or he can escape moral and legal condemnation for this slaughter?
By pointing to an algorithm named Lavender?
Yeah, I'm not sure if this is Netanyahu's way to absolve himself or if he really cares if the international community condemns him for being immoral.
I think he really just cares about his perception in Israel and maybe his legacy in Israel overall.
And I think maybe he calculates that his legacy is either going to be one years of propping up Hamas and using Hamas as a cudgel so he didn't have to negotiate at all with the Palestinians until it ultimately led to October 7th.
And so if he could be the Israeli leader that finally deals with the Palestinian problem, and particularly in Gaza, and just ethnically cleanses the place and removes all the Palestinians, I think that's what Netanyahu is concerned about, his legacy being,
and that's his thinking on what he wants to have his public image be, at least in Israel.
Here's Leon Panetta, not my favorite public official, although a long time.
A friend of mine admonishing Netanyahu on one of the talk shows yesterday saying you're never going to destroy Hamas.
Cut number five.
Netanyahu keeps saying we're going to destroy Hamas.
Look, you're not going to destroy Hamas.
Hamas is going to be around.
What you can destroy is the leadership that was involved by Hamas in the attack on October 7th.
And I don't think he's made that clear, that ultimately this is about killing the leadership of Hamas, not just wiping out Hamas.
If we had a better sense of mission here, I think we'd have a better sense of how this war could come to an end.
Harry Johnson says this is absurd.
For every leader you kill, you'll be replaced with two people who'll be more ardent than he was.
Right. I guess one important point...
Let me just stop you.
What we're watching, I want your answer, but what we're watching are the massive demonstrations in front of Netanyahu's house.
This goes on seven nights a week now.
Go ahead, please, Kyle.
Right. I guess the two points I would want to make on that clip are, one, this is something that...
Most Americans have known, they've watched what happened in the war on terror, when on 9-11, the members of Al-Qaeda could maybe fit in a pirate boat, as my boss Scott Horton at the Libertarian Institute likes to say.
And now there's tens of thousands of jihadists spread all the way from West Africa to the Philippines.
And so, obviously, trying to eliminate jihadism with bombs only creates more jihadists.
And so that would be a failure.
But what I think he really gets wrong in his analysis is that Israel...
Israel isn't trying to wipe out the leadership.
As we saw and talked about with the Lavender program, what they were doing, they put 30,000, I think 37,000 names on the list, and most of these were junior members of Hamas.
If you look at the number of people in Hamas that Israel claims to kill, almost all of them are low-level fighters.
They've gotten almost none of the leadership.
And so what Israel is trying to do isn't even kill the leadership of Hamas, as Panetta is suggesting.
Phil, welcome to the show, my dear friend.
Much appreciated.
Before we get to your piece on Apocalypse Now, Israel is playing a dangerous game in the Middle East.
I want to ask you a few questions, particularly about this comment by our friend and colleague, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, that it is more likely than not that the CIA This looks a lot like
what Nord Stream turned out to be, a U.S. operation.
Only the CIA let it.
Let's face it.
We have done as much to create and to nurture ISIS.
As anything else on the face of the earth, whether it be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or any of the instigators of the so-called ISIS consulate in the beginning.
We've used ISIS, and when I say we, I mean that agency called the CIA, the same agency that does so many nefarious things in our name.
And they have worked ISIS and worked operatives from ISIS in order to do other things.
And I'm hearing, and it makes a lot of sense to me, And I'm watching the behavior and the signals coming from Moscow, which are usually very indicative of the truth when it's something like this.
And I think that's what Putin believes.
And I think the intelligence community in Russia, whether it's the GRU, the NKPD, the KSB, the FSB or whatever, they believe it too.
And that makes this Ukraine conflict a different conflict as of that killing of that many Russians.
That close to Putin and blame lying, at least in part, with the people who orchestrated it being the CIA.
What's your take, Mr. Former CIA?
Well, I didn't do it.
I don't buy that.
I think there are many more players in this game.
Then he's giving credit to, you know, it's always easy to blame the CIA for everything because it's a secret intelligence organization.
So it's a permanent patsy, as the expression might go.
What I've seen is that if anyone had more relationship with ISIS, it was Israel.
So if you're looking for relationships and that kind of thing, and Israel would have motive, given the fact that the Russians are kind of a potential key player in what is going on in Syria right now.
So I don't know.
I just don't buy it.
I think that certainly the big motive here is on the part of Ukraine, and Ukraine certainly has operational connections with the Israelis and with the CIA and with military intelligence.
There are a lot of people that potentially could have come up with a scheme like this and done it.
But in my mind, this was, apart from Ukraine, This was kind of overkill for the United States to get involved to this extent.
It even would be, I think, overkill for the Israelis to want to get involved to this extent.
Would it have been overkill for MI6 to get involved?
MI6 is a different story.
MI6 doesn't have a lot to lose.
Or really a lot to gain.
But they tend to get involved in these kind of relationships.
I think I've mentioned to you before that MI6, before the U.S. really got involved with what was going on in Ukraine, were kind of heavily engaged.
I mean, they're Europeans.
They have a high reputation.
MI6 could be a possible player in this, sure.
Zelensky so desperate or so unwilling to face reality that he would have signed off on something like this.
Yeah, I think Zelensky is capable of just about anything.
He's desperate.
He knows he's losing.
And the fact is, he's trying to make, he's trying to kind of, you know, shake the dice and see what comes out the other end, would be my suspicion.
And this killing of a lot of Russian civilians is kind of something that he would give his seal of approval on.
Now, bear in mind that, you know, there are a lot of stories floating around about who knew what, and I am waiting to see.
How did Iran get the hypersonic from Russia?
I imagine they had some help from the Russians, but I don't know that for a fact.
The Iranians are quite clever people.
Witness the sophistication of the ballistic missiles that got through the Israeli air defenses after the Israelis shot down 300 decoys or what we call those hovering little things that came first.
So the drones cost $10,000 apiece and maybe a few hundred of them were destroyed.
The Israelis spent a billion...
That's the question, of course, Judge.
Not too many more nights.
And that is the threat that's dangling out like a sort of Damocles now.
For the first time, the Israelis have been warned, look, not only can we hit you directly, we will.
We just demonstrated that.
Now, knock it off.
This was just a warning.
We can do far worse.
And the United States is pleading with the Israelis, look, please don't retaliate again.
And the way they're justifying that is, we won!
There are no lawful methods to keep your children from being drafted.
The draft is still on the books as we speak, but it hasn't been used since the Vietnam War years.
Interestingly, in the war between the states, which the government likes to call the Civil War.
It wasn't a civil war.
A civil war is a violent struggle for control of the central government.
That's not what the war between the states was.
It was a war to leave the central government.
Nevertheless, when the U.S. government, the North in the war, imposed a draft, it said right in the documents for $300...
You can get out.
So a lot of sons of wealthy people got out because they either got someone else to replace them or they paid the $300.
That out exists no longer.
If there is a draft, and God forbid this from happening, to me the draft is a form of slavery.
If there is a draft, there will be no monetary out.
There will just be a physical and mental out.
If you fail the physical or mental test, you wouldn't qualify for the draft.
Okay, we'll take one more and then call it a break.
Kevin Boff.
So when will the neocons be listed by names and shareholdings for the world's population to see who is triggering these wars for profits?
Kevin, you can go to the five largest war...
Merchants in the United States, Raytheon, Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, you can go to them and look up and see who their shareholders are.
You can see who are members of their boards.
You can also look up and see what think tanks they own and what former military officials they put on television, not on Judging Freedom.
Aaron Matei joins us now.
Aaron, thank you, my dear friend.
Thank you for your time today.
Speaking about time, you have just produced a dissertation, well, it's about 20 or 25 pages long, which is available at Real Clear Investigations on what 10 years of U.S. meddling in Ukraine have wrought,
an exhaustively researched, thoroughly presented, brilliantly articulated argument.
And there's a spoiler alert in the title, but I'll let you...
Deal with the spoiler alert.
What have 10 years of U.S. meddling in Ukraine brought?
Well, according to Joe Biden, and really at this point, the bipartisan establishment, because House Speaker Mike Johnson just helped.
Push through the $61 billion measure to prolong the proxy war that Joe Biden and his team began.
Ukraine's on the front lines of democracy.
That's been the talking point from Joe Biden, that if we don't help Ukraine, then democracy will lose.
It'll be a victory for autocratic forces everywhere.
What I put out in the pieces is simply looking back at the actual record of the last 10 years.
The U.S. role in Ukraine has undermined democracy, not only in Ukraine, but also in the U.S. After serving on the front lines of a really dangerous proxy war inside Ukraine, which has undermined Ukrainian democracy, starting with the overthrow of its government in February 2014,
backed by the U.S., the Obama-Biden administration, Ukraine's also been used to meddle in U.S. politics in really consequential ways, factoring heavily in the 2016 campaign, in the first impeachment of Donald Trump, and then even in 2020 as well.
Probably stands to factor in 2024 campaign, too.
And I go through just some of the key details in all this, and it is a very, very long piece.
But I have some extraordinary revelations, or I think some important revelations, which I can talk about, that come from a Ukrainian insider who's seen all this from the start, named Andrei Telechenko, who took part in the Maidom movement back when it began in late 2013.
And then worked for the Ukrainian government after the coup that the U.S. backed.
And then worked for Blue Star Strategies, which is a Democratic Party-tied firm that worked with Burisma, which, of course, is the energy company that hired Hunter Biden right after his father, Joe Biden, helped overthrow the government in Ukraine.
So there's a whole lot to go through.
But what I argue here is that rather than portraying Ukraine as being on the front lines of a democratic struggle, as is the standard narrative in the U.S., Ukraine's been used to undermine democracy in both countries, both in Washington and in Kyiv.
Give us the backstory, if you would.
I know there's a tremendous amount of detail here, and some of the names are quite familiar to us.
Vice President Biden, of course, CIA Director, Brennan, Victoria Nuland.
Barack Obama?
Resisting the efforts of the neocons around him to provide the type of weaponry and military support that Joe Biden has.
But give us the thumbnail sketch starting in 2013, I guess.
Well, you know, the experience of Obama really underscores A very common theme here, which is that it doesn't really matter.
I mean, the whole story of Ukraine underscores that in both countries, whatever the elected president wants ultimately doesn't really matter.
You had Obama actually being pretty tepid about waging a proxy war against Russia and Ukraine.
He resisted efforts to arm Ukraine.
He actually threw his support behind Angela Merkel as she negotiated the Minsk II Accords.
But right as Merkel was doing that, there was a meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
In February 2015, right before the Minsk II Accords were signed.
And the Minsk II was the deal that was supposed to end the war in the Donbass that began after the U.S. backed a coup in February 2014.
This war between Russian-backed rebels in the East and the U.S.-backed post-coup government.
So as Angela Merkel is negotiating a peace deal, Victoria Nuland is meeting with John McCain, Mike Pompeo, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference at a luxury hotel.
And she's saying...
We're going to ignore the Minsk Accords, basically.
She's saying this is an act of betrayal.
John McCain is comparing Merkel to Chamberlain and saying all this is appeasement.
And Newland's saying we're going to keep flooding Ukraine with weapons no matter what happens with this peace deal.
What did the Minsk Accords, just for the benefit of our audience that may not be familiar with it, what did they do in a nutshell?
And who were the agreeing parties?
So, after you have the U.S. backing a coup in February 2014, and you asked me about that, so I'll go back to that in a second, because I skipped over that part.
But once there is that coup, you have a war breakout between...
Russian-backed Eastern Ukrainians who are opposed to this new government because they've not only overthrown their elected president, Yanukovych, but also one of their first moves is just try to ban the Russian language.
And so people in Eastern Ukraine see all this as an assault on their very existence.
So they take up arms with Russia's support.
There's, you know, some fighting.
Finally, in February 2015, you have the Minsk's bargain is these Eastern Ukrainians will get some limited autonomy.
Have their rights respected.
They'll be able to speak Russian.
There'll be no more attempts to ban their language.
And they'll have some limited autonomy, the right to appoint their own judges and police forces, but they'll stay inside of Ukraine rather than separating.
And in return, Russian forces that have gone there to aid them will withdraw, along with their heavy weaponry, and there will be peace.
That's the basic bargain.
But Newland, meanwhile, is saying, we're not going to respect these Minsk Accords.
And she sides in doing so with the ultra-nationalists of Ukraine, who also don't want the Minsk Accords, because I don't think they want these Russian-aligned Eastern Ukrainians in their country.
And certainly, they don't want anything that can respect their existence, respect their culture, because they're so devoted to their conception of Ukrainian nationalism.
And that's, by the way, the same faction.
That Victoria Nuland and her allies in the Obama administration got behind when in February 2014, a year earlier, after weeks of protests on the Maidan that get increasingly violent against Yanukovych, there's a power-sharing agreement brokered by the EU in a very similar situation.
And again, the ultranationalists said we're not going to accept that.
We're not going to accept leaving Yanukovych in power.
And after Yanukovych's forces pulled back under their terms of the deal...
The alternationalists took advantage, stormed the parliament, pushed through a new government.
And the U.S., even though they had welcomed the power-sharing agreement brokered by the EU that would have left Yanukovych in power, they immediately forget all that and say, yes, this is great, we support the new government.
So you have two incidents there, the coup of 2014 and the signing of the Minsk Accords, where you have a compromise reached, alternationalists in Ukraine, backed by neocons in Washington, completely undermine it.
In the case of the Minsk Accords, you have Victoria Nuland By the way, everything that's happening is proving day after day that the students are absolutely right.
They're protesting criminality.
They're protesting war crimes.
They know it when they see it.
Of course, all of those on the take of the Israel lobby deny it, but we see it before our own eyes.
And, again, as we've talked about...
When you see it before your own eyes, the Congress is trying to stop you from seeing it before your own eyes by closing down TikTok, where a lot of people see what's going on every day with their own eyes.
So stop looking.
You can't make this up.
You can't make this up.
I didn't make the connection with See It With Your Own Eyes and TikTok until you just mentioned it.
Well, but, you know, even we had a conversation of Mitt Romney explaining.
It was amazing.
It was ridiculous.
Yeah, he was so explicit and unabashed.
He said, well, this is why we had to close down TikTok, because the young people were seeing things.
We don't want them to see them.
And now we know, by the way, we had a story also a few days ago of how billionaires in New York were dealing with Mayor Adams from October onward to get the police in,
to bang the heads of the students and to arrest the students and to get them onto the campuses and so forth.
The game of the Israel lobby is to make us not look.
You know, we don't ask the West to trust us.
Trust is not something which is illustrating the Western positions, the Western actions, and today there were many examples.
I don't want to recite those failures to deliver on the promises, those failures to deliver on the legal obligations.
Frankly, I don't care whether the West trusts us or not.
The West must understand the real situation.
They don't understand anything except real politics.
Let them go to the people.
You are democracies, right?
Ask the people what the West should do in response to Putin's proposals.
What do you think?
He lost his patience, George.
Yes, he did lose his patience.
It appears President Putin has not lost his patience, but the people around him have.
Yes, and Lavrov is a gentleman.
He's like a Taoist monk.
Seriously, dealing with those limits.
You must tell him that the next time you shake his hand.
Dealing with these lunatics from the Beltway to Brussels, you need to be a Taoist monk.
Otherwise, you know, you go crazy.
But it's not only Lavrov, everybody.
Ryabkov, the number one Sherpa for BRICS, which is one of the deputy foreign ministers as well.
And when we met him already a few months ago, he's already saying, look, we tried everything.
We are...
It's impossible to have a dialogue with the Americans and with the people in Brussels, especially NATO.
Let me remind you how impossible that is.
Here is Secretary General Stoltenberg of NATO, followed by Secretary of Defense Austin of the United States.
Cuts five and seven.
It's not for Ukraine.
to withdraw forces from Ukrainian territory.
It's for Russia to withdraw their forces from occupied Ukrainian land.
And this proposal is a proposal that actually means that Russia should have the right to occupy even more Ukrainian land.
All the four provinces that they claim are not Ukrainian.
is not in any position to dictate to Ukraine what they must do to bring about a peace.
I think, you know, that's exactly the kind of behavior that we don't want to see.
We don't want to see a leader of one country wake up one day and decide that he wants to erase borders and annex the territory of his neighbor.
That's not the world that any of us want to live in.
I think, you know, he is not, in my view, not in a position to dictate to Ukraine what it must do to pursue peace.
Boy, the United States has been dictating to the world what the world must do to please United States exceptionalism since the end of World War II.
How close are we to World War III?
Pick your spot.
China, Ukraine, Israel.
That's an interesting question.
Actually, I was just talking with a group of former colleagues from the military.
I was not there.
I was not a fly on the wall.
We all agreed that, one, we are as close to a nuclear use, if you will, nuclear weapon use, as we've been in the history of nuclear weapons, short as it is, 75 years or so.
That we were extremely close, as close, if you will, to a conventional conflict that would lead to this exchange of nuclear weapons.
And this is the first time we have agreed that it is in multiple theaters of war, if you will, in the Levant.
So there is no consensus on it's going to be in the South China Sea, it's going to be in Ukraine, it's going to be in the Middle East.
The South China Sea was the least of our concerns at the moment, and that might be a warning, because if Xi Jinping and the Chinese military wanted to take advantage of preoccupation and other theaters of war,
it would be an ideal time to do it.
But we put that down as the lowest possibility in terms of what it is, in our view, the possibilities.
Why is Ukraine's top general, General Sersky?
Claiming that he's pushing the Russians backwards.
Is there any evidence to this at all?
I think he's spending too much time with President Zelensky and they're sampling the cocaine.
They're doing that or vodka shots, something like that.
No, I mean, it is delusional.
You've got even Ukrainian sources now saying, what is he talking about?
All along the Donetsk.
Particularly in the nets, but all along the line of conflict, which goes about 600-700 miles from north to south.
Russia's moving forward.
Ukraine's moving backwards.
That's it.
It's that simple.
And Ukraine does not have an answer for it because, again, we've gone over this repeatedly.
They lack manpower.
They lack air defense.
They lack air cover.
They lack artillery.
And they lack artillery shells to put in the artillery.
Other than that, it's looking really good.
You had an encounter with the FBI in your home last week.
Can you tell us about it?
I mean, it's more than an encounter.
The FBI executed a search warrant on my home.
We lost count at 30, but we think there might have been close to 40 FBI special agents and auxiliary personnel.
Who paid my home a visit.
Did they tell you they were coming or did they just show up?
I just showed up.
Two FBI agents showed up at my door, knocked on it.
I went outside and they said they wanted to talk to me.
I said, about what?
And they said, we have a lot of questions and concerns about your online activity.
And I said, really?
Like what?
And they said, well...
It relates to the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
I said, huh, you want to talk about it?
I'm not letting you in my house, but we can sit out here and talk if you want to.
They said, well, actually, we're coming in your house, and they showed me the search warrant, and then suddenly the whole area swarms, and they brought out a SWAT team in full tactical gear, and they're like, we've got to clear your house.
I said, guys, I've got four dogs behind the door that are worried.
And you're not opening this door and going in with a SWAT team because you're not shooting my dogs.
And so what's going to happen is put a gun against my head, but I'm going in that house and I'm moving my damn dogs out to the backyard.
Then you can do whatever you want.
I don't care.
And so they were cool.
I mean, look, I have to get to the FBI guys.
They're very calm, very professional, very courteous the entire time.
Clearly executing orders that they've been given.
And they...
You know, the search warrant allowed them to come in and seize my electronic devices.
I mean, it's very specific about what they can and can't do.
You know, so they could seize electronic devices, cell phones, computer storage, electronic, you know, things of that nature.
They stole everything.
I mean, I'm calling them out right now.
You guys know what you took.
They took gifts.
They were given to me of a non-electronic nature.
They took documents beyond the ones that they ended up.
They took my entire WMD archive, you know, when I was a weapons inspector in Iraq.
The receipts that allowed me to stare down the United States and all the other liars who were trying to go to war on Iraq based upon their lies about WMDs.
You know, it wasn't just my word that helped me prevail.
It was the fact that I had done the job for seven years and I had seven years worth of receipts.
None of it's classified.
All of it is considered sensitive by the United States, but none of it's classified.
You can't give classified information to the United Nations.
But they found that down in my basement, and they seized that whole thing.
24 boxes, 80,000 pages.
I said, you've got to give it back, guys.
You can't have this.
And they said, well, we have to review it.
I said, okay, but you have to give it back.
It's not classified.
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