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Jan. 8, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:50
Phil Giraldi : Jimmy Carter and Me.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, January 8th, 2025.
Phil Giraldi joins us now.
Phil, a pleasure, my dear friend.
A belated Happy New Year to you.
Thank you very much for all of the help and analysis and research you brought to us in 2024.
And I hope that we can continue our collaboration in 2025.
You're a fan favorite.
In fact, one of the writers writes in, my two cats always tune in whenever Phil is on, hoping to see Rupert.
I don't mean to demean your work by reading that.
I thought you'd appreciate it.
But welcome here, as always.
The incoming Trump administration has been giving me some palpitations.
Congressman, who's about to become the National Security Advisor, told an interviewer over this past weekend that the Trump administration plans to suppress speech critical of Israel and supportive of the plight of the Palestinians.
If this is true that he said it and true that they plan to do it, What difference did an election make?
Well, in terms of the Middle East, obviously it made no change, except it might get even crazier, is the way I'm reading it.
I mean, there's a lot of nutty stuff coming out, both from Trump and from his selected advisors.
And I am quite afraid that a total genocide of the Palestinians.
If that were conceivable, it is something that they would just kind of shrug and look the other way and say, hey, let's get it done with or let's finish the job, I believe is the favorite expression.
I mean, this is just awful what's going on.
And the ultimatum to the Russians about, you know, if you don't agree to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine right away, we will increase the load of arms Now,
that ultimatum was issued by a retired three or four, I forget how many stars he had, General, General Keith Kellogg, who purports to be, are you ready for this, the Trump peacemaker,
the Trump negotiator between Russia and Ukraine.
I mean, this is worse.
Yeah, I mean, even Jake, as ignorant as he is, never threatened to annex Greenland, never proposed to make Canada the 51st state, never said we have to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico,
and never said we would use U.S. troops inside Mexico to deal with immigrants.
These are all coming out of the incoming administration.
How do you think Vladimir Putin feels about this Greenland nonsense?
If you look at the map of the globe from above the North Pole, you can see how close Greenland is to Russia.
Yeah. If I were Vladimir Putin for that and the other reasons, the other things that are being said and cited, I'd be very worried.
And I'd be worried specifically because this seems to be an indicator that we, the Russians, are going to be dealing with people who are certifiably insane.
Well, among the other things the president-elect has said in the past three days, Phil, are...
If the Israeli hostages are not returned by the time of my inauguration, no word about the 10,000 Palestinian hostages, but if the 100 Israeli hostages are not returned by my inauguration,
they'll be hell to pay.
What more hell could there possibly be in Gaza than what the Israelis have visited upon it using American equipment, ammunition, and cash?
Well, they could basically just, you know, give them more of those kinds of weapons to essentially annihilate the Palestinian nation, get rid of it.
And there's a good deal of public support in Israel for doing just that.
And it's not just the nuts surrounding Netanyahu, it's the public in general in Israel, the Jewish.
Public in Israel that is quite willing to see this kind of solution.
This is why this is so frightening.
This is no longer a, or it may not, in two weeks, it may not be any longer a world in which there is some kind of rational humanitarian, dare I say, process for people to deal with people.
Well, this is disappearing down the drain.
And it was bad enough with Biden, because Biden is the one who allowed all this stuff to happen in the first place.
But now we're just seeing the lunatics are in charge, or may be in charge.
I am hoping not.
I didn't vote for Donald Trump.
I voted for the Green Party.
And I basically feared what Trump might do, both from his ignorance and his personal arrogance.
And how it would all blend together.
And now we're seeing that his selected advisors are 100% Zionists, are a lot of people that embrace war in general.
There's a lot of talk, of course, about the Panama Canal thing.
Of course, that's all about China.
Because the Chinese are involved in the Panama Canal.
I was on somebody else's podcast this morning and they said to me, what would stop Donald Trump from using the military to seize control of the Panama Canal?
I don't know what the answer to that is.
I don't either.
I suspect that there must be some buttons to push with Trump.
To make him back off on some of this stuff.
But I don't know what they are.
We didn't see a whole lot of that in his first four years in office.
One of the other things he said over the weekend, Phil, was that I am Israel's best friend.
Yep. Now, what the hell does that mean?
What could he possibly give Netanyahu more than Joe Biden gave him?
I think it's guaranteed that Biden and Donald Trump.
We'll give Israel whatever it wants.
And this last move by Biden to send $9 billion more of military equipment to Israel, you know, it just tells you what the story is here.
When people sometimes, like myself, Who are inclined to drop comments like, Israel runs the United States, most particularly in foreign policy and security policy, you sort of feel nutty just to say that.
But the fact is, it's true.
They do run it and they run Congress.
Look at the last visit of Netanyahu to the Congress with the 56 first-standing ovations.
This is sick.
This man is a monster.
The Speaker of the House is one of these right-wing Republican Christian nationalists, sort of like Mike Huckabee, who believes that some form of Protestantism should be the national religion of the United States and that God the Father gave the whole Middle East to the descendants of the Jewish people to whom he allegedly gave it.
This is an attitude which feeds directly into Trump.
Well, it clearly is a major constituency forum.
Yes. And, you know, certainly the Democrats made so many mistakes in terms of what they thought the American people wanted to hear.
And when Trump was coming along and he was preaching, of course, that he was going to put an end to all these stupid wars.
And he turns around and after he's elected, he's talking quite differently.
You know, we as Americans, I should, I guess, be wondering, where are we going to flee to next?
I gather Costa Rica is a nice place.
Wow. Did Trump dupe the American public?
Is he smart enough to do that?
I don't know.
I think whatever comes into his prefrontal lobes comes out of his mouth.
And I think that's what he conceives to be a thinking process.
Both he and Mike Walls, the soon-to-be national security advisor.
I know you hate this phrase, I do too, so I'll unleash you on it.
Refer to Israel as our closest ally.
Now, you and I would love to have the two of them under oath and interrogate them about whether Israel is an ally.
But they keep using this mantra, Phil.
Yeah. Well, there's clearly an element.
There are some elements, some constituencies that like to hear that.
And so they repeat it over and over again, and they might actually believe it.
Whereas if you actually compiled a chronology of the relationship between the United States and Israel, there has been zero in it for the United States and everything in it for Israel.
So is this an ally?
Is it a friend?
This is somebody who's taking you for a ride.
And basically has corrupted the system whose supporters, Israel's supporters, have corrupted the system to such an extent that they can get away with murder.
They could walk into the White House and shoot the president and they would say that they're only defending themselves.
That's the mantra.
Talk to the survivors of the attack on the USS Liberty.
About whether Israel is an ally.
Isn't an alliance bilateral?
Isn't it a relationship in which each side helps the other?
And isn't it reduced to writing in something we call a treaty?
None of that is the case between the United States and Israel.
None. That's absolutely true.
I mean, an alliance requires reciprocity.
And there is no reciprocity with Israel.
Israel does whatever it wants, kills whoever it wants.
Damage to U.S. interests worldwide, and it walks away from it.
Phil, I'd like to ask you about your days in the CIA, and in particular an incident in which your colleagues had planned a coup, and the coup was, you believe,
personally stopped by the President of the United States.
Do I have that right?
Yeah, and I'll tell you why.
I mean, I was in a CIA station in Europe when this was being planned, and the demand that the CIA do this came directly from the National Security Council,
which is a White House function.
And most people don't know much about the NSC, but it's the intelligence function that's closest to the president and his staff.
And they were the ones that wanted to launch this scheme of a covert action, which is an intelligence expression for something you're trying to arrange, but you're trying to keep your visibility in it reduced.
And this was to damage Or to bring about regime change in a country somewhere else in the world.
And anyway, this was a lot of work.
We accomplished what we were supposed to do with some other politicians in other countries and that sort of thing.
And someone then came out from Washington after this was all set up and said, we're not going to do it.
We've called it off.
And again, this came straight from the White House.
About two months later, Jimmy Carter was traveling through Europe and he stopped in the country where I was at.
And there I was, you know, working away down to my basement office.
And a message came down saying, someone wants to see you up in the ambassador's office.
And I went upstairs and there was Jimmy Carter alone.
He was the president at the time.
President of the United States at the time.
And we talked for about five minutes.
That's all it was.
But he apologized for what had occurred.
He said, I apologize for all the work you people put in.
And then the rest of what he said was basically that he had decided that because of the...
Probable casualties this would cause and the damage and so on and so forth.
It was not a good step at this time.
And I agreed with him.
I was just a kind of a monkey down in the basement putting together parts.
But this was the President of the United States.
He was apologizing to me.
And it really got to me that he was basically saying this was not the right thing to do because it would hurt people.
And I've respected the guy ever since.
And ever since, I've felt very strongly that this guy is a good person, which you don't run into all the time at top levels of the U.S. government.
So that's basically my story.
It's a fascinating, fascinating story.
It reminds me of the one-liner by Lord Acton, no great man is a good man.
You are characterizing Carter as a good man.
He was a failed president, but a decent human being.
And, of course, he incurred the wrath of the neocons and the donor class, did he not?
I'm trying to look for the name of his book, but he was a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause.
I think it's called Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid, right?
That's correct.
What argument did he make that set them off?
Well, basically what he set them off was he made a two-sided argument.
He said on one hand, it's just in terms of humanitarian appeal or basis, this was the wrong thing to be doing, that Israel had basically institutionalized making a state.
We're only Jews, we're full citizens, and we're the only ones that had full rights.
And he's absolutely correct about that.
And so he was saying, what about these Palestinians who have been living here for 2,000 years?
Many of them have had, in fact, Israeli passports, but they did not have full citizen rights.
So he was saying this is the characteristic of apartheid.
If you want to have a A situation where the Palestinians and the Israelis could live in peace together.
They have to have equal rights.
They have to get equal benefits from the state.
But this is not the case with Israel.
So naturally, everyone, including the New York Times, of course, came down upon him and said he was an anti-Semite.
And this persisted later in terms of any time Jimmy Carter's name would come up, there would immediately be an attack against him.
Has there been any president since Harry Truman who articulated a defense of the Palestinian people the way Jimmy Carter did?
I would have to say no.
I think there have been some presidents who were kind of fed up.
John F. Kennedy obviously had some things going with Israel, spying on the United States and setting up bogus charities and things like that to take advantage of U.S. laws.
And also George H.W. Bush had a run-in over the U.S. funding.
And I would think even Obama, Barack Obama, did not like Benjamin Netanyahu.
But no, apart from Jimmy Carter, nobody has verbalized it and come out to quite that extent.
Here's an interesting clip of Jimmy Carter on this very topic.
Chris? It was 12 years ago and he was prescient,
was he not?
Yeah, absolutely right.
Now, you wrote a recent piece.
I was a little startled when I saw it because right above your name is a picture of the Pope.
Do you think the Pope can play any role in Ukraine or Gaza?
Well, I was contacted by a friend of mine who's very strong in the peace movement, which I fully support.
And she said to me something.
She's also a devout traditionalist Catholic, which I basically identify with.
And you know I do as well.
The left, even the Catholic left, thinks we're fanatics and fascists because we love the Latin mass.
But anyway, go ahead.
This is crazy.
Go ahead.
Yeah. So anyway, she got in touch with me and she's been...
Picketing outside her local church and also her local diocesan office with a sign saying, you know, send the Pope to Gaza.
And I thought about it a bit and they said, you know, it sounds ridiculous.
But at the same time, this is something that Netanyahu might actually put up with.
Because he might feel that to turn it down would be very bad PR for him and for Israel.
And even maybe our new president, Donald Trump, would put up with it for the same reasons, because he has very strong support among conservative Catholics.
And I thought about it more.
I said, this might be a groundbreaker.
Here we have a pope who has a...
Strong reputation as being, shall we say, outside the box in terms of his views and how he interprets doctrine.
And so this is a guy who might be able to go over there and get the ball really rolling on the various sides of this, getting together and starting to talk and figuring out some way to get out of this without having to kill three million Palestinians.
So I said this would be interesting to float.
And I recommended that Catholics who are active in their parishes and outside of the parishes in social organizations that have a lot of Catholics to get this kind of thing floated out there and see what would happen.
Wow. From your lips to God's ears.
Unbelievable, Phil.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Thanks for your thoughts, as always.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks for all the research you do and the materials you send us.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
All the best.
Look forward to it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up at 4.30 Eastern this afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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