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April 14, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:55
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : CIA Running Killing Fields.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, April 15th, 2025.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be here with us in just a moment, but first this.
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Professor Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure to be with you.
It's nice to have you to myself, if you don't mind me putting that way, since you've been all over the world in the past week with comments that you've made, which I'll ask you to summarize briefly right now.
Has the United States government used the CIA to concoct and commence wars against innocents?
Of course.
This is without any serious dispute, and there have been several of them.
We know that plans for many wars were concocted in 2001.
In fact, General Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of NATO in the 1990s, was shown a document actually at the Pentagon the week after 9-11, which said seven wars in five years.
These were wars against states in the Middle East that opposed Israel's domination of Palestine.
And they include countries that we know ended up on the other side of American wars.
Iraq, of course, was on the list.
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia.
And the one that hasn't quite happened yet, that Netanyahu has been begging for.
More than 20 years is a U.S. war against Iran.
So, yes, this has happened.
I spoke about Syria because this was the topic of a discussion that I was asked to participate in in a diplomatic forum.
And with Syria, we know that President Barack Obama gave A presidential finding that the CIA should work with other countries in the Middle East to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.
And I always thought, from the first moment I heard about this, that this was a disaster in the making.
It was a war that, in fact, Lasted 14 years, took about 600,000 lives.
People can look up Operation Timber Sycamore to learn more about this U.S. caused disaster.
And I happened to learn a lot about it over the years because of my work with the United Nations as well.
The U.S. blocked peace in...
Syria, a peace that could have come as early as 2012, but the U.S. was engaged in what we call a regime change operation.
It's a nice sounding phrase for an ugly part of American foreign policy, which is overthrowing governments of other countries.
The U.S. has done this or tried to do this probably a hundred times.
In the post-World War II period.
So this isn't something new or special.
It's a standard part of American foreign policy that has typically led to outright disaster, to bloodbaths, to civil war, to prolonged violence.
And it did so in Syria.
So this was the point that I made.
And it's a very sad story of American foreign policy.
Israel has said go to war.
The U.S. has said yes.
We do it at your command, Bibi, and we've been involved in nonstop wars for a quarter century.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, 20 years ago, claimed that the Iranians would have a nuclear bomb in two weeks.
Ten years ago, he said they would have a nuclear weapon in one week.
A month ago, the United States intelligence community concluded collectively That the Iranians have no nuclear weapon.
MI6 agreed.
Wouldn't Mossad agree?
Wouldn't Netanyahu be knowingly lying or rejecting the intel of his own first-rate intelligence agency?
Netanyahu's a fool because there could have been a decisive and definitive end to Iran's even potential.
Seeking of a nuclear weapon back in 2016, 2017, many countries, including the United States, negotiated with Iran to have a definitive end to Iran's nuclear program,
and the counterpart of that was to end the U.S. and other...
Desire to isolate Iran through punitive economic sanctions and to impoverish Iran through those sanctions.
So Obama negotiated that.
And then Trump denounced it.
A lot of Congress denounced it because the Israel lobby denounced it.
Just stupid as can be.
And it's so typical, by the way.
Instead of diplomacy, you say, no, no, we'll do it by force, and you end up achieving nothing but absolute violence.
It reminds me of the attempt, not a very well-done one, but still an attempt by President Clinton at the end of the 1990s We reached an agreement.
The U.S. reneged even under Clinton or dragged its feet.
And then when Bush came in, Bolton said, no, we don't have to do any of that.
We don't have to agree with this tyrant and so forth.
And Bolton induced Bush Jr. to cancel the whole thing.
A lot of great stuff.
God came out of that.
You know, North Korea became a significant nuclear-armed country with missile systems, delivery systems.
Ah, because the United States said no, no to diplomacy.
Well, Israel's always said no to diplomacy with Iran, and Iran has tried to negotiate repeatedly, and Israel instead has tried to egg the United States into what would be a catastrophic war.
Iran is a big, powerful country with big, powerful allies.
And Israel, and I shouldn't say Israel, I'm talking about Netanyahu and his extremist failed government, has been at this for, as I've explained,
really almost 30 years since he came into power in 1996, to try to remake the Middle East through war.
In Israel's desire and image, and the U.S. has just walked into it time and time again.
And the big question is whether President Trump extricates the U.S. from Bibi's wars, or whether he just follows along as every president has done for nearly 30 years.
Here's Colonel McGregor disagreeing with another friend of the show, Colonel Daniel Davis, over...
The military strength of Iran, I'm going to guess you agree with Colonel McGregor, but feel free to comment as you see fit.
Chris, cut number 15. What nation on the planet can have their embassy destroyed in another country and to have an assassination in their capital city on an inauguration and not go to war with somebody?
Yet that's exactly what Iran didn't do because they don't have the power to do it.
So that should tell you...
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
That's a fundamentally false statement.
Which part?
False, false, false.
They don't have the power to go to war?
You haven't looked carefully at Iran.
Iran's arsenal of missiles is enormous.
It could flatten Israel in a day.
They have the power to go to war.
They have chosen repeatedly to avoid war.
And I've said this a thousand times.
No one in the Middle East is interested in a war except Israel and the United States.
You know, what's a standard mistake of the United States is that when any other country shows prudence, we say weakness.
And so if another country says, let's make peace, the U.S. approaches, oh, they're weak, let's make war.
This is actually a pretty repeated point of view.
The Iranians have been trying for peace.
Repeatedly, they sent repeated messages to the Biden administration, all batted away.
They have sent repeated messages to the Trump administration.
There was a first meeting of Trump's negotiator, Steve Witkoff, and the foreign minister of Iran last week.
Actually, both sides portrayed as a positive encounter.
So there's some hope that Donald Trump is extricating himself from Bibi's grasp.
We're not seeing that in other areas.
The administration has given the green light to Israel to continue rampant, vicious slaughter and war crimes.
in Gaza and in the West Bank.
But when it comes to Iran, there's at least
The United States, my God, does not need another war.
No Americans could want this.
This would be Bibi's war and yet more Bibi destruction.
And he's ripping apart Israel and he's divided America as well because so much of the American political class is within the grasp of the Israel lobby.
On the same weekend that the United States was, to the chagrin of Prime Minister Netanyahu, negotiating face-to-face with the foreign minister of Iran, the Trump administration sent its neocon Zionist-in-chief over to my friends at Fox,
To say this, cut number nine.
He's dead serious that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
He's said that for 20 years.
He's been consistent.
That is clear.
But he's also dead serious that if we can't figure this out at the negotiating table, then there are other options to include my department to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear bomb.
We hope we never get there.
We really do, Maria.
But what we're doing with the Houthis and what we're doing in the region, we've shown a capability to go far, to go deep, and to go big.
And again, we don't want to do that.
But if we have to, we will to prevent the nuclear bomb in Iran's hands.
Does that affect negotiating to use my department to bring them to the to to heal?
Look, this is Trump's approach to believe that you scare people.
The wits out of the other side.
You make every threat.
You claim you're going to bring them to their knees.
He thinks that this is the only way to negotiate.
Well, the truth is, whatever Hegseth said in that clip doesn't really mean anything.
That's not influencing the Iranians.
With a real counterpart, a real negotiator, and find a mutually beneficial way out of the current situation.
I've spoken repeatedly with the Iranians and with the diplomats throughout the Middle East and have done so recently as well.
It's obvious that there's a mutual interest of the United States.
And Iran in ending the nuclear program and ending the sanctions regime, ending the war threats, and actually moving to peace in the Middle East through a two-state solution of Palestine and Israel.
In other words, one could really solve what is right now Netanyahu's wreckage over the past 30 years.
You see, all of this goes back to one basic fact, which is that Netanyahu and his extremist ilk are trying to rule over 8 million Palestinian people and deny Palestine a state side by side with Israel.
This is the fundamental point.
Now, because of that, there is slaughter by the Israelis.
There's ethnic cleansing.
There's mass murder, and there is opposition to Israel throughout the Middle East.
Netanyahu's answer, again, since 1996, has been clear, cold-blooded, and calculated, which is, we will do what we want vis-a-vis the Palestinians, and if anyone else objects in the Middle East, we will overthrow them.
Of course, it's a lot of bravado.
We will do what we want.
Vis-a-vis the Palestinians, and if anyone objects, our friend the United States, which we control through our lobby, will overthrow them.
So Israel has implicated the United States in war after war.
I've listed them.
The Iraq War, the Libyan War, the Syrian War, the war in Lebanon, actually, strangely enough, the wars in Sudan and Somalia.
All have their roots in this idea.
Israel will do what it wants vis-a-vis the Palestinian people.
Israel will have its reach and influence and even occupation in other countries in the region, not just Palestine, because now Israel is in Lebanon, Israel is in Syria, and so forth.
And the U.S. will clean up the dirty work when other countries in the region object.
Well, there could be peace with Iran.
And there could be peace throughout the whole region if there was actually a settlement to the Israel-Palestine crisis, because that's at the root of where all of this instability comes from.
Instead, we have a battlefield throughout the Middle East caused by this, stretching from Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and, as we're discussing right now,
Netanyahu's great hope that it reaches Iran.
It's mind-boggling, the damage that's been done, and it's absolutely straightforward to end the fighting in the Middle East.
By the way, there's an occasion coming up, which isn't reported in the United States, but the UN is having a high-level summit, essentially, on Palestine to implement the two-state solution.
On June 17 to June 20, just in a couple of months.
And the simple point is, more than 180 countries of the world are saying, two states, come on, end the violence, end the wars.
And Israel, of course, forget it.
Their whole purpose is to reject any...
Palestinian state.
Okay, put that aside.
They don't really have a veto over this.
But the United States is the only holdout of any country of scale, significance, and literally the United States has a veto in the U.N. Security Council.
So the U.S. is the blockage to peace in the Middle East.
Trump, if he wants to, if he gets it, Can actually make peace in the Middle East?
He can do it.
It's one vote.
It's to change one U.S. vote so that Palestine becomes the 194th state of the United Nations on the borders of the 4th of June, 1967, according to international law,
according to endless resolutions of the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. General Assembly.
And vetoed by one country, by the United States under Biden.
And one more point, if I may, and sorry to ramble, but President Trump said something quite interesting about Ukraine.
He said, I want the war to stop.
This is Biden's war.
This isn't my war.
I don't need this.
Well, President Trump should realize exactly the same thing in the Middle East.
He doesn't have to fight Bibi's wars, and he doesn't have to fight Biden's wars in the Middle East.
If he applies the same logic in the Middle East that he is rightly applying in Ukraine, he will make peace in the Middle East for the first time, basically, at least you could count it for 58 years since the 1967 war.
But I would count it all the way back to 1948.
Donald Trump would make peace where no other president has.
And all he has to do is use the same logic.
This is not his war.
This is wars that previous presidents have been pulled into by the Israel lobby, by Bibi.
And Trump does not have to fall prey in the same way.
You've told us many times both wars could be stopped in 24 hours with a phone call from the President of the United States.
Hey, Pete Hegg, Seth, stop sending arms to Kiev right now.
Hey, Bibi, nothing's coming your way, so stop.
And very importantly, you know, I've said that the war could stop, and it's interesting in Ukraine, we're getting to an end of that war.
We are.
But why doesn't it stop in one day?
Because they're still not saying publicly the truth.
Trump is right.
He's trying to get peace there.
He says this is Biden's war.
He's absolutely right.
He's trying to end it.
But instead of saying the clear things, NATO will not enlarge.
There will be a territorial adjustment given the history of all of this.
And there will be security guarantees through the United Nations.
The focus has been on a ceasefire without a kind of honest accounting of the underlying reality.
I think Steve Whitcoff, the negotiator, heard that clearly and gets that clearly and reportedly told President Trump this.
But the reason why the war isn't stopping yet isn't that Trump is trying to prolong the war.
He's not.
But he's using the wrong approach and tactic.
He's saying ceasefire, ceasefire.
But the point is not a ceasefire.
The point is a peace agreement based on certain underlying principles.
Ceasefire is pretty meaningless.
We saw there was a ceasefire in Gaza and it broke down because it wasn't based on underlying principles.
The underlying principle in Ukraine is no NATO enlargement.
The underlying principle in the Middle East is simple.
It is the state of Palestine as the 194th UN member state.
No more, no less.
Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
Thank you for letting me take you across the board in all these subjects.
We deeply appreciate it.
I know it's the middle of the night where you are, notwithstanding the bright room you're in, but we deeply appreciate your time and all your expertise.
See you again soon.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Wow. Fascinating, fascinating conversations with Colonel McGregor and Professor Sachs.
Coming up tomorrow at 2 in the afternoon, Aaron Maté, and at 3 in the afternoon, Phil Giraldi.
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