Nov. 17, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:36
AMB Chas Freeman : MI6 and Venezuela: What The Brits Know
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for it, Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, November 18th, 2025.
Ambassador Charles Freeman will be here with us in just a moment on what do MI6 and the British know about Trump's killings in the Caribbean.
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Ambassador Freeman, welcome here, my dear friend.
Before we get to MI6 in Venezuela, what do you expect Trump's new board of peace backed by U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza to accomplish for the United States?
Absolutely nothing.
And I think the reason the Chinese and Russians did not veto the resolution in the UN endorsing the broad outlines of the so-called peace plan, which really isn't a peace plan, but a pacification program and a Hamas removal program, was that they think this is going to be an absolute disaster for the United States.
And why pull American chestnuts out of the fire when we're shoving them in there?
So what's going to happen, I mean, first of all, this authorizes a stabilization for us in Gaza.
And that is premised on the disarmament of Hamas.
Hamas is not going to disarm, and it said so.
And it would be foolish to disarm because when it disarms, it gets nothing but additional attacks from the Israelis, who have been practicing mowing the grass, as they call it, for decades in Gaza.
Second, it's unrealistic, completely unrealistic, to expect that Arab and Muslim countries will A, pay for the reconstruction of Gaza without the Israelis paying anything for the damage they did, or B, field a force, the purpose of which is to pacify Gaza so there can be no Palestinian self-determination.
Everybody in the world except the United States is now at least nominally in favor of Palestine's Palestinian self-determination.
The exception being Israel, Netanyahu said there will be no Palestinian state established.
The only reason this resolution was able to pass in the UN Security Council was that there was a sort of veiled reference to the emergence of a future Palestinian state.
Israel's totally ruled that out.
So this is an utterly unrealistic so-called plan.
It hasn't even created a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israelis are still killing people daily on an arbitrary and capricious basis.
They're blowing up buildings.
They're destroying housing.
They're continuing with their program of making Gaza uninhabitable and if they had their way, uninhabited.
The Guardian newspaper reports that since the so-called ceasefire, since the so-called ceasefire, the IDF forces have destroyed more than 1,500 buildings in Gaza.
I didn't know there were 1,500 buildings still standing after the Israeli onslaught in the past two years.
So you're right.
This is not much of a ceasefire at all.
Do you see American troops getting involved in hostilities?
Well, I guess the idea is not to have them in Gaza, but we're apparently building a huge military base right on the edge of Gaza.
And the word is that much of what the Israelis are now doing is in fact directed by the U.S., by the Central Command, which now is regularly in liaison with the Israelis.
And there's a lot of complaining in Israel about the forfeiture of Israeli sovereignty.
Of course, that's a bit of a canard because everybody knows Israel does not exercise sovereignty in Gaza.
It has no legal right to do anything there.
It is an occupying force.
It has violated every obligation of military occupation, as well as numerous other provisions of international law.
And it is avoiding the main issue, which is self-determination for Palestinians, just like self-determination for Israelis.
I wonder why Prime Minister Netanyahu felt the need in the past week to deny twice two different forums that this proposal, which then was just a proposal yesterday, it was actually passed by the Security Council, that this proposal might lead to a Palestinian state.
You have that on one hand, and then the other hand, you have this horrible person, Danny Dannon, who's the Israeli, this guy is one of character, the Israeli ambassador to the UN embracing Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN when this thing passed.
Is Netanyahu under heat from the right wing to distance himself from this Security Council resolution?
I think he's under pressure from the vast majority of Israelis who don't accept the idea that it can be Palestinian self-determination or a Palestinian state and never have.
The essence of Zionism is to create a state of Israel, which, by the way, doesn't have any firm borders.
It just keeps expanding whenever it can, annexing territory without any Palestinian presence at all, if they can get rid of all of them.
So he's under pressure from domestic politics to demonstrate that Israel has not given up either its sovereignty or the Zionist dream of ethnic cleansing.
How can a country that authorizes genocide, murder, rape, and theft of property be accepted in the international community?
Well, the fact is it isn't.
It is accepted only in the West at this point, and not everywhere in the West.
It is in the UN.
It has not been suspended, as South Africa was for apartheid, which was a far less violent and contemptuous overthrow of international law.
It's there.
It has a very powerful lobby in the United States.
When you see Mike Walsh embracing Danon, that's performative for the lobby.
And so the thing is that this is really totally isolating the United States.
And the fact that the Chinese and the Russians felt free to just stand aside and let us do this thing in the Security Council is not a triumph of our influence.
It's evidence of the ebb of our influence.
Interesting.
Switching gears to Europe.
Do the folks running NATO really think they can win this proxy war against Russia?
Or can't they sense reality at this point?
Well, a close encounter with reality does seem to be setting in.
You see two things happening.
One, of course, the acceleration of the collapse of the Ukrainian armed forces along the battle line.
Russian advance is now accelerating and Ukrainian losses climbing sky high.
Ukraine just doesn't have the manpower, person power, if you will, to continue this fight on the offensive on an effective basis.
And even Zelensky seems to be recognizing that.
The second factor is that the Europeans have been basically handed the bag by the United States.
They now have to finance Ukraine.
So Ursula von der Leyen, who is a hardliner on Ukraine, says, well, there are only a couple of ways to do this.
We would have to all come up with the money, but nobody has the money.
Nobody wants them to come up with the money.
Or we could float a bond against the seized Russian assets.
But the Belgians and others who understand the implications of that for international finance and the credibility of the banking system balk at that.
And one reason they do is that they believe they would be liable for the seizure of those assets if it ever came to a legal decision.
So the Europeans, on the one hand, are beginning to realize that the game is pretty much up.
And you hear people saying very intelligently now, although still at the fringe, look, we need to work out a pan-Eurasian settlement of this.
We need to talk to the Chinese who came up with a 12-point so-called plan, really a statement of principles about how Ukraine, the Ukraine war should end.
We need to talk to the Chinese.
We need to talk to the Russians.
We need to come up with a new security architecture that protects our interests.
And the implication of that is you've got to protect Russian and Chinese interests too.
Where's the United States in this dialogue?
Nowhere.
Nowhere.
Why do you think that MI6, the reputation of which is worse than the CIA for engaging in clandestine activities and overthrowing governments, is washing its hands of Trump's murders on the high seas in the Caribbean and doing so publicly.
No, it's really quite remarkable because it's a break with the 80-year long U.S.-UK intelligence cooperation alliance, which has gone through various phases over the course of those eight decades, but which has always been intimate and special.
And it is the core of the so-called five eyes international espionage machine, the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
But we've managed to alienate Canada, which has also stopped sharing intelligence on the Caribbean.
The Dutch have done the same.
They have, of course, Aruba, Curaçao, and so on as part of the Netherlands in the Caribbean.
And I believe the French have done the same, although the French are more discreet about things like this than the Anglo-Saxons and the Dutch.
So what's the reason behind this?
MI6 and the British establishment understand and have said these attacks are illegal.
They would subject those who carry them out to prosecution.
And they are war crimes and acts of piracy.
And we don't want to be associated with that.
We don't want to have the liability of having conducted such activities or being complicit in them.
Ergo, we will no longer supply intelligence.
Same thing's happened, by the way, with Colombia.
85% of actionable intelligence on narcotics matters has come from the Colombians.
So we've just lost that intelligence.
The net result of this is not going to be a reduction in drug smuggling into the United States, but an increase, because we've been blinded, essentially, in many ways.
So what will happen there, the only beneficiaries of this are the addicts, because if the supply goes up, the price will go down.
And the odd thing is that everything we've been doing in this area, trying to deal with this as a supply problem, just puts the price up, which means that the drug smugglers make a bigger profit.
We're now doing the opposite, although not intending to do it.
Later today, I'll be speaking to Sheriff David Hathaway, who's the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona, but for 30 years was a DEA agent and his last several years was in a supervisory capacity looking for sources for drugs in the Caribbean.
I think he's going to tell me the very same thing that you just said.
Well, I was involved when I ran the embassy in Bangkok.
I was the regional Southeast Asia drug coordinator, if you will.
And I learned a lot.
And here's the reality.
Let's just talk about fentanyl, which obviously doesn't come from Venezuela, but Mexico.
If you take $1 and you buy the precursor drugs for fentanyl, when you produce that fentanyl, that will be worth $500 on the streets of New York.
So there is a markup that is astronomical.
And there is no way, given the level of profitability in that smuggling and trade and pushing, that you can hope to interrupt the flow of drugs into the United States.
We have the problem.
We have the addiction.
There are 40 to 50,000 Americans who die every year from fentanyl.
And nobody in Colombia or Venezuela or China or even Mexico administered those drugs to them.
They bought them and consumed them and paid the price.
We need to deal with this on the demand side, just as we did with smoking.
I mean, I was an inveterate smoker for years.
And finally, social pressure and propaganda and needling by my wife caused me to quit.
So it can be done.
Nicotine is very addictive and just as addictive as opioids.
And we just need to come up with a different plan because this isn't going to work.
I'm glad you quit.
My father was four packs a day for 40 years, starting at age 17 in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where cigarettes were distributed by the government along with your meals.
Then, of course, he eventually quit and became a bit of a crusader.
He'd see a stranger in a restaurant smoking and he'd go up to the guy.
He didn't even know him and start giving him a lecture about how much healthier you will be once you stop.
And the stopping probably extended my father's life.
He since has passed at age 92, but it probably extended his life by a good 10 years.
I'll have to turn into the Judge Napolitano show in 2050.
Are you surprised that the White House is hosting Mohammed Vin Salman, who ordered a reporter for the Washington Post to be butchered and slaughtered in the embassy of Saudi Arabia located in Turkey?
No, after all, the White House regularly receives Benjamin Netanyahu, who has murdered more than one person, I believe.
In fact, the deaths are numbered probably in the hundreds of thousands.
So, you know, geopolitics is not a moral science.
That is correct.
But more important, Donald Trump is not a noted moral philosopher.
There's not much evidence that he's driven by moral reasoning on anything.
And so what is he driven by?
In this case, pomp ceremony that the Saudis provide to him when he goes there, but also the promise of a lot of money, some of it real.
So we're going to get apparently a sale of F-35s, probably downgraded somehow so that they couldn't win an air battle against the Israeli Air Force.
But a lot of money for Lockheed Martin.
And that will gratify our president.
He measures things very much in financial terms.
Might he also be interested in Trump towers throughout Saudi Arabia?
He's apparently got a plan for that in Jada.
And I don't know where, maybe Riyadh, I'm not sure.
So, I mean, we have a businessman, Ms. President, and not one constrained by moral reason.
Wow.
Ambassador, thank you very much for your time and thank you for letting me go across the board on these topics.
Actually, before we go, how much longer do you think Ukraine can last?
I meant to ask you this earlier.
Last week, the government fired two of President Zelensky's closest advisors, one of whom, the Minister of Justice, or I forget if it was Justice or Energy, was a longtime friend of his, because of public corruption.
We've known of the corruption for years.
All of a sudden, it's on the front pages in Kyiv newspapers.
Well, I think those are really two questions.
One is how long is Zelensky going to last?
Because there's a lot of pushback against rather credible reports of his own involvement in corruption.
And these advisors were very close to him.
And the amount of money was significant.
And people are fed up with the war and the whole situation.
And they may very well take it out on Mr. Zelensky.
The second question is: how long will Ukraine be able to resist the Russians?
And the answer there is: Ukraine seems to have an inexhaustible supply of bravery and is quite ingenious on the battlefield, but it is up against the wall, and nobody can tell you how long it's going to last.
But we can see that at some moment in the year, maybe this year, maybe next year, Ukraine will fold.
Ukraine will fold.
Ambassador, thank you very much for your time, my dear friend.
Next week is a short week, but because of Thanksgiving here in the U.S., but we'll look forward to seeing you.
Hope so.
Okay.
Thank you.
All the best.
Coming up later today at 10 o'clock this morning, Alistair Crook at 1 o'clock, Sheriff David Hathaway, the former senior official of the Drug Enforcement Administration at 2 o'clock, Matt Ho, at 3 o'clock, Colonel Karen Kwatkowski.