Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté: US Media and Syrian Terrorists

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Aaron Maté: US Media and Syrian TerroristsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, December 18, 2024. Apologies for the mix-up. Colonel McGregor will be on at two o'clock this afternoon, Eastern. Aaron Maté is with us now. We had a technical glitch and we have now addressed it. Aaron, thank you for your patience. Always a pleasure, my dear friend. When President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that they wanted to undermine the Assad government in Syria in 2011, 12, 13, in that era. What did they give as a basis for it? If I recall correctly, Obama basically said that Assad had lost legitimacy because of his crackdown on the uprising against him then. Now, they weren't telling the full story because the part that they were leaving out was that the U.S. and its allies

had been flooding Syria with weapons, and Turkey was letting militants from around the world cross its border into Syria to fight alongside the insurgents trying to topple Assad. And so in the process, you had the Syrian government fight a battle to prevent regime change. And Obama basically conflated Assad's crackdown on peaceful protesters, which did happen, with his government's war to prevent regime change against one of the most well-armed insurgencies in the world.

And this is a fundamental conflation that people don't know about because the media did such a skillful job covering it up. So, for example, most people don't know about Timber Sycamore, which is the CIA program that was one of the most expensive covert operations in history, which is how Obama and Clinton and the other people in their administration spent billions of dollars arming this insurgency. And just to illustrate the impact, a few years later, David Ignatius reported in the Washington Post, that according to U.S. officials, militants trained and armed by the U.S. had killed or wounded over 100,000 Syrian soldiers. So basically, Obama said that Assad lost legitimacy because of his response to a dirty war that we helped initiate. And that's

far different than Assad cracking down on peaceful protesters demanding reforms, which again, I want to stress that did happen, but that was not the cause of the bulk of the carnage inside of Syria. The bulk of the carnage inside Syria came because the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, France, the UK, and others were arming one of the most well-funded insurgencies in history. And the Syrian government, along with its allies, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia responded to that. Why did the U.S. arm an insurgency it knew was dominated by al-Qaeda and had committed atrocities on civilians? That's a great question. I'd love to see a straight answer to that question from the principals, from Obama, from Clinton,

from Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Samantha Power. I mean, some of those people are still in power now, including the president himself. Before you begin your analysis, should the Trump administration, obviously the first one, be in that group as well? Well, Trump did shut down the CIA program. He pointed out that a lot of these weapons ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda.

He was correct. So Trump actually shut down the CIA program. Now, Trump, though, his hands aren't clean because although he shut down the CIA program of arming the insurgency, he imposed crippling sanctions that helped further impoverish ordinary Syrians. And he also kept the US military occupation in Northeastern Syria that stole Syria's oil and wheat. So he still pursued the policy of regime change, not via arming an al-Qaeda-dominated insurgency, but by stealing Syria's resources so that it remained poor and by imposing sanctions that raise the price of food and fuel and deprive Syrians of their own resources. And that, alongside the CIA program, did help contribute to the regime change.

All right, now back to Obama, Clinton, Biden, maybe George W. I don't know. You're more familiar with the history. Arming an insurgency they knew was dominated by Al Qaeda. For years, Americans were told, Al Qaeda's the monster. Al Qaeda's the monster. We were funding these people? Correct. And during the Bush administration, I mean, there's the famous story of Wesley Clark, the U.S. general, going to the Pentagon right after 9-11 and being told that Donald Rumsfeld has drafted up plans to overthrow a group of countries, including Iraq, but also Iran and Syria. So Syria was marked for regime change. And the reason was pretty clear that Syria was a part of the axis of resistance. It's through Syria that Hezbollah was able to get weapons through which it could resist Israeli aggression. And the U.S. wanted to take out all these countries that resisted Israeli aggression because simply they were so committed to Israel's goal of preventing a Palestinian state. As long as you have resistance to Israel, then Israel will face major problems in expanding its settlements and in stealing the Palestinian land that it wants,

and in denying Palestinians the right to self-determination. So if you take out the acts of resistance, the states that support Palestinians, you make it a lot easier for Israel to never have to worry about granting Palestinians their most minimal rights. And so that's why Syria was marked for regime change. That's why there's a cable from the U.S. embassy in Damascus from 2006, this is under Bush, talking about the major vulnerabilities inside Syria that Assad has and how the U.S. can exploit those vulnerabilities. And the main one, the main vulnerability that they identified was the transiting of what the cable called

Islamic extremists. That Islamic extremists were a major threat to the Assad government. And the U.S. talked about wanting to make sure that those vulnerabilities were even more acute. And that's what happened in 2011 when you had protests break out in Syria as part of the Arab Spring.

And initially, yes, I mean, I have friends who took part in those protests and they went out because they were protesting a repressive government that denied people their political freedoms. If you criticize the government, you'd get in trouble. You could even be tortured. And they wanted reforms.

They also wanted to stop all the corruption that was happening. But those protests, those peaceful protests were not the only story. There was also a sectarian component from the start. People who wanted to overthrow the government because of their own sectarian views. There was a famous chant from the very start that said, Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave. And it's that sectarian component, not the peaceful, nonviolent reformist component that the U.S. and their allies exploited

by arming sectarian insurgents. And that is what then led to the regime change operation. And Hillary Clinton, you can read emails released by WikiLeaks showing that if we do this, if we overthrow Assad, that will be a huge gift to Israel. So basically, that was the major goal right there. And that's why we're willing to arm an al-Qaeda-dominated insurgency, because it was more important in the eyes of U.S. officials to help safeguard Israeli aggression than it was to stop the flow of

terrorism around the world, including the growth of al-Qaeda and ISIS inside Syria. Here's a clip of General Wesley Clark saying exactly what you said he said. I believe it's in 2007, Chris. He said, I just got this down from upstairs, meeting the Secretary of Defense's office today. And he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. I said, is it classified? He said, yes, sir. I said,

I said, well, don't show it to me. If you were Iran, you'd probably believe that you were mostly already at war with the United States anyway, since we've asserted that their government needs regime change. And we've asked Congress to appropriate $75 million to do it, and we are supporting terrorist groups, apparently, who are infiltrating and blowing up things inside Iraq, Iran. And if we're not doing it, let's put it this way, we're probably cognizant of it and encouraging it. So it's not surprising that we're moving to a point of confrontation crisis with Iran all right the clip is from 2007 but it recounts events obviously uh earlier than that I don't think rumsfeld was the secretary of defense in 2007 but your point your point is the same the United States just draws up a list of countries it wants

to overthrow it doesn't care what laws it breaks to overthrow them, bringing us back to where we were before we ran the General Clark clip. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. The federal government has made it a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to provide material assistance to a terrorist organization. The same statute allows the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury or the Secretary of the Treasury to declare an organization a terrorist organization. Al-Qaeda, HTS are terrorist organizations. Al-Jalani, the head of it, has a $10 million bounty on his head. The CIA provided material assistance to him and to his

organization. Should anybody in the CIA be worried about being prosecuted? Well, if our laws were actually applied, sure, they should be worried about it. But of course, we know that they're not. And so in the US, even if you arm an al-Qaeda dominated insurgency, if it serves US foreign policy goals, then that's seen as a success. In fact, one of the few New York Times articles to report on the CIA dirty war in Syria talked about how when insurgents were able to capture Idlib, the province of Idlib, back in 2015, that that was seen as one of the program's few areas of success. Well, what happened in Idlib? That insurgent offensive was led by al-Jalani's forces. It was led by al-Qaeda. And that's why when they took over Idlib with the help of the CIA in 2015, al-Jalani and his group, which was then under a different name,

became the rulers. And it was from their perch in Idlib that they were able to then launch this recent offensive that took over the rest of Syria. A few years after Jelani's forces captured Idlib, Brett McGurk, who currently serves in the Biden administration as a senior official for Middle East policy, he called Idlib Al-Qaeda's largest safe haven since 9-11, which means the U.S. knowingly created al-Qaeda's largest safe haven since 9-11. And it was from their safe haven that they're able to expand it to the rest of Syria. And now we're in this awkward position of having a $10 million bounty on the head of a guy whose safe haven we not only created, helped create, but have now just expanded

to the rest of Syria. And so when British officials last week or a few days ago went and met with Jalani, there was no call from the State Department for them to not do that or for them to collect the $10 million bounty because we're okay, I guess, with having a former leader of Al-Qaeda now rule over Syria. And apparently they actually discussed removing him from the terror listing of Great Britain and discussed it in a straight-laced, open way as if it were a legitimate negotiating point. So putting somebody on a terror list is just a political goal. It's not a law enforcement act. I mean, just as we saw with the destruction of Gaza, that

are words about international law, human rights, it's all just complete jargon. It means absolutely nothing. The same applies to our concern about terrorism, that if somebody serves the goals of US hegemony, then they're not a terrorist. They're an asset, as James Jeffrey, who served under Trump, called Jelani. He literally said that Jelani and al-Qaeda, they're an asset to U.S. policy in Syria. And he was right. One of the complaints that Obama made over and over as a justification for toppling Assad was his alleged use of chemical weapons. You have debunked that more than anybody else that I know. Did the White House ever take any of your research? Well, you know, this is an issue that is very sensitive.

And if you read media accounts, they all parrot the line from the Obama administration that, yes, the Syrian government used chemical weapons. But if you look at all the major cases, they're undermined extensively, not just by logic, but by leaks. Now, by logic, they're undermined by the fact that why would Assad do the one thing that he knows would invite U.S. military intervention. Obama said with the so-called red line comment that I'm not going to intervene in Syria militarily with airstrikes, but the one thing that would change my calculus is if chemical weapons are used. So therefore he created an incentive for anybody who wants U.S. military intervention to use chemical weapons. And he certainly created a disincentive for Assad to use them because Assad now knows that the one

thing that he could do to invite U.S. military intervention, which he does not want, obviously, would be to use chemical weapons. So just even putting aside the evidence, logically, it never made any sense. And then you look at the evidence, take the case of Ghouta in 2013, which is when Obama was pressured to enforce the red line. The reason why he didn't enforce the red line is because his own intelligence officials, including James Clapper, went to him and said, the intelligence here that Assad did is not a slam dunk. That was a deliberate reference to the Iraq WMD scam,

invoking the line of George Tenet, who headed the CIA under George W. Bush. Then you fast forward to the most recent allegation of chemical weapons used by Syria. This is Douma, April 2018. Video put out of dozens of dead bodies. Trump saw this and then bombed Syria in purported retaliation. But then we got a series of leaks from the world's top chemical weapons watchdog,

which for the first time in many years had sent a team to Syria to deploy on the ground at the site of an alleged chemical attack. And we know now from leaked documents, and I've reported on this extensively, that those leaked documents show that the investigators found evidence that undermined the allegation against Syria and that pointed to this incident being staged on the ground by insurgents, which again, logically makes sense because it's insurgents who want the U.S. to militarily intervene on their side. Now, these leaked documents showed there was a huge coverup at the OPCW. The original findings were censored. They were doctored. The original team was removed from the investigation and they put out a series of reports publicly that contradicted what the team actually found.

And if you read U.S. media accounts, these OPCW whistleblowers, the people who challenged the cover-up of their investigation and their leaked documents, they just don't exist. They just do not exist at all. So read any mainstream account about Syria chemical weapons. They will not acknowledge the existence of the OPCW leaks and the whistleblowers. And the reason is very obvious, is because if you acknowledge the leaks, if you acknowledge the whistleblowers, then you have to refute what they said. And their findings are based in science, because they're scientists. So they can't be refuted. So therefore, for the purposes of has not been on Gaza since the overthrow of Assad and now the murder of this general in Moscow.

Is the IDF continuing to kill innocents in Gaza? And by the way, has Israel ever given a rational number for the number of innocents it has slaughtered? No. And in fact, Israel apologists are now promoting a supposed study from something called the Henry Jackson Society, which is just a neoconservative think tank, saying that the death toll has been overblown, that the amount of civilians is way less than what the health ministry in Gaza says. It's complete garbage. No one should take it seriously.

To me, it's the equivalent of Nazi Holocaust denial. But that's what Israel is doing, is just trying to deny the death toll. If there's anything to be said about the death toll, the official death toll from the Gaza health ministry, is that it's a vast undercount. How can you possibly account for all the dead bodies under the rubble, all the people who have been killed in a territory that's just been completely demolished? What does Hamas or the Hamas health ministry say the death toll is now, more or less? I believe their official toll is still in the 40,000 to 50,000 range. But it's just, there have been so many studies, like in the Lancet,

speculating that the toll is far higher. And that just makes sense, given the sheer amount of destruction that Israel has brought to Gaza with these massive bombs, bombing an area where people cannot escape, and that is very densely populated, more than 2 million people. So if anything- Is Israel still bombing Gaza while it's bombing Syria? Yes, it has. Yes, it has. And their massacres have become so normalized that they barely make a blip now in our news media. They're barely reported.

But these massacres continue. They've been happening at the same places, at shelters, in hospitals. All the same locations where civilians who have managed to survive this genocide so far are taking refuge, and they're still being massacred in the supposed safe zones where Israel says that civilians can flee to. What media entities in the U.S. are cooperating with the CIA's efforts to legitimize and westernize and humanize al-Jalani? Well, the same media outlets that have been whitewashing the dirty war in Syria for more than a decade, they've been whitewashing the sanctions. If you read the New York Times, they have these, or CNN or the Washington Post, all of them have examples about how Jelani is a changed man. He's wearing a blazer

now, a suit blazer. He's turned in his green fatigues for a blazer. Now he's changed his ways. I mean, just the fact that you can take someone who was a former leader of Al Qaeda in Syria, a former deputy leader of ISIS, someone who's presided over atrocities against civilians, and also, by the way, the killing of American soldiers in Iraq, and take him and now make him to be a moderate figure just because he serves US foreign policy goals. It just shows how completely corrupted our media has been. And this is just par for the course. There's a long history of people who become friends after their enemies just simply because they serve US foreign policy goals. In the case of Osama bin Laden, for example, he was once a friend, then he became an enemy.

But if Osama bin Laden were still alive today, I don't know if he'd still be an enemy, given that he was part of the same group that al-Jalani was a part of, and al-Jalani is now taking over Syria. Well, after he died, or after he was murdered, the government decided that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind, not Osama bin Laden. Last question. Under the hands, I guess there's an area of Syria that al-Julani and his people control. In that area, are Christians safe? Well, this is where it gets complicated. And I hear all these sort of conflicting reports. Now, when Jelani's forces took over Idlib in 2015, the Christian population of Idlib

went from about 1,200 or so to literally three. After a few years, there were literally three Christians left in Idlib. Now, recently, Jelani said that we have to treat all minorities with respect. And you do hear reports sometimes about his forces intervening to stop attacks on minorities like Christians and Alawites. So I don't want to say that that's not happening. At the same time, you also still get reports about forces attacking Christians, attacking Alawites and people being scared. So it's a complicated picture, but that's just to be expected in a war zone, in a country that's destroyed from years of war and sanctions and military occupation,

and that is flooded with weapons and foreign militants from around the world. If you watch some of the videos of the militants who supposedly liberated Syria, they're not even Syrian and they don't even speak Arabic. They come from places like Xinjiang in China and other places. So it's a complicated picture. So yes, you will find some cases where minorities, they're being protected, other cases where they're being attacked. And that's just inevitable when

you decide on a policy to arm an Al-Qaeda dominated insurgency in Syria, and then pretend as if everything's going to be fine once they take over. Do you foresee a conflict between Israel and Turkey over these land grabs in which the two of them are engaged even as we speak in Syria? I don't actually foresee a conflict there. I think Israel and Turkey, despite all the harsh rhetoric that is thrown by the turkish government against israel i think they're tacit allies if not if not over allies um when it comes to syria all their actions in syria have sort of been oddly in sync that i never see turkey do anything that undermines the israeli position and vice versa so i don't expect to see a clash between these two they both wanted they both got what they wanted. They wanted to destroy Syria as a state.

And now, you know, Turkey is going to take over the parts that it wants. And Israel is already taking over the parts that it wants to. So I see a lot more harmony there than I do see discord. Aaron, thank you very much, my dear friend. And thank you for all you've done for the viewers, for our team, and for me personally in the past year. I trust we can continue our collaboration after the holidays when we're back in 2025. Sounds good, Judge. And my appreciation to you, your staff, and all your fans. It's a real pleasure to be a part of your show.

So thank you. Thank you. All the best to you and your family. And coming up later today at two o'clock Eastern, Colonel Douglas McGregor at three thirty Eastern Phil Giraldi. And if you want to hear or read, I should say about my encounter with a drone over my property in New Jersey, the column is called Shoot the Drones. It'll be up tonight at midnight Eastern time on judgnap.com. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. We'll see you next time. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future.

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