Judging Freedom - AMB. Chas Freeman : Does Anyone Want Peace?

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

AMB. Chas Freeman : Does Anyone Want Peace?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Tuesday, December 9th, 2005 Ambassador Chas Freeman. We'll be with us in just a moment. Does anybody want peace? But first this. History tells us every market eventually falls. Currencies collapse. And look at where we are now. 38 trillion in national debt. Stocks at record highs defying gravity. So what happens next? Groceries, gas, housing, everything's going up.

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Is it too late to buy or is it just? the right time call my friends at lear capital to find out ask questions get the free information there's no pressure and that's why i buy my gold and silver from lear and right now you can get up to twenty thousand dollars in bonus medals with a qualified purchase call 800511 4620 or go to lear judge nap dot com today ambassador freeman welcome here my dear friend thank you as always for accommodating my schedule. I want to start out with the latest on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Our dear friend and colleague Alster Crook reports of evidence in the bubbling up in the Israeli press that Netanyahu is extorting the Israeli president to get him to give the Prime Minister a pardon.

he apparently believes that he will be convicted in his three criminal prosecutions. And of course, he wants the pardon without the Israeli legal precondition for a pardon, which is an admission of guilt. How do you see this? Well, I don't know anything about the details of this, but I'll simply say that it's entirely consistent with Prime Minister Netanyahu's behavior over the years. He is an extortionist. He's a manipulator. He is constantly evades legal standards. There is widespread belief that he is guilty of the corruption with which he's charged.

He's made every effort he could possibly make to avoid having that trial continued to a conviction, including perpetuating Israel's wars on its neighbors and genocide against the Palestinians because wartime prime ministership is a guarantee of immunity from immediate conviction. So I think this is entirely credible. And of course, as you said, he hasn't met the preconditioned for a pardon, which is an admission of guilt, some kind of plea bargain. He continues to insist that everything he did was legitimate. And his case basically is that Israel is at war and therefore he should be excused from liability.

That isn't very convincing to anybody, I think. Is his government complying with the so-called peace or ceasefire agreement? And I know this is going to sound ridiculous. Is Tony Blair actually going to become the Governor General of Gaza? I think the answer is no and no. That is, whereas Hamas has kept the terms of the so-called peace agreement, which isn't a peace agreement at all, it's a ceasefire flavored with promises of peace,

which will probably never be realized. Israel continues to kill. kill people daily, carry out airstrikes, sniper attacks, murder children who stray into areas it doesn't want Palestinians to be in. It has not withdrawn from the from Khasa. It continues to occupy it. It insists on the disarmament of Hamas but offers no nothing in return. It wants an international force to do what it failed to do, what it couldn't do, which was to subdue Hamas and disarm it. No, it is not complying with the so-called peace plan, even at the level of a ceasefire. And so no and no.

What kind of a peace plan ceasefire agreement, whatever you want to call it, would allow one side to craft imaginary lines and murder people, including children who cross the imaginary lines. These yellow lines, I'm told, we are told by Alastair Crook, don't actually exist. They're not visible to the naked eye. It's just a line in the mind of the IDF. You went one step too far, even though you're 14 years old. We're going to kill you. Right.

No, I mean, I think the basic flaw here is obvious, and it's apparent not just a in the Gaza context, the various peace agreements that our President Donald Trump has celebrated with pseudo events of one sort or another signing ceremonies and so forth are all fictional. They are at most temporary ceasefires. You see this most clearly, perhaps, with the much-valued piece

that he allegedly arranged between Thailand and Cambodia, Thailand is now bombing Cambodia. The Royal Thai Air Force is in action. The Cambodians are firing back. There's a war going on. There's a war going on between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, notwithstanding the claim that peace was made there. There is a war continuing.

There is no peace between India and Pakistan. There is no peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There is no peace in Gaza. There is no peace between Israel and Iran. There is no peace. between Israel and Yemen. There's no peace between Israel and Lebanon, despite an American arranged so-called peace plan in SISFAR. There's no peace between Israel and Syria. And so what's the problem? The problem is that the United States purports to be a mediator in many of these

situations, and yet we are a co-belligerent. That is the case in Ukraine. You cannot be a mediator, a good faith conciliator, if you are, in fact, a participant in the war on one side, and that is where we are, both in Israel and in Ukraine. The Financial Times just reported not too long ago, Tony Blair out of running for Gaza Peace Board. I'm reading from the opening paragraph, Tony Blair has been dropped from consideration for Donald Trump, quote, Board of Peace, closed quote, in Gaza, following objections from several Arab and Muslim states said people familiar with the matter. I assume that that would mean he's not going to be the governor general either if he's not going to be on the peace report. The whole thing was a joke.

Every time I ask one of our colleagues like you about it, everybody smiles. I mean, it's inconceivable. That's right. But the whole neo-colonial project for Gaza is still born. The idea that there would be an international force paid for by Arab countries to come in and make peace in Gaza to do what the IDF was unable to do, which is to pacify Gaza and end of the Palestinian drive for self-determination has always been preposterous. And we see, of course, most competent military in the region, the Turks have been banned by Israel for participation. So this whole thing is an American effort to implement for Israel on behalf of Israel, a plan that Israel drew up to evict Palestinians. Palestinians are now able to leave Gaza, theoretically, according to the Israelis, that the Rafa crossing, Egypt, which is on the other side of the crossing, says no, that can't work because those who leave must have the right to re-enter. And Israel says, anyone who leaves, it's gone forever. So Israel remains

very much the occupying power in Gaza, and we are simply its tool. So the national security strategy are released yesterday or over the weekend by the White House, which laughingly refers to President Trump as the president of peace, is relatively silent on Iran and Venezuela. Do you know if the Israelis are still planning to invade Iran? if the United States will back them up? Well, they say they are. They say they plan to attack in Iran.

Their objective remains not just regime change, but the breakup of Iran into various smaller and more controllable policies. So, I mean, I think you have to take them seriously on that. Will the United States join them? I hope not, but we did join them in the attack in June. And then, in the end, when Iran proved able to penetrate Israeli defenses with ease, as it used its hypersonic missile arsenal and other weapons,

having exhausted earlier less capable weapons in earlier rounds, Israel lost the ability to defend itself. We couldn't defend it. And so we proposed a ceasefire. There was a ceasefire. Iran has said, however, that it does. expect to be attacked again by Israel, that it's ready for that if it happens, and that the response will not be as restrained as it was in the last round when Iran targeted only military

and intelligence facilities. Perhaps Iran will target, we'll do what Israel does and target civilians. Wow. One would hope not, but who knows what will happen. But the, the, the, the of the so-called self-proclamation of the president of peace while, and you just ticked off all the hot spots in the world where he claims to have caused peace, and in fact he hasn't in any of them. Oh, yes, he's brought people to the White House for meaningless ceremonial signings, but they didn't bring about peace at all. He's obviously still making a push for the Nobel priest prize, which he ardently covets, and I believe either the nominations for it or the voting for it, even though it doesn't come out for another nine or ten months, concludes pretty soon.

The situation in Venezuela doesn't seem to be getting any better Colonel Wilkerson opines, Larry Wilkerson, that the government is spending a billion dollars a day. You would know this from your past experience in the Defense Department. That's very plausible. Housing 20,000 troops and all those ships, who don't even

know the number of ships, you might have an idea how many ships travel with the Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world. What is he planning to do with him? We don't know.

He has not gone to Congress with request for a declaration of war. He plans evidently to continue to put pressure on Venezuela. This is part of a two-decade long effort by the United States to engineer regime change in Venezuela, which is consistently failed. I don't think there's any reason to believe this is going to work either. And if we do invade Venezuela, I think we're going to find it a tougher not to crack than we did Vietnam. So, in the meantime, of course, the collateral damage to our reputation and relationships in the hemisphere has been very great.

Colombia has ceased to cooperate with us in interditing the narcotics trade from Colombia. 85% of our actionable intelligence on that subject has come from Colombia, now deprived of it. So the net effect of everything we're doing is probably to ease the passage of drugs into our into our society i know that there are huge contradictions in the so-called national security strategy which isn't a strategy at all it's a mishmash of praise for the president um gripes and grumbles resentments and and tactical adjustments many of them contradictory no more no more so than in the Western Hemisphere, where we propose to reinstall an invigorated, more aggressive

form of the Monroe Doctrine than we've ever had, in which everyone else is to respect our sovereignty and we respect no one else's. And the assumption somehow is that by doing this, we will keep the Chinese and other extra atmospheric forces away from influence in South America, Central America, the Caribbean Basin. but in fact you don't get cooperation from people you don't become an alternative to China

or any other country that offers investment and infrastructure construction and trade by bullying people and that's what we propose to do so this is something that on its face is a

looming disaster I have been arguing for a couple of weeks now more pointedly in the past week when we learned about the incident on September 2nd where two survivors clung to the wreckage of their boat for 45 minutes and then the military decided to kill them very intensely. I have argued that not just this second kill, the killing of the survivors after the boat had been blown up, is illegal and unconstitutional. But the entire project is illegal and unconstitutional. The president can't just paint somebody with a political brush, narco-terrorist. That's a political phrase, not a legal

one, and claim that that gives him the authority to kill them. The president can only kill in wartime when Congress has declared war, and it can only kill soldiers of the country against which the Congress has declared war, or you can execute people after due process in the United States. And of course, none of that has happened. But Trump did predict that he'd be doing this. Now, here he is in the presidential debates in 2016. He looks about 30 years younger than he looks today. And this is a little difficult to watch because he's at his bombastic worst. But here he is telling me, telling my friend and former colleague, Brett Baer, there is no such things in an illegal order. The military will do whatever I tell them to do.

So what would you do as commander-in-chief if the U.S. military refused to carry out those orders? They won't refuse. They're not going to refuse me. Believe me. But they're illegal. They then came to me. What do you think of order? I said, it's fine. And if we want to go stronger, I'd go stronger too, because frankly, that's the way I feel. Can you imagine, can you imagine these people, these animals over in the Middle East that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we're having a hard problem with waterboarding. We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding.

But targeting terrorist families? And I'm a leader. I'm a leader. I've always been a leader. I've never had any problem, leading people. If I say do it, they're going to do it. Colonel McGregor says when the Admiral was ordered to kill people, he should have ignored the order. Absolutely ignored the order. Now, this admiral, in my view,

as well as the people that obeyed him, are potential defendants in military court marshals. Absolutely. I mean, the irony of this, happening now. I don't know if you're aware there is a videotape that was taken of a secret trial through the Tiananman student and worker uprising against the Chinese government occurred in 2000, in the 2000, sorry, in 1989. The general in charge of the Beijing garrison got in order to go and clear the square and he refused on the grounds that it was an illegal order.

So here we have a Chinese communist general holding himself to a standard that our military apparently don't hold themselves to anymore. I absolutely agree with you. The admiral received an illegal order. He should never have executed it. And beyond that, I think What we're seeing in this case is the typical reaction of the Trump administration, maybe the Biden administration wasn't any better, and that is it didn't happen. No, that didn't happen.

Oh, I didn't see it. Or I wasn't there. I didn't know about it. Or it was right, you know, the right thing to do. It's legal, although no lawyer agrees. So this is a series of verifications, which is a disgrace. to our country, and which totally negates

the rule of law, which made us great. Let me take you back to a recent history with which I know you're personally familiar. When the Kremlin pulled out of the Warsaw Pact, why didn't the US pull out of NATO? Well, there was a real question about whether we should do that. I think, you know, I was there and played a role in inventing the alternative

to a U.S. withdrawal, which I in some ways now regret having done, and that was based on several conclusions. First, that Europe did need a comprehensive cooperative security system, that NATO would be the vehicle for establishing that, that is all Europeans should be in a common security space, that the United States, as the 20th century had shown, could not afford to remain aloof from Europe, for many reasons, not only because we were essential as a balancer to the Soviet Union, Russian Federation, but also because smaller countries in Europe wanted us as to balance her against a powerful Germany. And finally, that basically we had an opportunity to extend the benefits of Western civilization east, not necessarily in the future. form of military alliance, but that we should challenge the countries of Europe, Eastern Europe,

to prove that they were European by adopting two things. First, parliamentary oversight of military budgets and civilian control of the military, something foreign to the Soviet tradition or the Eastern European tradition under the satellite arrangements with Moscow. And second, that they should, should learn the 3,000 standardization agreements in NATO, which enable the Greek and a Turk, even though they don't speak the same language and despise each other to cooperate in military operations like search and rescue. And thereby, if they were Polish, demonstrate that we're, instead of just asking people in Portugal to die for their defense, they would be prepared to die for the benefit of people in Portugal.

So all of this made a certain amount of sense, but it was captured by the neocons, turned into a military march into Eastern Europe against Russia. The Cold War, which had ended, was revived by this. And here we are, with NATO enlargement, having brought about a Russian response that was entirely predictable, which the Russians constantly warned us of, and which is, led to the essential destruction of Ukraine. So the Europeans cannot be happy with two documents that have come out of Washington recently. One, we still don't know who wrote it or how it came out, the so-called 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine,

which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but the essence of it didn't please them. And two, the national security strategy, which clearly doesn't please them. I wish that you or one of us could have been a fly on the wall yesterday at 10 Downing Street when Vladimir Zelensky met with Prime Minister Starmor and Chancellor Murs and President Macron. What the hell could they have talked about? They can't borrow money. They can't increase taxes. Belgium won't let them steal the Russian money. What are they going to do?

Well, one thing they've done, I think, is put President Zelens. Zelensky up saying that he's not going to cede any territory at all for Russia, as though he hadn't already lost it on the battlefield. And the response from the White House seems to be a call for new elections in Ukraine because President Zelensky is long past his constitutional term in office. And I think he deserves a good deal of blame for what he, for his repudiation of his own campaign platform and pledges to honor the Minsk Accords and give the eastern oblasts in Ukraine

in the Donbos region, the autonomy, the cultural and linguistic economy within a federalized Ukraine that they could have enjoyed. His failure, his embrace of the ultra-nationalist repudiation of those accords that provided the excuse for Russia

to commit its aggression against Ukraine. So I think we're at the end of a line here. And there's one other observation I'll make, and that is the last meeting that Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner had with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, which lasted about five hours, ended basically with Putin saying, you know, this is going to get solved by Sergei Lavrov and professional diplomats. So on the one hand, he clearly wants to maintain his dialogue with and indirect contact with President Trump. But on the other hand, he has come to recognize

that amateur hour isn't going to work in ending this war. I think Whitkoff and Kushner are like the president, remain focused on a ceasefire rather than peace. So your initial question, does anybody want pieces? Yes, everybody wants peace. But what we are offering is ceasefires. which paper over the war and don't end in a piece that can provide long-term security for anyone. What an excellent statement, Ambassador Freeman.

Thank you very much for it. I was going to ask you one or two more questions, but you were so articulate. We're going to end with that on for nearly 30 minutes. But thank you very much for your time. I hope we can get one or two more segments in before Christmas is upon us. And we'll look forward to seeing you next week. Well, Merry Christmas to you.

Thank you. Back at you, Ambassador. And coming up later today at 11 o'clock this morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 1 this afternoon. Professor John Mearsheimer at 2 this afternoon. Matthew Ho at 3 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Koukowski, Justinapal Tano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.