Judging Freedom - Anya Parampil: The CIA and Venezuela

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Anya Parampil: The CIA and VenezuelaSee 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 Monday, August 5th, 2024. Anya Parampil will be here with us in just a moment. ...doing in Venezuela. Sonia Parampil will be here with us in just a moment. Doing in Venezuela and is torture in Israel so commonplace that it seeks to shock. But first this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value 23%. So $100 invested in gold a year ago is now worth $123. If you have $100 in the bank, it still shows $100,

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Anya, welcome here, my dear friend. Before we get to Latin America, a subject on which you have substantial expertise, I do want to discuss a little bit about Israel. of Israel and the efforts by the Knesset to immunize the torturers and the efforts by radical right-wingers to break into jails while the police look the other way to let the torturers out and a statement by the Attorney General that they shouldn't be prosecuted makes me wonder if from your understanding of Israeli culture, is there so much torture? Is it so commonplace? Have the Palestinians been so dehumanized that all of these things, which I've just touched on, seek to shock the Israeli conscience? I think that is exactly the case, what you've just described. And it's not just the dehumanization of Palestinians and the rabid bloodlust that exists within Israeli society that's driving this. It's also something that I think we should be clear about is the concept of Jewish supremacy that really is behind the Israeli state. When you have the rabbi, the state rabbi in the military saying it's okay for Israeli soldiers to rape non-Jews. I don't know what clearer demonstration of the Zionist mentality you could really get. These are people that do not view other human

beings as human beings. And that is actually the basis for their state as well, this so-called Jewish state. It's not about having a place of safety for Jews as they claim, it's actually about defining other human beings as less than human and not deserving of rights. I can't imagine any other society on earth where for all their whatever faults or difficulties other countries and other groups of people face, where a mass movement calling for the right to rape could actually take root. And that's what we see in Israel. That's why on top of the outside pressure that Israel is facing right now from various states that it's been aggressive with over the years, whether that's Lebanon, Syria, Iran. I mean, Israel has been constantly stoking

its neighbors. In addition to that, that pressure, Israel internally risks crumbling on itself. I think if Netanyahu were out of the picture or this war, this external existential threat wasn't something that the Israelis were grappling with right now, that they would actually be left to face themselves, left to face each other. And in that case, their society might fall apart even more rapidly than it already is. And that's, again, why I think years from now we might look back at October 7th as the true beginning of the end of Israel. When Joe Biden says Israel has a right to defend itself, when Prime Minister Netanyahu says that amongst a rapturous, it's the only way to describe it, applause and adulation by a Congress he's bought and paid for, are they defending a liberal democracy or are they defending an authoritarian state?

It's beyond an authoritarian state. It's a racial project, or according to them, they see the Jewish people as a race that are superior to everyone else. It is a Jewish supremacist state. We've know, we've been denying that for years here in the United States, especially as Zionist foundations and money have made a bid to influence Christians and make Christians actually in the U.S. believe that they're somehow included in that vision of Jewish supremacy, when in reality they're not. And I think that's something that Americans should really wake up to. There was that fabulous interview a few months ago that Tucker Carlson

did with a priest in Bethlehem. And I think that was a beginning, hopefully, of Americans learning about the fact that they might like our money, our tax dollars, and they might like our soldiers to come to the Middle East and fight and die for them. But ultimately, the people running the Israeli state don't even see us as human beings. They see us as, well, what exactly I just described, a country that can supply endless bodies and tax dollars in their defense. And meanwhile, you have people in the Israeli government that are pushing toward an actual messianic end times vision of Judaism. That's real. That's powerful in the Israeli state. And Netanyahu, in many ways, is the figure keeping those those more radical forces at bay.

So, again, it just spells disaster for Israel going forward. Haven't those more radical forces more or less been unleashed in the West Bank? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Israeli state actually depends on these forces to keep their project going because secular Israelis aren't going to be as dedicated to expanding Israel's borders or continuing aggression with its neighbors, some of those people might actually want peace because they would like to stay in Israel. And they see this radical segment as driving not only confrontations in the West Bank, but with the region more broadly. And yet Israel's survival is completely dependent on its expansion. It's kind of just a moment in history, I think, where everything is being revealed as it is.

And Israel is being revealed as a force that can only move the world in one direction. And if they have their way, that would be end times nuclear war. So I hope level heads in Washington actually get the message and can start making a rational policy from our perspective soon. How, if at all, does the relationship between Israel and the United States benefit the United States? It doesn't. I think that if we had a sovereign U.S. policy that was actually based on our interests and good faith with the rest of the world, that Israel would be one of the last countries that we'd actually tie ourselves to in the modern era. I would, if I were crafting US policy, be much more interested in having a rational policy with Israel's neighbors and with our Arab states and our

Arab allies that have actually been weakened and subjugated by Israel themselves. So Israel's never served our interests. I think it's time that we actually restore constitutional and sovereign rule in the United States. I think that would be nice. What threat does Iran pose to the United States? I think if we were, again, speaking as rational human beings that saw Iran as a sovereign country that had the right to be sovereign, I don't think that there is a major threat from the Iranians, other than the fact that in the region, more broadly, they stand up to Israeli influence. And that, for whatever reason, is a red line for the United States. But if it's just a question of the US and Iran, well, maybe we don't like the fact that they've asserted more sovereignty over their oil reserves and some of their domestic wealth since their revolution. But I think that's just a reality that we have to live with,

that sometimes countries aren't going to want us dominating them. And that pretty much in 2024, that model of development is done. So if we could just make deals rationally, I don't think that the Iranians would actually have a problem with us. up and participate in something like this, this future world market going forward that's based on win-wins and not just domination from the West or transatlantic powers. And they said, you know, we would like the same thing. It's not that they want confrontation with us. They would actually like us to just behave like a rational actor instead of, yeah, rolling ahead with this NATO and IMF World Bank model that has dominated since World War II, because the rest of the world is pretty much over that by now. I don't think Netanyahu made an argument that Iran is a threat to the United States. He could easily have been talking about his own country when he said it's barbarism against civilization.

I mean, the behavior of his IDF is utterly barbaric. We don't have to go into the details. We all know what the facts show. I also don't think he made the case that Iran is a threat to Israel. Isn't Iran just a country that wants to be, okay, ultra-religious, but prosperous and left alone? Yeah, I think that's most countries these days would just like to be left alone. And in the Middle East, it's pretty much, it's almost impossible for any country to be left alone because, well, since Israel's foundation in 1948, when it was established through the same kind of violence and cleansing that we're seeing play out now during this war, it's just been a constant stream of instability and Israel seeking to take even more territory than it was originally granted. And they would like to go beyond Gaza, I'm sure as well. So the

Egyptians know this, the Syrians know this well, the Lebanese know this. And of course, the Iranians, for whatever reason, have ended up carrying the torch of that Muslim and Arab resistance in the region, because some of those other Arab powers, particularly those in the Gulf and in Egypt, are subjugated by the United States. But I do think Egypt, again, they are joining BRICS. They are attempting to move away from sole reliance on the United States and Western financial hegemony. So in the long run, because Egypt knows its sovereignty is at stake here as well, any of these countries know that betting with the West is not a way, it is not a way to ensure your sovereignty going forward.

So I think that's why even some of our traditional allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are diversifying their allyships and trying to build a world that's less dependent on us. So we should wake up to that and start making a rational policy based on that reality. I want to play for you something that we got from your website, so I know you've seen it, which is a tape of a former IDF sniper talking about what they did to Palestinian families. It's not graphic, but it's terrible. It's a little on the long side. It's about two minutes long. He has a strong, it's in English,

but he has a strong Israeli accent and there are subtitles, but I'd like your thoughts on it. Chris, cut number five. I became an activist because I was a soldier in the Israeli army. I'm 38 years old. I served 20 years ago

and I served in the Special Forces Unit of the Infantry Nacha Brigade. And me and my team, we were snipers. And when you serve as a sniper in the West Bank and Gaza, you are inside Palestinian cities, towns. But more than everything else, you are inside Palestinian homes. Almost every night we did an operation that is called the straw widow. Straw widow is when you take a private Palestinian house and turn it into a military post. It means that you have to storm the house in the middle of the night,

drag all of the family members from their beds, and put them in one room so they won't bother us. And then we put our sniping rifles, and me as the spotter of the team, I would put my thermal camera in one of the rooms, then we start scanning the city. And during that time, if one of the family members wants to eat, to drink, to take medicine,

to go to the bathroom, they need authorization from us, because it's our house. It's not their house anymore. And the storm window could be two hours, or four hours, or six hours, or two days. And after that ends, we just take all of our weapons and everything, and we go back to the base. And when we go back to the base, the first time we did it, I understood that we ruined the Palestinian family's life. Not because we had information, not because we wanted to shoot at someone, because they told us this is a routine operation. You have to be with your sniping rifles inside the Palestinian city.

And I was brought up on the idea that I have to protect Israel. What I'm doing in the Israeli army is protecting Israel. And that wasn't protecting Israel. That was controlling Palestinians. And that's a different thing altogether. So you ask me how I became an activist? I served in the IDF. And I think that as an Israeli, we have the moral obligation to speak about what we did over there.

It's not a secret that belongs to me as a soldier or as an Israeli. It's something that everybody should know that is happening almost every night, store windows like I did. But every day we have checkpoints and the Palestinian giving permits and now fighting in Gaza and arrest. It's an ongoing occupation of 57 years. An occupation of 57 years,

very telling and gut-wrenching testimony under oath by this former IDF sniper. I had never heard of this Operation Straw Widow before. Had you? No, but I'm quite familiar just with the behavior of the Israelis in the West Bank, whether that's through their seizure of land or, you know, I when I went to the West Bank, I worked with this wonderful translator, someone who'd previously taught English, English literature at local universities. And his family had, you know, there's the one aspect of just getting around the West Bank where you're confronting Israeli soldiers constantly because of the checkpoints. But then you also have the radical settlers that came in and burned down his family's olive grove. And every Palestinian you meet in the West Bank has a story like that. And it's only surprising that more Israeli soldiers don't wake up to what

it is that they're doing after participating in something like that. It's a minority. And that's the scary part is that you actually, rather than seeing a mass awakening in Israeli society against the war or against the occupation, you see them doubling down and even having these protests demanding their right to rape non-Jews. So it's a pretty disturbing societal trend there. And ones that I think Americans struggle to grasp because even Americans who've served in the U.S. military, I think, have this idea of how an army or people are supposed to serve, even though war is, of course, not a pretty picture no matter any way you cut it. But they have this idea that there's rules. The Israelis just simply don't honor those rules or honor any sort of semblance of human rights or rules of engagement.

So I think more Americans need to wake up to that and also wake up to the fact that in many instances, there's wars that are so unpopular that American soldiers have served in over recent years in the Middle East are directly tied to Israel's interests. We were told for so long that they were about, you know, wars about peace and democracy or American security, when in reality, I think it's become more and more clear that we were picking off Israel's enemies in the region one by one. What has been, switching gears to the other side of the world, what has been the CIA's role in Venezuela? Well, it's interesting because there's a tie to Zionism here as well. The government in Venezuela that has since the early 2000s begun the process of nationalizing their country's natural resources. So we're

talking about the largest oil reserves in the world over double what Saudi Arabia has, and the largest untapped gold deposits in the world, which I think makes Venezuela especially key to the modern world, because I think BRICS and other countries that are breaking away from the dollar are going to be looking at gold as a base currency or having gold playing a larger role in global exchange once again. And so the U.S., up until that point, up until this process had basically, through U.S. companies and European companies, dominated Venezuela's oil industry and their mining sector. And since that ended, since Venezuela started asserting its sovereignty. The U.S. has run endless coup attempts in 2002. They removed their first revolutionary leader, Chavez, from office with

a brief military coup. But so many people went into the streets that they were forced to bring him back. More recently, there have been other periodic periods of unrest in the streets. But more recently, in 2019, the Trump administration moved to recognize this shadow government in Venezuela. So this was a very odd policy where the U.S. actually declared mission accomplished in its regime change before the change in government had actually taken place. The Maduro government to this day controls the borders, the military, all the government ministries in Caracas, and yet the U.S. recognizes a government as its legitimate government that isn't part of that regime. Why is that? government, the U.S. and our European allies have successfully frozen billions of dollars worth of Venezuelan assets, including gold bullion that was stored in the Bank of England that Maduro

actually attempted to repatriate back in 2018, just a few months before the U.S. launched this coup. So it meant that now England gets to sit on Venezuela's sovereign gold reserve holdings indefinitely because they claim they can't figure out who actually runs the government in Venezuela. Very convenient for the British. Now they get to keep those gold reserves. But just to tie it back to Zionism, Venezuela kicked out the Israelis, doesn't even have a U.S., doesn't have an Israeli embassy in Caracas, has not had relations with Israel since the 2000s.

Compare that now with Javier Millet in Argentina, who took his first international trip as president to Israel, actually thanked the Chabad Lubavitch cult in New York for his victory, went and prayed to a cult leader, claiming that thanks to his belief in that cult, he was actually able to win the presidency in Argentina. He's not only sold out his country to the IMF and is accepting IMF loans, now has higher inflation than Venezuela and is facing street protests himself. But more recently in this past week, Javier Millet got caught shipping Argentina's sovereign gold supply offshore. Now, what kind of leader does that? I'm not sure. He wouldn't even say where it went. I'm willing to bet it was the Bank of England, but this is now a controversy in Argentina. So I think this shows two models for development or leadership in Latin America. Yes, the Venezuelan government has its own issues. They would admit that there's corruption and that they're fighting their own

battles internally, but at least that it's up to them that they're still a sovereign nation trying to get their sovereign gold reserve deposits back as a result, facing all this pressure externally, whereas Argentina, MLA, very warmly praised by Elon Musk and many figures in alternative media, but is actually in many ways selling out his nation. There's some link there too, between those that are very pro-Israel on the American continent and those that are not, that would like to actually be sovereign and actually call Israel out for its war at a time like now. So I think Americans would benefit to, again, learn about Venezuela and create a rational policy there that is not just driven by these characters that want to get a slice of the country's natural resources. Who won the Venezuelan presidential elections

last week? Well, according to the government, Maduro has declared victory, but they have yet to release their local polling data. And because of street protests and the opposition coming forward with their own polling data saying that they didn't recognize the results, the U.S. immediately recognizing that opposition candidate again, they've turned the process over to their Supreme Court now to have all of the parties that participated turn over their polling data and the Supreme Court is going to conduct an independent audit. But I would just say that it doesn't even matter who won the vote necessarily from the perspective of Americans, because this

isn't about voting or democracy for the US. That's not really what we're basing our policy on. In fact, the opposition said before the vote took place that they would not honor the election results unless they won. And this is something that routinely happens in Venezuela. It happened in 2014. It happened in 2016, 2019, or I'm sorry, 2018. Whenever there was an election that the opposition didn't win, they go into the streets, they claim fraud. And it's created this breakdown now at a point where it doesn't even matter who wins the vote. It's just a question of who controls the military and who controls the borders, who actually can provide stability in the country.

And Maduro says to the United States, he just gave a statement last week saying, look, I'm the only one that is going to prevent more migrants from coming to the border and has the ability to actually stabilize the country. He also gave a comment last week saying that he's been frustrated because routinely when Trump was in office, Trump actually tried to reach out to meet with him. He actually revealed that when he came to the US in 2018 for the UN General Assembly meeting, that Trump tried to schedule a meeting to meet with him as the President of the United States to meet with the President of Venezuela, but that these advisors, Bolton, Pompeo, and at the time, Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon, who was Secretary of State, blocked that meeting from happening. And Maduro said this happened repeatedly throughout Trump's presidency. And so I think as Americans, we should start to ask questions about who's actually driving our policy. Is it the president? Is the commander in chief and the chief diplomat actually able to set our foreign policy? Or is it ideologues like Bolton? And to be honest, foreigners, there's a large group of

Miami Cubans and Venezuelans who act very similarly to the way the Israel lobby does, where they have this base and they say, we're one issue voters and our one issue is that you have to take a hard line on Venezuela and Cuba and Latin America and try to carry out regime change operations against foreign countries. I think that doesn't make sense for the US, especially not in 2024. If you're here in the United States, you have a stake here. You should act as an American, not with an interest to go and gain control back in your home country. And I think going forward, this is something that we should be concerned about because we can understand Ukraine, we can understand the Middle East and all these other regions all we want. But at the end of the day, the Americas, that's our neighborhood. Venezuela, these are the countries

that we have to understand and deal with. And we should deal with them for what they are rather than what we want them to be, which is like some projection of an old, outdated neoliberal model that just doesn't catch. It just doesn't work in 2024. People aren't going along with it, whether it's Venezuela or Iran or places throughout Europe. Here's President Maduro denouncing the United States, denouncing Javier Millay and denouncing Elon Musk. Maybe you can tell us what this is all about. Cut number seven. I denounce that the government of the United States, together with Elon Musk and the international fascist of Millay, are at the forefront of a destabilization process and a coup d'etat at this moment against the Venezuelan people and against Venezuelan democracy. What does he mean?

Elon Musk, for whatever reason, came out before the election and endorsed the opposition candidate, actually endorsed Maria Karina Machado, who was not even on the ballot, but is the main opposition figure leading the rallies and pretty much the campaign of the candidate Edmundo Gonzalez. Elon Musk has, as we know, an interest in natural resources that are needed to build batteries. Venezuela, on top of having gold and oil reserves, has lithium, coltan, all the different minerals that are going to have national control over the resources. And then this military dictatorship came in and started selling it off to players like Elon. And at the time, someone mentioned this to Elon, that there was a violent coup in Bolivia. And he responded on X or Twitter at the time saying, we will coup whoever we want. And it was kind of a joke then, but the fact that he's now decided to take such a strong line on Venezuela is disappointing to me as someone who does appreciate what Elon has

attempted to do for free speech and our rights on X. I think it's disappointing that he now is getting involved in a regime change scheme. And he also has had this relationship with Malay that is curious. He's gone down there and so have the media figures that he's boosted on X, such as Bari Wise, Ben Shapiro, all gone and done puff pieces for Malay. He went down there and signed deals with Malay himself. And Malay in Argentina, since coming into power, has actually expanded the U.S. military presence in his own country, is opening a naval base. And Malay and Argentina, since coming into power, has actually expanded the U.S. military presence in his own country, is opening a naval base. And so it is a concern for Venezuelans and other governments in the region that Argentina is now turning into a

staging ground for potential military operations against governments in the region. And so I hope that we don't escalate any further further because if Argentina were to put any pressure on Venezuela or if the U.S. is involved there with State Department funding and CIA-backed groups, I've documented all that in my book, if they decide to turn up the heat and force Maduro out through some sort of military action or pressure in the streets, then we're looking at a civil war type scenario in our hemisphere, not to mention the fact that Russia is heavily, heavily involved in Venezuela. They consider Venezuela one of their key international partners. They have military advisors and Russian military equipment there, as do the Iranians, have deep ties with the Venezuelans. So if war were to break out,

we would actually be looking at an expansion of the global war that we see now in the Middle East and Ukraine into the American continent, which I think would be very dangerous, not something I want to see. Anya, nobody else is talking about this, and I'm deeply grateful for the way you tie it all together. Tell us about your book Corporate Coup. Yeah, well what I document in the book is how the policy of recognizing a shadow government in Venezuela provided cover for the United States, the United Kingdom and our allies as well as private corporations to pretty much carry out a looting of Venezuela's internationally stored wealth. I identify the characters that drove this policy on the Venezuelan side and found that they all worked for, like directly worked as agents of corporations that are now cashing in on the looting of the assets that were frozen as a result of this coup policy. So they recognized

the shadow government and said, oh, all of these Venezuelan government bank accounts in the US and Europe, they're ours now. We froze them and now we're turning them over to the people that we, and actually Venezuela's sovereign gold deposits in the US ended up somehow in an account linked to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. So, I mean, that's just bizarre. It was a policy actually that acted as a kind of practice test of what we saw then the Biden administration roll out against Russia, where they froze Russian assets, stole Russian assets, and are now talking about paying frozen Russian government assets out to the government of Ukraine. This is exactly what we did with the Venezuelans. We stole their money and then started paying it out to our collaborators and our agents working to overthrow the government there. The resolution of my book, Judge, is that this policy

that we see in Venezuela, we saw with Russia, it's escalated. We've done it to Iran, so many other countries, our aggressive sanction policy and our propaganda media war. The only thing that it's resulted in now is countries breaking with the West, actually forming a multipolar world that is less reliant on the dollar, not reliant on the swift exchange in Switzerland. Instead, Russia, China, India, these countries are coming together to build a world where they don't have their, you know, they don't have the same ideology across these various countries. And they recognize that they see that as a strength. They actually just want to create a basis for international exchange that is actually based in honoring the political sovereignty, territorial

integrity, and, you know, win of every country and allowing them to kind of just make agreements that are mutually beneficial. And that's a world that I hope the United States can one day participate in. I just think that our greatest obstacle at this point is our own government. It's our own government that is working in the interests of corporations and in many cases, foreign lobbying groups. So the corporate coup, yes, it targeted Venezuela. It's targeted many other countries, but ultimately it was something that happened in this country a long time ago. I think a bankers and corporate coup kind of took over from the U.S. public. And we just need to restore, as I said,

sovereign rule and constitutional rule in the United States, then we'd be better off going forward in this multipolar world. Then we'd be better off going forward. Thank you, Anya. Thank you for the breadth of your knowledge and the clarity of all your explanations. Much appreciated. I hope you come back and visit with us again next week.

Anytime. Nice talking to you, Judge. Sure. What a pleasure. Coming up at four o'clock this afternoon worth waiting for scott ritter 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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