Judging Freedom - COL. Bill Astore - The Legacy of 9/11

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

COL. Bill Astore - The Legacy of 9/11See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right what if that government is best which governs least what if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong what if it is better to perish fighting for

freedom than to live as a slave what if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now hi everyone judge andrew napolitano here for judging freedom today is monday september 14th 2006, Colonel Bill Estory, we'll be here with us in just a moment. What is the legacy of 9-11? But first this. If you're serious about preparedness like I am, head over to preparewithachadge.com right now. Let me tell you why. Our partners over at My Patriot Supply are the experts when it comes to emergency food,

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This is not the time to assume you'll find out what you need later. Build your 90 days of real food security. This offer ends on September 30th. So go now to prepare with the judge.com. Colonel Bill Astory, welcome here, my dear friend. you wrote a great piece at anti-war.com called The Legacy of 9-11, and it, the chief legacy of 9-11, and it provoked me to want to have this conversation with you. Aside from that, I've missed you, and, of course, I've delighted that the Yankees keep beating the Red Sox, but we'll talk about that later.

9-11 was such a monumental failure of U.S. Middle Eastern power. U.S. foreign policy in general, George W. Bush was almost literally asleep at the switch when it happened. Why do we commemorate it with such solemnity? Right. Yeah, that's quite the trick, isn't it? I mean, we've come to rebrand 9-11 as Patriot Day. And surely there were American patriots who stood up on that day and really did respond. as as heroes and we need to respect the first responders and others who sacrificed. Yet as you said, Judge, it was a colossal failure, especially of the Bush-Cheney administration. And it's rather amazing the trick that they played on us.

Rather than focusing on the failure, they used 9-11 as an excuse to, as Donald Rumsfeld said, you know, basically, let's go after everything, whether it's related to 9-11 or unrelated to 9-11, now is the time we're going to settle scores with all the enemies that we perceive. And that led us into all kinds of bad places. So what they decided to do was to rally the American people. I mean, we all remember right after 9-11 the upsurge in patriotism, how everyone was getting, flag zone. I was at the Air Force Academy at the time. I was teaching in the history department. There was a lot of Americans came together. We also got a lot of support from foreign countries,

including Iran, for that matter. And yet all of that was squandered as Bush Cheney declared that the answer was war, a war on terror, open-ended, a war that made no sense whatsoever. I mean, it's like It was like saying we have Pearl Harbor Day and, you know, Japanese attacked us on December 7th, 1941, and then we decide to declare war on China, you know, just because, you know, they're an Asian country. So, I mean, that's essentially what Bush Cheney did. As Cheney said, we're going to go to the dark side. And, you know, after this raid on Afghanistan, all of a sudden we're going to launch an assault on Iraq, which had nothing to do. do whatsoever with the 9-11 attacks. I remember the expression back then, though, was not just Iraq, but the expression was, you know, everyone wants to go to Baghdad, but real men want to go to Tehran. So there's always a plan that after we settled the count with Iraq, that we would attack Iran next.

And that is exactly what is happening now with President Trump. I mean, just this incredible embrace of war that just makes no sense whatsoever. It's driven our debt up to $40 trillion and has been the biggest strategic mistake we've made, probably in the history of our country. Right. We know why 9-11 happened because the hijackers told us. We know it was U.S. financial support for Israeli, a part of, and genocide. We know it was the presence of U.S. troops in the Middle East. We know it was U.S. support

for cruel and corrupt Middle Eastern governments. No one welcomed 9-11, but you could at least no one here, but you could almost predict it on the basis of what U.S. foreign policy had been. We also know now that the invasion of Afghanistan, just like the drafting of the Patriot Act, both took place before 9-11. How can that be explained? Right. Yeah. The Patriot Act, I mean, talk about an Orwellian name. You know, when they start naming things like the Patriot Act, you know it's unpatriotic. But yes, that's exactly right. The Patriot Act was prepared. ahead of time. They were just waiting for the right opportunity to deploy all of these draconian

measures to limit liberty and freedom in the United States, in the name, of course, of fighting terrorism. But what we've learned over the last 25 years is that the word terrorism is so, you know, it's been used in such vague and flexible ways. It almost has no meaning. It's almost just means people we don't like, you know, people that we hate. And that is not, you know, it's supposed to be a word that has a precise definition. Wow. Ron Paul gave Congressman Ron Paul at the presidential debates, the Republican presidential debate, one of them in 2008, gave one of the clearest, most coherent explanations of why 9-11 happened. He was ridiculed, of course. We're going to play the clip. You'll see Rudy Giuliani losing his temper. We now know that Congressman Paul was right. This is long. It's about two

and a half minutes. It's captivating. It's worth watching every second of. Chris? Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9-11 attack, sir? What changed? The non-interventionist policies. No, non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in

the Middle East. I think Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China

was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. Are you suggesting we invited the 9-11 attacks, sir? I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it. And they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier. They've already now, since that time, have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.

comment on that? That's really an extraordinary statement. It's an extraordinary statement of someone who lives through the attack of September 11 that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've ever heard that before and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11. You would ask the Congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. Congressman? I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes, there was blowback.

The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages, and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over the country. there. I mean, what would we think if we were, if other foreign countries were doing that to us? And I have 30 seconds, please.

No, no, wait a second. Let's all get 30 seconds. They are coming. We all want 30 seconds. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, go ahead. I think I want to turn to Senator McCain and, uh, change the subject. And changed the subject. So they called him crazy Ron Paul after that. He was right. then, he's right now, and much of the world recognizes, even much of American domestic politics recognizes he was right then. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, all Ron Paul was saying, and I remember watching this debate, and, you know, back

then, and I was thinking to myself, you know, he's making a lot of sense. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, you know, they had what they, they had what they, they considered to be legitimate grievances against the United States. And we need, we as Americans, and certainly our government, should understand what those grievances were. And we should, I mean, the most fundamental thing they teach you when you go through a military academy is to know thy enemy and to study them and to understand where they're coming from.

And instead, what we were told, we were fed a very simplistic story by the Bush administration. At the same time as basically we were told to go shopping and to go to Disney, and the government had everything under control. Along with that, they were telling us that, well, we were attacked because they just hate America because we're free people, they're not, and they envy us. And that wasn't it at all. They had legitimate grievances against the United States. and against our actions in the Middle East, and we need to understand that.

And if we refuse to understand that, we're going to get ourselves into deep and deeper trouble, which is exactly what has happened over the last 25 years. What is the foreign policy legacy of the United States of 9-11? I think we all recognize it's far worse today than what Ron Paul. described in 2008. Yes. Well, it's a legacy over the last 25 years of increasing militarism here in the United States, increasing authoritarianism. And with respect to foreign policy, we've just seen more and more failures, more and more lost wars. I mean, the Afghan war started as a raid, a punishing raid against the Taliban. It initially,

succeeded more or less in the opening months. How did that turn into a 20-year war in which we had to, you know, retreat, bug out, so to speak, ignominiously in 2021 under President Biden? How did the Iraq war, which again, mission accomplished, that was supposed to be a few months, tops. And that was another decades plus long war. How do these American-trained armies in Afghanistan, in Iraq, that are supposed to be, we spend billions and billions of dollars training these Afghan and Iraqi forces, and when we pull out, they fail miserably. What does that tell us? It's a 25-year record of failure. In the meantime, we've squandered eight, ten trillion dollars. fighting the war on terror, money that could have been invested here in the United States.

So we've seen a hollowing out of our own country as we've witnessed just this imperialism and militarism run amok. How many people died in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? It must be well into the millions. I'm not talking about Americans. talking about locals, people that were slaughtered over this. Yeah. And this is something that I think we as Americans need to recognize. I had a little note to myself to mention Islamophobia,

because that's another legacy of 9-11. This fear of Islam, this fear of Arab people, Persian people. And then it's not just fear, but in our evasions, as you say, Judge. I mean, we don't even label, we're not even honest about what they are. They are invasions. But we label them as Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. You know, we make war synonymous with freedom. So we know from various studies that these wars have cost the lives of

hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqis and displaced millions of people. Yet this is something that we don't talk about that much here in the American media. There's a natural tendency to, again, if I watched some of these celebrations, so to speak, the 25th anniversary this weekend, and it focused on American heroes, lots of American flags. There was really, I don't recall any mention in the ceremonies that I witnessed of the cost to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Libya, to Syria, and to other countries caught up in this war on terror. You talked about the rampant patriotism that you witnessed when you were a professor at the Air Force Academy. I mean, of course, you know from your own experience that it was not just limited to American military academies. Unfortunately, it affected and infected the Congress as well.

The Patriot Act, which in my view is the most abominable piece of legislation enacted by Congress since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to criticize the government. The Patriot Act gutted the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment requires that no search or seizure shall occur except a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime sworn to under oath by the government before the judge. The Patriot Act permits one federal agent to authorize another federal agent to serve a warrant. They don't call it a warrant. They call it a national security letter. It is a warrant demanding documents and things, just like a search warrant signed by a judge. And, oh, if you receive one of these warrants, it's a crime to tell anyone you received it.

You can't tell your spouse in the bedroom. You can't tell a priest and confessional. You can't tell a lawyer in her office. You can't tell a federal judge in a public courtroom. What about Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech? this was an abomination. And in the House of Representatives, 15 minutes to read the Patriot Act.

And no debate. Now, you're speaking today with one of the few people on the planet who's read the Patriot Act from beginning to end. It doesn't read like a novel. In order to read it, you have to have the entire federal criminal code in front of you because much of it is just amendments to statutes that already exist. Conservatively, it takes about 24 hours to read.

And yet, everybody in the House of Representatives, there were 60 who voted against it, but everybody else voted for it on faith. In the Senate, only two voted against it. None of them had read it because they didn't have the time or the skills to do so. It is still the law. today, Colonel. Right. No, I'm glad you brought that up, Judge, because I was going to mention, and actually,

I was going to defer to you because I was going to say that what we, one of the legacies of 9-11 has been the assault on the law here in the United States. You know, we are fundamentally supposed to be a constitutional republic. And what is supposed to hold our country together, you know, it's not. some allegiance to a king or aristocracy or tradition. What's supposed to hold us together is this allegiance to the law of the land. And as all you're listening to know, this is what we in the military swear an oath to. We swear an oath to upholding, defending the constitution of the United States, the law of the land. And so what we witnessed, what we've witnessed during

9-11 is in and afterwards is an assault on the law. And we see this. You remember the infamous torture memos of John U. I think was his name? Yes. You know, the one who's basically saying, you know, we'll just redefine torture. We'll call it enhanced interrogation techniques. And that will make waterboarding perfectly legal. I mean, this is the United States, as as Cheney said, going to the dark side. But going to the dark side willingly and proudly, you know, creating an Orwellian

authoritarian state. This is the legacy of 9-11. This assault on our rights, the assault on the law. Wow. Bill, thank you very much. Thank you for raising this. Thank you for your very gifted column.

The chief legacy of 9-11 available wherever you can get, Colonel Astorries' comments. I got it. Well, you can get it at bracing news.substack.com. I got it from our friends at anti-war.com. Colonel, a great conversation, notwithstanding the unpleasant subject matter, as always. And I'm not talking about the Red Sox. But thank you.

Thank you very much, Colonel. We'll look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you, Judge. Sure. All the best. Coming up at 1.30 this afternoon. on all of this. And he's going to talk about AI. How dangerous is AI? Why does the president not see the danger? And what kind of a corner is Prime Minister Netanyahu painted in now by his own hand? Who else? Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.