Judging Freedom - Connor Freeman : Anti-War Wrap

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Connor Freeman : Anti-War WrapSee 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, May 30th, 2024. Connor Freeman from NAwar.com joins us now. Connor, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Jeff. In one of his, I guess, campaign fundraisers, this wasn't very public, but the Washington Post reported on it. Former President Trump said he would not rule out, as crazy as this sounds, my friend, bombing Moscow and bombing Beijing if Russia occupied Ukraine or if mainland China occupied Taiwan. Do you think anybody who gave that advice considered the consequences? No, there doesn't seem to be any concern for the consequences and risks of nuclear war across the bipartisan establishment. Trump drove us to brinksmanship with Russia and China before he left office,

greatly expanded Barack Obama's Asia pivot, the largest military buildup since the Second World War, and drastically expanded the American military footprint in the South China Sea, especially constantly sending aircraft carrier strike groups to conduct war games just in China's backyard, expanding the so-called freedom of navigation operations, and basically intervening in a myriad of disputes between Southeast Asian nations over all these uninhabited rocks, reefs, archipelagos, islands, and islets that the U.S. has no interest in whatsoever except to stir up trouble and to confront China and justify ever-increasing military budgets. Trump has always been a hawk on China. Biden's been much worse, although he's

not given the credit for it in the mainstream press. Biden has essentially done away with the strategic ambiguity policy, which has kept the peace for more than 50 years and increased the number of troops on the island of Taiwan. We've seen constant sailings of Navy destroyers to Taiwan Strait. And Biden has greatly expanded the presence of American aircraft carrier strike groups and war games throughout his administration in this region. And we know for a fact, I mean, even Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien, said in an interview, I believe last year, you know, we often hear this claim that, well, we need to protect Taiwan. We need strategic clarity, not strategic ambiguity, because plan, which was outlined in a U.S. Army War College paper in 2021, is to bomb the Taiwan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Company facilities.

So it has nothing to do with protecting Taiwan. Let me stop you. The U.S. plan supposedly to save Taiwan from being seized by the government of mainland China, would be to destroy the most valuable part of Taiwan? Correct. The idea is that if you're going to take Taiwan, you're going to inherit just rubble. And you know what? There was a House representative, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and I've written about this before. I apologize. I'm blanking on his name. But he actually made this. He asserted that this is U.S. policy last year. And it actually got the Taiwanese defense minister had to come out and say, well, if you attempt to do that, we'll shoot down your plans.

So there doesn't seem to be much coordination. Donald Trump, I'm not surprised. You know, he was the one who, frankly, pushed through this foreign military aid supplemental, the $95 billion bill, which has sent $61 billion more to the Ukraine proxy war, using these people, this whole country as a human battering ram, or at least the poor people who are unable to avoid conscription. And, you know, with all this talk about sending NATO-supplied long-range missiles into the Russian mainland, and all this talk about sending NATO troops to train Ukrainian soldiers, or to, you know, shoot down, use NATO planes to shoot, and other armaments to shoot down Russian missiles over Ukraine. I haven't heard Donald Trump oppose any of this yet. And quite frankly, his rhetoric on

Ukraine, as you just mentioned, has gotten exceedingly worse. I mean, it wasn't too long ago we remembered Donald Trump on CNN saying that, you know, I just want people to stop dying in Ukraine. He appears to, and he wants to, you know, broker a peace deal between President Zelensky and President Putin, but he seems to have discarded that completely for political expediency. But I don't think he ever really cared about peace with Russia. It was just a good rhetorical device, like he would, in the same way that he would say, I'm going to leave these eventually, eventually before the vote, supported that $95 billion package, $61 billion of which theoretically is for Ukraine. Of course, we know a lot of it stays here, but he supported all of that.

Before we get to Israel and then Ukraine, another question about China. Does not the U.S. have about 2,000 Marines on a little island nobody ever heard of right off the coast of Taiwan called Kinmen Island. And are they there as a tripwire? Meaning if they get attacked, well, then old Joe and the neocon establishment has an excuse to attack the mainland? Well, I'm not sure the exact number of forces that are there right now. And I believe it's a deployment of Green Berets, if I'm not mistaken. But yes, absolutely. They're there as tripwires. This is just, I believe, only about two miles or so from mainland China. And this was another drastic escalation on the part of the Biden administration, who has taken basically Trump's policies and then ramped them up, including the tariffs, the sanctions, and as you mentioned earlier, the provocations regarding

Taiwan and a myriad of other fronts. But yes, they're absolutely there as tripwire forces, the same way these NATO trainers who are, you know, supposedly going to be deployed to Ukraine would be themselves. Let's move over to Israel. Over the weekend, the IDF shot and killed an Egyptian officer and wounded three others at the Israeli-Egyptian border. What's this all about? Well, so apparently there was a shooting incident and there's different explanations of what happened in various media reports coming out of Israel and Egypt. But it sounds like the Israelis have at least acknowledged that there was a shooting incident that took place at the Rafa border crossing, what they call the Philadelphia

corridor. And two Egyptian soldiers, border guards have now been killed as a result of this. And there's a devastating story about one of the young men in Middle East eye. It's up at antiwar.com today. But it sounds like, at least according to some of the reports that came out of Egypt, that these soldiers were, quote, affected by the massacre of 45 Palestinians sheltering in a displacement camp next to UN warehouses in the Tahrir Sultan area in western Rafah over the weekend where we saw, you know, a very young child's head blown off and burned off and several other bodies completely burnt to a crisp in this horrible massacre. And I not exactly mean it sounds like either the Israelis initiated the shooting, which I've seen some reports that suggest that or the Egyptian soldiers did. Either way, it would appear that Israel is totally responsible for this. And the border crossing is operated by Hamas and the Egyptians. The Israelis have ceased it since May 7th. So no aid is getting through that vital entry point. And the Egyptians

will not reopen it until Israeli forces retreat from that border crossing and relinquish its control, which under the agreements they have with Egypt, they're not allowed to do. And so it's creating a great deal of tension between the Egyptian forces there. Did President Biden or Secretary Blinken give Prime Minister Netanyahu or Benny Gantz or anybody in the Israeli government a red line over which they shouldn't pass? And if they did, wouldn't the incineration of 45 innocents in a refugee camp be crossing that line? Well, I think John Kirby, our National Security Coordinator, or National Security Council spokesman, would be offended by your question, Judge. He just said that to a reporter yesterday and reaffirmed that, no, this does not cross the red line. It's very unclear what the red line is. Frank Lowenstein, a former envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the Obama

years, just told Middle East Eye that the Biden administration is very reluctant to escalate this, what he characterized as a fight between Tel Aviv and Washington over this so-called red line. He goes, it's really more of a pink line. But we've heard other quotes. You know, Aaron Maté has a great piece about this right now. It's the spotlight at antiwar.com, where he has, you know, sickening quotes from Jake Sullivan, for instance, where he says, we don't, it's either him or Blinken, but they say, we don't discuss red lines when it comes to Israel. That was Blinken. After saying we treat all countries the same, he said we don't discuss red lines when it comes to Blinken. How can they claim, I'm going to play a clip from Kirby and you and the audience will get a kick out of it,

he's all over the place, and he would be offended by my question, and he is offended by similar questions. But how can the Israelis expect anybody to believe they dropped this bomb on this refugee camp to kill Hamas leaders? Do Hamas leaders hang out in tents? Of course not. They're 70 meters under the earth. It's even worse than that, Judge. They bombed the same area less than 48 hours later and killed, I believe, another 16 people. You know, there were leaflets dropped on Rafa. The last leaflets that were dropped on Rafa told people, I remember hearing about this coastal strip that has no infrastructure and no resources to support the displaced people from Rafa,

but it's this area called Al-Mawasi. And that's been bombed as well. They just killed recently, since the massacre in Rafah over the weekend, 21 more people in Al-Masawi, mostly women and girls. And in the case of the massacre in Western Rafah and the Tarlesan displacement camp, the people who were wounded, which were about 250, were taken to a place called the Kuwaiti Specialty Hospital in Rafah. And that hospital has since been bombed. Those people have, it's been knocked out of service. It's out of commission. The patients are trying to be evacuated to al-Masawi, but there are quadcopter drones, reportedly,

according to medical officials on the ground, that are preventing these people from getting to what is a field hospital that's not even ready yet. So they're, in the meantime, just in agony, and probably many of them may succumb to their wounds in the meantime. And Joe Biden and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, don't give a damn. All right, for a little bit of lighting, a little lighter, although it's very serious what he's talking about, but he's off the wall. Admiral Kirby, recently, the same presser you talked about, it's only about an hour or so ago, on the RAFA strikes, cut number 12, Chris. Between what's happened on Sunday, what's happened in terms of the ongoing ground operations since,

there's nothing that you have seen thus far that would prompt a U.S. withdrawal of more military assistance? I believe that's what I've been saying here. As soon as we saw these reports over the weekend about the strike, we reached out to the Israeli Defense Forces at various levels to gather more information. And we've been actively engaged with the IDF and with partners on the ground to learn more about what happened. I think this speaks very clearly to the challenge of military airstrikes in densely populated areas of Gaza, including Rafah, because of the risk of civilian casualties, which of course happened terribly in this case.

And this is not something that we've turned a blind eye to, nor has it been something we've ignored or neglected to raise with our Israeli counterparts, including Ed, this weekend as a result of this particular strike. Now, they're investigating it, so let's let them investigate it and see what they come up with. Everything we're seeing, and we can't see everything, but everything that we can see tells us that they are not moving in in a major ground operation in population centers in the center of Rafah. We still don't want to see the Israelis, as we say, smash into Rafah with large

units over large pieces of territory. We still believe that. And we haven't seen that at this point. But we're going to be watching this, of course, very, very closely. So I guess old Joe and company only object to ground troops. They don't object to missiles and 500-pound bombs on tents. Well, and also, according to Reuters, there are tanks in central Rafa right now and armored armored vehicles mounted with machine guns as well. And they're attacking eastern Rafa. They're attacking western Rafa. Biden claims that, oh, I would, you know, suspend military aid transfers if they attack population centers.

Well, they're just attacking population centers left and right and massacring women and children. And of course, none of this crosses the so-called red line, which is, as Aaron Maté has said in his article, is clearly invisible. And so, no, I mean, this kind of rhetoric from John Kirby is going to go down. And he's made numerous statements like this, but this whole thing of, well, this, this, um, the, uh, events over the weekend do not, will not, uh, necessitate any sort of policy change. I cannot report to you at this point

that will go down in history. The same way, Madeleine Albright's interview with Leslie Stallings on 60 minutes, uh, when she was confronted with UN figures that showed half a million children have been killed under US sanctions in Iraq in the 90s, where she said, we think the price is worth it. That's exactly how this will be remembered in the whole world season. Right, right. Staying with Israel, but switching topics, the Mossad chief has been accused of having threatened the ICC prosecutor, not the current prosecutor who announced last week he's asking to file an indictment and asking for arrest warrants, which has to come from a panel of three judges. But his predecessor was there for nine years, was apparently threatened, and her family was threatened by the Mossad chief, and nobody in Mossad has denied it. Yeah, they've declined to

comment, as it said in the Guardian piece, which is, you know, there's scores of sources in that article, and it's part of a joint investigation being conducted by the Guardian and the Tel Aviv based outlet 972 Mag, which has done fantastic reporting throughout the war, including on the AI programs Israel is using to massacre and carry out its genocide against the Palestinians. But yes, and you know what? One of the most interesting elements of that story is the coordination back to Donald Trump with his administration at the time, who was imposing sanctions and visa restrictions on the former ICC chief prosecutor, you're referring to Fatou Basouda, in response to her looking into American war crimes committed in Afghanistan and our allied

personnel during the 20-year occupation. But also this was largely related to Washington's opposition to the ICC investigating Israeli war crimes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. And of course, Biden's administration removed those sanctions when they took power, but they've kept the pressure on the ICC and continued to threaten them with further action. We know that Antony Blinken has said that he'd like to work with Congress to impose sanctions on the ICC in response to Karim Khan's announcement that he's going to be seeking arrest warrants. But isn't it the same ICC that Biden and Blinken applauded when an indicted President Putin allegedly for kidnapping children, children that they took out of harm's way before they attacked the places where they thought the children might be found? Yes, it is. And they lauded them for their vital role in negotiating settlements under the UN Charter or peace settlements and bringing criminals to justice.

And excuse me, not the UN Charter, but they applauded them for that. And it was largely motivated with intervention by the State Department. And so they always, you know, it's really the ICC is supposed to be our, you know, partners in prosecuting sort of relatively powerless African dictators, and of course, Vladimir Putin, and the Serbs, but not America and its partners, of course not. And that's why we have a group of 12 senators saying that this is a violation of American sovereignty, if you look into Israeli war crimes, the International Criminal Court, and they were, of course, referring to the Hague Invasion Act, which authorizes essentially U.S. military intervention to prevent any American personnel or ally personnel from being detained or tried at the Hague. I don't think you and I have talked about that threat,

but it had the earmarks of the threats of a mafia don, except the mafia don would have been smart enough not to put the threat in writing. But here you got 12 United States senators, a half of whom are lawyers saying, be warned, come after BB and we'll come after you. This is just reprehensible in a different environment. That's obstruction of justice. Well, neocons do not believe in international law. The only neoconservative who signed that letter was Tom Cotton, but the rest of them, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham are spokesmen for the neoconservatives. So this is par for the course for them. And of course, we've seen, you know, there's a lot of talk like this from American officials,

even this talk about, well, we haven't seen a major operation in Rafah yet. It reminds me of all the other genocide apologists on the Zionist side of the argument regarding this war who say, hey, if Israel wanted to commit genocide, we could. Or Blinken when he says to Hamas, Israel has a very generous offer on the table. I suggest you take it and sooner rather than later. And that was on the eve of the Rafah invasion. So, you know, they all act like this. They're mass murderers and criminals, and they, whether it's in writing or if they're just saying these, making these statements verbally, it is exactly like a mafia dump, but just on a grand scale. Before I let you go, do you think that Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan are concerned

that they might be indicted? I mean, the genocide laws are crystal clear. Funding it is the same crime as executing it. Absolutely. And we saw, you know, after this massacre that was carried out in Rafah over the weekend, the National Security Council spokesman coming out saying Israel has the right to target Hamas in Rafah in direct, well, a direct rebuke of the ICJ's ruling that Israel must halt its operations in Rafah and immediately stop blocking aid shipments into the Gaza Strip, where we have well over a million people facing catastrophic levels of starvation and the entire Strip is on the brink of famine.

They have, you know, they're defying the UN, they're defying the world and carrying out these mass killings of the Palestinians. And it's going to get much worse from here on out. But I think as these charges and these rulings from the ICJ and the impending indictments from the ICC, as we have these to look forward to, the Israelis are becoming much more erratic, much more violent. And I think they will escalate and Washington will as well. And I just think it's going to get much worse from here. Last question.

How dangerous is it, in your view, for President Macron of France publicly to authorize the use of French long-term missiles to strike inside Russia? Sent, dispatched by the Ukraine military, theoretically, I don't know if there are French soldiers on the ground working this stuff, but French destructive devices exploding inside Russia. How crazy is that? I hadn't seen that report yet. I know that David Cameron has said

the same thing, that Ukraine has the right to use British missiles on the Russian mainland. And Russia's response was they summoned the ambassador to the UK and Russia, demanded that he directly and immediately refute that statement. But they've said that we will target UK military sites in Ukraine and beyond. And that goes presumably for all NATO states. We just saw Sweden say, hey, you can use our weapons on Russian territory. But of course, they're not supplying the same long range missiles that the US and the Brits are, but it's in order to pressure Washington and London. Well, London has already, I guess, made this statement. But if Macron is saying that, I mean, it's the same time that the French are

sending apparently military trainers who are just going to be tripwire forces. But we're told by NATO heads of state like Kajikalis, the prime minister of Estonia, that I don't worry about it. Even if these NATO trainers get killed, it's not necessarily going to trigger Article 5, the mutual defense clause in the NATO charter. So, you know, let's roll these dice. And I don't take words. Yeah, I don't take much comfort in knowing that if we go to war with Russia, Estonia will be right behind us every step of the way. Conor Freeman, I have to run. Thank you very much for your time. Eloquent as always and deeply appreciated. Thank you so much, Judge. clock, Phil Giraldi, how deep and how extensive is the relationship between the, and unlawful

is the relationship between the United States government and the Israeli government. And Aaron Matei, you heard Connor refer to it, has a detailed piece out just yesterday, which we will explore on does Joe Biden even know what he's talking about? Well, the answer to that is kind of obvious with respect to red lines in Gaza. That's at 415 Aaron Matei Eastern this afternoon. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thanks for watching!