Judging Freedom - Connor Freeman: US To Seize Russian Assets?

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Connor Freeman: US To Seize Russian Assets?See 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, April 3rd, 2024. Connor Freeman from libertarianism.org. Do I have that right? The Libertarian Institute. I'm sorry. Thank you. The Libertarian Institute and also from antiwar.com joins us. Connor, welcome back to the show. Nice to have you.

Thank you, Judge. Glad to be back. Of course, I want to start with the horrific Israeli bombing of the food truck, which killed seven people, one of them an American. The chef, I never heard of him, but it turns out he's an internationally highly regarded chef, born in Spain, now an American citizen, who at his own expense brought tens of thousands of meals to Gaza. It turns out that the truck was followed for a couple of hours and three missiles were sent at it. The Israelis claim it was an accident. I don't think anybody believes them. What are you learning from your sources is the perception of Israeli behavior, even those who think somehow

it has the right to expel Palestinians from Gaza. What is the perception of Israeli behavior from this monstrous act? Well, I think this particular murder of the aid workers is getting more attention because once again, the Israelis have killed an American citizen, not to mention three British citizens, British nationals, an Australian citizen, a Polish citizen, as well as a Palestinian driver. And so, you know, usually when the Israelis kill Americans, it does not, as usual, there won't be any consequences for this. And the Israelis have already killed an American teenager in the West Bank earlier during the war, since the war in Gaza began. They murdered Shireen Abu-Akhle, the Christian American journalist in

the Jenin refugee camp back in May of 2022. And they ran over the peace activist, Rachel Corey, who is an American, a young American girl. They ran her over with a bulldozer where she was protesting home demolitions in Gaza during the second Intifada. And so there won't be any consequences. There won't be any change with the U.S.-Israel relationship. What we're seeing, in fact, is reports from Israeli media where they're talking about, I mean, the official story indicates that this was a very deliberate mass murder massacre of these aid workers because they scored direct hits on three vehicles that were clearly marked with the world central kitchen logo. Uh, they hit the first truck and then civilians came out of that truck or, and went to another vehicle. Then that vehicle was bombed. And then they went to a third vehicle. Any remaining survivors who got to the third vehicle were all killed in a third strike by the same drone. And what even in Haaretz they're saying, there's Israeli sources who say,

even though that they had coordinated this with the Israeli military, they were on a pre-approved route within what's called a safe zone, a deconfliction zone. The quote from Israeli sources was, this wasn't a result of any accident or lack of coordination. It's because Israeli officers on the ground do whatever they want. And this is what they want to do. And now we're seeing World Central Kitchen canceling their aid operations. They were brought in to sort of as a stopgap measure to, you know, since UNRWA has been kneecapped by the West over these false accusations that were apparently extracted from UNRWA workers under torture, including waterboarding, rape, and other kinds of horrible assaults and treatment. This claim that UNRWA was involved in the October 7th attack, and we've seen several countries,

some have reinstated their funding, but certainly the United States is refusing to do so. And so UNRWA has been crippled. They're the main Palestinian, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. And they have the largest distribution network and the most infrastructure to actually get aid to the Palestinians. And so this group is now leaving, who is filling in some of the gap. And of course, other aid groups are spending their operations as well, because it's just, you can't send people to a war zone where America's greatest ally is going to be murdering a workers. They've already killed hundreds of workers for UNRWA as well as other aid agencies. I was just reading a testimony from, I believe the commissioner general, the secretary general of doctors without borders talking to the

UN security council about how in February in con Eunice, there was a house that was sheltering a family as well as several Doctors Without Borders members or workers. And the house was marked with a Doctors Without Borders flag. And the Israelis shelled it with 122 millimeter tank shell and then set the building on fire and then just started shooting at everybody. And they killed, I believe, two people and severely burned six more. And so you're telling me that the Israelis tortured UN employees to find out if any of their colleagues were affiliated with Hamas? Yes, this is according to the UN agency for Palestinian, the UN relief and works Palestinian Refugees. And these reports came out weeks ago. I believe the story was broken by Reuters originally. And it's based on a report that was written up by UNRWA based on testimony from their own employees who came back from Israeli

detention. And they testified that they, or that they reported that they had been waterboarded, they had been raped, you know, all kinds of horrible treatment. I mean, the Israelis, we're getting reports of what they're doing to the Palestinians that they're kidnapping and torturing. I mean, they're sodomizing them with electrocuted metal plates or metal bars, you know, sicking dogs on them, tying them up along a barbed wire fence. I mean, the Israelis are really, I mean, this is levels of atrocities that I don't think the American people can even fathom, really. I mean, I find it difficult to read this stuff myself, but it's all coming out in Israeli media. We've been seeing in 972 Mag and Haaretz and several other publications talking about just the same kind of practice being done to regular Palestinians, let alone these UN workers.

And this should be the biggest scandal in the world that Israel is torturing and murdering UNRWA workers. It wasn't Matthew Miller. It was the, I forget his name. He's the deputy spokesman for the department. Was asked by Ryan Grimm from The Intercept about this, about these reports of UNRWA workers being tortured into making confessions, false confessions that have investigated this dossier that purported to have the evidence to support these allegations that would justify allegedly pulling all this aid from UNRWA. And they just refused. They said, no, we haven't seen that. We haven't seen it. And it's reported by Reuters and all these other media agencies. It's very much accepted and it hasn't been addressed by the United States. They just pretend it's not happening. Here's the – well, I won't characterize the response.

I'll let you and the viewers characterize the response. But here's the press spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, and his national security communicator, Admiral Kirby, responding to the fact that U.S. weapons were used to kill the food workers. The President's call, he called Chef José Andrés to express that he's heartbroken by this news of the airstrike that killed seven aid workers and to express and share his deepest condolences. The President felt it was important to recognize the tremendous contribution World Center Kitchen has made to the people in Gaza and people around the world. The president conveyed he will make clear to Israel that humanitarian aid workers must be protected. We were outraged to learn of an IDF strike that killed a number of civilian humanitarian workers yesterday

from the World Central Kitchen, which has been relentless in working to get food to those who are hungry in Gaza and, quite frankly, around the world. We send our deepest condolences to their families and loved ones. We've seen the comments from Prime Minister Netanyahu and from the Israeli Defense Forces about their commitment to conduct an investigation. As we understand it, a preliminary investigation has been completed today and presented to the Army Chief of Staff, and we'll obviously look to see what they discover in this preliminary one.

But we expect a broader investigation to be conducted and to be done so in a swift and comprehensive manner. We hope that those findings will be made public and that there is appropriate accountability held. Why would the U.S. not more forcefully set conditions on the use of U.S.-made weaponry when it is being used to target aid workers. First of all, there's an investigation going on.

So why don't we let it get done, and why don't we see what they find in terms of the decision-making process that led to this terrible outcome? The Prime Minister and the IDF have noted that it was their error. If you don't like the word mistake, their error. They're investigating it. Let them do that work and let them see what they come up with. And then we'll go from there. More innocents will die during this investigation, Admiral. This is just reprehensible. You know, Connor, a federal statute enacted by Congress that prohibits the use of American military equipment or the transporting of American military equipment and ammunition to't know how he can look himself in the sovereign state of Iran,

inside Damascus, inside Syria, if you follow me. 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. Yeah, absolutely. This is a declaration of war against Iran. And this is something a lot of Iran experts, particularly Trita Parsi from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, have been warning about. And I follow his work very closely. And one of the things that he has pointed out is that the Biden, this is well before October 7th, by the way, that the Biden administration

has been unprecedentedly hawkish against Iran and also unprecedentedly deferential to Israel vis-a-vis its Iran policy, including when compared to even Donald Trump or Barack Obama, certainly Barack Obama or George W. Bush. So what we've seen, I mean, just since Biden came into office, one of the first things he did was he flew B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf in a message to Iran. And there were, you know, for it, I followed this at the time, I can't remember exactly how long they went on, but let's say a year, maybe a year and a half of indirect negotiations in order to get the US back into the Iran nuclear deal in Vienna that were brokered by, you know, the EU and other signatories to the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. These all failed largely because of Israeli pressure. The Israelis had been attacking Iranian ships and Iranian nuclear facilities

with sabotage attacks, which can cause huge environmental catastrophes in order to pressure the United States to walk out of the talks. In August of 2021, when he was prime minister, Naftali Bennett came to the White House and proposed a deal, a plan to destroy Iran by a death by a thousand cuts, economic, diplomatic, covert, military, the whole works. And by all appearances, Biden signed on to it. And he also insisted that the Americans keep their troops in Syria and Iraq, where we indefinitely occupy in Syria, for instance, a third of their territory, stealing their oil and wheat resources in a country where because of our sanctions and our dirty war, which killed half a million people, where the U S and Israel and their partners backed out Qaeda and its affiliates,

90% of the country lives below the poverty line with limited access to food, water, medicine, transportation, you name it. And so in 2022, the Israelis launched a huge campaign of assassinations and drone strikes within Iran. And the United States tacitly backed all of these attacks, which is something that even the Barack Obama administration would not do. They murdered a colonel named Hassan Syed Kodeh in, I believe, in Tehran, and also many aerospace engineers and drone-striked military facilities. And so the entire time the Biden administration's policy has been, we stand behind Israel, we give them the green light, they have freedom of action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear

weapon, even though our own Pentagon, our national defense strategy, and our nuclear posture review, and our intelligence community has repeatedly conceded that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, and they are not seeking them, and they have been a signatory of the nonproliferation treaty for more than 50 years. Whereas Israel has a clandestine nuclear program, which could include up between 80 or 300 warheads. And that actually makes our aid to Israel illegal anyway, due to our foreign assistance laws, which were amended in the seventies. So, I mean, since, I mean, and also the Israel has been bombing Syria nearly every week. And they have been since the seventh ramping up these strikes on civilian infrastructure, was saying the U.S. needs to start harshly targeting the IRGC, which would set off a full blown war between the U.S. and Iran. So that was unprecedented.

And at the same time, starting last year, Israel carried out with U.S. involvement an extensive series of military drills preparing for a multi-front war with Iran, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and Syria. And I mean, and including in the beginning of last year, the U.S. and Israel carried out their largest ever drills, you know, 140 aircraft, 8,000 troops over the Mediterranean, clearly practicing for war with Iran, with long range bombers, B-52s, the whole gamut. And the Biden administration has just been, they've expanded the sanctions on Iran, even compared to what Trump did. They've refused to reenter into the JCPOA. And this is largely due to pressure from the Israelis. And because we don't have diplomats in this administration and we have instead an ardent Zionist hawk, a mass murderer named Antony Blinken leading the State Department. He could have easily returned to the JCP Netanyahu was bluffing about basically preparing for war with Iran.

And I think it's pretty obvious now that in the situation Netanyahu finds himself in politically, that he is clearly going to go to war with Hezbollah probably sooner rather than later. And he appears to be trying to drag Iran into it. Hezbollah probably sooner rather than later. Can Israel survive a full fledged war with Iran or they want to drag the United States into it? According to the DIA assessment that was reported from the Washington Post, Israel cannot fight Hezbollah, certainly not while they're fighting in Gaza. And the last time they fought Hezbollah, they had to end the war due to significant damage and losses they were taking. So I think they would devastate Lebanon. And I mean, Hezbollah is a much stronger armed force now than they were in 2006. But, you know, I mean, I think the Iranians would intervene, whether asymmetrically or directly.

That could get very risky because, as I said, Israel has nuclear weapons, Iran does not, and the Israelis are completely, I mean, they're a pariah state, but they're a nuclear-armed apartheid state with genocidal intentions, and they clearly appear to want to blow up the Middle East. They have no regard for international norms, basic morality, Judeo-Christian morality, whatever they choose to call it. They probably wouldn't call it that, but they have no sense of following the rules. They make up the rules as they go along. It is absolutely against all international norms to attack an embassy or a consulate. Even when you're at war with that country, you're not allowed to attack the embassy or the consulate. Have they admitted that they did this damage or is it just obvious that they did it? Yoav Galant, the defense minister, has made some comments. Dave DeCamp has them in an article on Antiwar.com today that indicate that, well, he's hinting that they were responsible.

Everybody knows they were responsible. In fact, you know what's really embarrassing, Judge, is right before, so apparently the U.S. was notified of the strike only minutes before it took place. And this also coincided with a meeting between Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and some Israeli officials discussing the coming attack on Rafah, the invasion of Rafah Syria, as I say, stealing a third of the country who had previously been forces. They don't answer to Iran, but Iran holds significant leverage with them. And Iran, uh, back in February leaned on, uh, and as well as Baghdad leaned on these militias to cease their attacks on American bases. And they did cease those attacks. Yes.

Yes. And, and of course now those soldiers are sitting ducks and, but this is what is, you know, I got, I got to say the Abraham Accords project was a fig leaf for a NATO style coalition that was going to be built up around Iran and that they were going to fight Iran with the U S Israel and these Gulf dictatorships at the U S backs. That was always the plan that was admitted by Israeli officials. And the, the, the political aspect of it was normalizing Israeli apartheid, throwing the Palestinians under the bus and bribing these Gulf dictatorships to spit in the faces of their own people by offering them weapons get involved in a war with Iran at this point. They will still be in the crossfire because of all the American assets that are based, for instance, in Qatar and Bahrain. Colonel McGregor believes that if the war became

serious between Iran and Israel, Russia would enter on Iran's side. Russia has too much of an investment, too many assets in Ukraine to let it twist in the wind. Here's a report, a very interesting observer by the name of Douglas Herbert, a report from France 24 News on whether or not Israel's denial of the destruction of this embassy consulate is plausible. Cut number six. The vast majority of the time, Israel plausibly denying it, saying we do not comment on reports in the foreign media. It's almost that exact same wording every single time. What makes this attack different than all of those hundreds of other strikes that we've seen until now is both the target itself. Iran says this was a consular, a building that housed the consular section of its embassy, meaning it was part of the broader Iranian diplomatic complex, meaning that essentially Israel, in Iran's view, was striking at Iranian territory, albeit in Syria, but Iranian territory. Two to three high-level generals in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force, which is their external branch of the IRGC, and some other high-level officers.

So both the targets and the location, just by definition, by their nature, escalate this immediately. And nobody takes seriously any denial, and you indicated that Foreign Minister Gallant hinted at the truthfulness of our beliefs about the attack. Switching gears, what is the latest with Speaker Mike Johnson, one of those American Republicans who believes that God the Father gave all of the land between... Listen, I'm an old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic, but this is absurd. This guy believes that God the Father gave all the land between the river and the sea to modern day Israel, Mike Johnson. But now I'm asking about Johnson's attitude about Ukraine. What is he going to do about Ukraine? Is he going to risk his speakership by allowing a vote on Ukraine? Does he understand that by sending

more money to Ukraine, it's just more destruction and more death. It's not going to defeat the Russians at all. Oh, of course. Yeah. The Russians have taken 20% of Ukrainian territory, including Zafirishik Kherson, the Donbass, Donetsk, and Luhansk. They've outpaced the entire NATO alliance in terms of producing artillery and ammunition by at least three times, according to a NATO assessment that CNN reported on. You've got 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers dead or wounded. And the country, at least where the fighting is taking place, is covered in cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions. And we're just continuing to escalate, as we discussed last time, by, you know, we have neo-Nazis running over the border with American weapons, killing civilians. And of course, this attack, I'm not yet sure how much Ukraine was involved in that or if they were directly, but this

mass murder in the concert hall outside Moscow. And so, you know, Speaker Johnson, you know, as we're on the brink of nuclear war, we spent already $113 billion or more on this project, and it's done nothing but kill Ukrainians and lose the war. He is proposing, well, he's not only saying that he wants to bring a bill to a vote for the $61 billion in further aid military for Ukraine to get it, so Biden can get through the election cycle without the collapse, the outright collapse of the Ukrainian military and its government. He wants to do that in exchange, it sounds like, for the Biden administration would lift this pause on the issuance of liquefied natural gas permits for new export terminals. And so this could benefit Louisiana, where Mike Johnson's from. Well,

that's certainly a big part of it. Um, and something that can help him back home, but he's also talking about supporting this repo act, which is going to seize, uh, frozen Russian central bank assets and other sovereign assets that are held, uh, in the United States and in Europe, which is around $300 billion. And this is on even the New York Times says in that same article, you just showed that this is completely unprecedented, could lead to massive economic consequences. And the Western banks that are going to be involved in this are warning against the plan. And the EU has a similar one where they want to use 3 billion euros in profits made from these assets to send over to Ukraine, 90% of which will be used for more weapons for the war. The Western banks are saying, if you do this, it's going to under, it's going to accelerate de-dollarization across the world. And we will be liable to legal action from the Russian side

for decades into the future after the war ends and sanctions are eased or lifted. So this is just a horrendous plan, but Johnson has been committed to this multi-front policy. We have, you know, Obama launched the largest buildup for wars, largest military buildup since the Second World War against China, shifting two thirds of all American air and naval forces and hundreds of bases, forming a noose around China, preparing for a direct war with China. And this has been expanded by each successive administration. And of course, he's an ardent Iran hawk. Maybe he thinks it'll bring on the apocalypse and the return of Jesus or something, but that's where we're at. And also, this crisis is going to increase the escalation with Russia, who by all appearances and all the past history here, just since the war started and before the war started, Putin is very open to negotiating, uh, would, and, but the Americans are the ones who continue to stand the way and the British and Brussels, uh, uh, preventing

any peace talks and any diplomatic settlement. They just want more Ukrainians to die so that they just have this idea. They can bleed Russia. And they say, we've, we've destroyed Russian military capacity by a half, but that's just a lie. I think Victoria Nuland jumped off a sinking ship. Yeah. Well, the Supreme ally commander of NATO and the head of Eurocom, Christopher Cavoli, General Christopher Cavoli told Congress that Russia's armed forces, their ground forces are bigger today than when the war began and that the Navy and the Air Force have only taken negligible losses. This're destroying Ukraine despite Russia. And really the plan, Judge, is to cripple Russia as much as possible before they go to war with China. And that's been stated

several times. In fact, the head of strategic command of American nuclear forces said, I believe at the end of 2022, that this is just a dry run. This war in Ukraine, this is kid stuff. We're preparing for the big one. Conor, you're an encyclopedia. Your knowledge is vast and your ability to articulate it is commendable and rewarding. Thank you very much for your time, for all the information and knowledge that you shared with us. We'll see you again soon, my friend. Great. Thank you very much, Judge. Take care. Of course. Coming up, the whirlwind of knowledge, coming up at three o'clock Eastern this afternoon, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll be you next time. 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. Learn more at wgu.edu.