Judging Freedom - Kyle Anzalone (Antiwar,com) : Antiwar Wrap-Up

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Kyle Anzalone (Antiwar,com) : Antiwar Wrap-UpSee 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 Thursday, February 8th, 2024. Kyle Anzalone from Antiwar.com joins us now. Kyle, always a pleasure. I enjoy going through the anti-war wrap-up with you because it touches on a variety of topics of interest to our audience in the area of the government use of violence. But there's just a little breaking news, actually, between the time that you and I chatted a few minutes ago and now, and that is that the United States Senate has voted to proceed forward with a vote on sending $68 billion, not clear if it's 68 or 61, to Ukraine. The vote was a preliminary vote, but it allows them to do it without the ordinary rigmarole that they have to go through before they do it.

Wouldn't $61 million in the hands of a collapsing government and collapsing military just assure more death and destruction and maybe postpone, maybe not at all postpone, the inevitable crushing Ukraine defeat. Oh, I don't hear you, Kyle. It's very disappointing news, Judge, that the Senate moved that bill forward. But unfortunately, I guess I do think that they're going to end up passing some aid to Ukraine. But in the short run, it seems like Ukraine has far

more desperate problems. Zelensky just fired the head of his military today, Zelushny. And so that's a big move. And the Senate moving forward here may be something. But overall, I think in the House, this aid for Ukraine is going to have to be attached to probably border security, as well as aid for Israel in Taiwan. And so I see a hard time of this particular bill moving forward in the House, even if it does pass the Senate. Here's the president yesterday, cut number eight, Chris.

It's really off the wall, but let me hold back my comments on it because I want yours. This bill would also address two other important priorities. First, it provides urgent funding for Ukraine. I'm wearing my Ukraine tie, my Ukraine pin, which I've been wearing because they're in dire straits right now defending themselves against a Russian onslaught. A brutal conquest. The clock is ticking. Every week, every month that passes without new aid Ukraine means fewer artillery shells, fewer defense, air defense systems, fewer tools for Ukraine to defend itself against this Russian onslaught, just what Putin wants. Do you think that his mind, who knows about his mind, do you think his mindset, his attitude is back in the days of the old Soviet Union when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire, as opposed to today, where Russia is a highly sophisticated, self-sufficient economy that should be our trading partner and not our fanciful,

fanciful, based on Joe Biden's beliefs, military adversary. Yeah, I think maybe Biden does try to identify himself as one of the great U.S. wartime presidents and up against a true evil in not only Russia, but Hamas and other groups like groups across the Middle East and also Iran and North Korea and China. multiple conflicts now that have cost us billions and billions of dollars. And Biden is still pretending like we need to continue on this crusade to help the Ukrainians, when in reality, things are collapsing in Ukraine. And the best thing that we could do for them is to facilitate some talks with Russia and maybe offer, you know, Russia and say, hey, we will close the door on NATO membership to Ukraine. We're willing to remove some of our missile batteries from Eastern Europe, if that will help you to end the war in Ukraine and maybe give Ukraine back some territory in exchange. I haven't seen the agreement, but the handshake agreement, there

were some written notes, of course, in Turkey two years ago in March of 2022 between Russia and Ukraine didn't even require the removal of any American offensive military equipment from, say, Poland. It only required that the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine go back to Russia and the rest of Ukraine stay neutral and not in NATO. I don't think they're going to get a deal that good now, which is two years later, 500,000 Ukrainian casualties later, most deaths, some injuries, so great that they can't go back to the military, a government about to collapse, a government on life support. It requires money from the United States just to pay its domestic bills and its public servants. None of that would have happened had Joe Biden and Boris Johnson not interfered with that handshake agreement before it was reduced to writing?

Certainly. The Biden administration had a lot of chances to help Ukraine. At the start of his presidency, Biden treated Ukraine like a de facto NATO ally, conducted major NATO war games within Ukrainian territory, and really upset the Russians with these war games and other agreements to defend Ukraine and to support Ukraine and things like that. And then leading up to the invasion, even, there were offers from Ukraine and documents exchanged between Russia and the United States back and forth that could have averted the war by, again, agreeing that NATO not accept Ukraine as a member and withdraw some of their anti-missile defense systems from Eastern Europe that could be used to launch nuclear weapons at Russia. But rather than

negotiating on those issues, Washington refused. And so Russia ended up going to war. And then, as you say, a couple months into the conflict, rather than negotiating an end to it, they decided that they wanted to go to war. And each of these decisions has cost Ukraine more and more, more territory, more young men and women who are dying on the front lines, more of their infrastructure destroyed. To say nothing of a few million Ukrainian refugees looking for a place to live throughout Europe. All right, switching gears. People are criticizing the president for wearing a Ukrainian flag in his lapel. That doesn't move me one way or another. He's got the freedom of speech like everybody else.

He can wear an Israeli Jewish star or a Ukrainian flag or an American flag if he wants in his lapel. But when he kills people, I care about it. So the drone that killed three American soldiers, reservists from Georgia, confined to this god awful place called Tower 22 at the border of Syria and Jordan and injured between 37 and 40 other soldiers was responded to in a variety of ways. The president directed 85 different attacks on structures, many of which were empty, and many of which caught up about 25 or 30 civilians, tribesmen, herdsmen, and their families, and killed them. They had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the attack on Tower 22. Now, yesterday, the United States

government fired a drone from within Iraq, where we've been asked to leave, to inside Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, in order to kill a Hezbollah leader. It succeeded in killing this person, it says. It also killed two others who had nothing to do with him. How dangerous, how horrific, how violative of international law and morality is it for us to do this? We spent a trillion dollars supposedly liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein because supposedly he had weapons of mass destruction, which we now know he never had. Now we're inside the country. They've asked us to leave. We won't leave, and we're bombing their capital. Could it get any crazier than this? Yeah, it's hard to imagine. And on the tie, you know, I've long

believed that members of Congress and politicians should be like NASCAR drivers and wear their sponsors on their jackets and things like that. So this seems to be a good example of that. Does AIPAC have a lapel pin? Because two thirds of them would be wearing that. Right. Or a Jewish flag may be appropriate for Joe Biden, because as he says, you know, he's a hardcore Zionist and it's a firm belief of his. And so, yeah, this, you know, Biden's dedication to Israel has embroiled the U.S. in multiple conflicts in the U.S. And this ended up with three dead Americans. And Doug Bondow has a fantastic article out today in the American Conservative explaining how not only did Joe Biden sit these American troops

somewhere out near the border with Syria and Jordan to reinforce a war they should never be waging and poorly defended them and ended up getting them killed. But not only that, when they came back to America, he used their arrival as a photo op for his reelection campaign. And I really hope that America is different now than it was in 2002 or 2003, when they see a flag-draped coffin of an American soldier, rather than wanting more blood in the Middle East, they want to come home and they blame our politicians for still having the American soldiers there. So I really hope this badfires and blows up in Joe Biden's face, just like his bombing of Iraq and Syria is where these militia groups, they're not backing

down. The Iraqi people are not backing down. They want the Americans gone. They're tired of the Americans violating their sovereignty and conducting airstrikes in their capital city. I mean, Judge, can you imagine if any other country conducted a bombing in Washington, D.C. against, you know, a militia leader that was popular among the people? It would be outrageous. Can you? No, I can't imagine that. I can't imagine that happening, Kyle. It's just it's a crazy world.

The United States sets its own rules for itself. I mean, why do we have 57,000 soldiers in the Middle East, in Israel, in Syria, in Egypt, in Jordan, in Iraq? Why are they, probably in Turkey, that I don't know, but I'm going to assume they're there. Why are they there? Because the U.S. has dedicated itself to this global domination foreign policy, and the Biden administration has cartoonishly committed itself to it. Rather than vowing to bring troops home from the Middle East, as he says, a candidate, he has decided that we have to ensure freedom and democracy everywhere. And so not only are we trying to fight a proxy war in Ukraine and also deter China in Taiwan. You know, Judge, right now we have U.S. troops on an island just a few kilometers off the coast of China. And not only that, he's exacerbating tensions with North Korea, but he still thinks we have to have 50,000 troops in the Middle East to fight and defend a war, mostly on behalf of Israel there in the military-industrial complex.

Yesterday, the Saudi Arabian government announced that there will only be normalization with Israel if there is a Palestinian state, and they insisted it be the 1967 borders and that it be a free state, free to have its own security and military apparatus. This, of course, I guess is a non-starter with the Israelis, or at least with the certain Israeli government. I wonder why the Saudis would do this now. They must know it's a non-starter with Netanyahu. Maybe they're trying to drive Netanyahu out. Yes, I think what Washington is trying to do is, you know, the U.S. believes in this fiction that Israel is going to allow Palestinians to live in Gaza one day.

And so they're trying to leverage normalization with Israel and Saudi Arabia on Saudi Arabia rebuilding Gaza, which no Israeli government will ever allow. They don't allow that much aid to get into Gaza even before the October 7th attack. So they won't allow it after. They're not going to allow the strip to be rebuilt. There's 2.3 million people almost now, all of them displaced. And so that level of infrastructure and that project just won't be committed to. But Blinken is doing this for propaganda because the Biden administration can't just pretend like they're completely underwriting the Israeli genocide and they're doing something for peace and diplomacy in the

Middle East. So this is a just a fictional thing the.S. is doing, and Saudi Arabia stomped it out with their statement. Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, said he had seen credible, highly credible, quote, credible, highly credible, closed quote, evidence that a significant numbers of the United Nations rescue mission in Gaza were aligned with Hamas. There are 30,000 people on that mission, and the Israelis claim they had evidence on 12, and then the number was reduced to something less than 12. To my knowledge, nobody has seen that evidence, except the UN is not there anymore, Western Europe is not sending aid, and Blinken and the Congress have used it as an excuse to dial back our aid to Gaza. This is Israeli propaganda. I submit to you at its absolute worst.

Kill these people and starve those who survive the killing. Yeah, the agency you're talking about there, UNRWA, is the UN agency that supports aid going into Gaza and is really the key facilitator of that. In fact, the Israeli military has even admitted that if UNRWA has to shut down, they worry that the famine in Gaza will get so bad that they have to stop their military operations because there'll be such a drastic humanitarian catastrophe. And so that's what we're on the brink of right now. And as you mentioned there, Israel claimed that 12 members sources, including Channel 4 in the UK, The Daily Beast, and CBS News, all of which reviewed the documents and said there's absolutely no evidence of anything there. But this has happened time and time again since October 7th

and throughout the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, where whether it's the tunnels under the al-Shifa hospital, the 40 beheaded babies, or the mass rape, the U.S. government just repeats whatever the Israeli government says. And even if there's never any proof for it, they take action based off of the lies that Israel is telling. And here they have suspended funding for UNRWA, as well as 17 other Western countries. You don't judge one of the countries that didn't, Belgium, actually had their aid office in Gaza bombed by the Israelis afterwards. So maybe Israel was trying to send a message there that there's going to be repercussions if you don't

suspend your aid to UNRWA. The Israeli government claims that of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza, between 30 and 50 have been killed. What they don't say is that they were killed by the Israeli IDF destroying the buildings in which the hostages were housed. I know you're not an expert in Israeli domestic politics, but how much longer do you think the Israelis will tolerate Netanyahu? I think as long as he keeps up the war in Gaza, they're going to tolerate him. I think there's a large faction in Israel that is for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I even saw the father of one of the hostages say that if his son dies in the military campaign, so be it. It has to go on. So there is members of the

Israeli populace and some of the family members of hostages who are protesting against Netanyahu, but the far right has a lot of power and influence over Netanyahu, and there's a lot of forces working against any kind of ceasefire end to this conflict in Israel. Some of our military guests, Matt Ho, Tony Schaefer, Larry Johnson, Scott Ritter, have suggested that the United States often puts troops in harm's way to be a tripwire or to be bait in order to draw an attack to justify war. It's horrific that the U.S. would do this, but apparently it does. And perhaps that's why those four or three reservists from Georgia at Terror 22 are dead. Is that why we just sent 50 troops to an island off the coast of Taiwan? I mean, why do we have to have the U.S. military on an island off the coast of Taiwan. I mean, why do we have to have the U.S. military

on an island off the coast of Taiwan? Biden would be crazy to try and pick a fight with China in its backyard. Yeah, Judge, I wish I understood the thinking in the White House, because I often find myself asking myself why they're doing whatever they're doing, and including in this case. In fact, when I initially saw this, I was in disbelief, and my colleague at antiwar.com emailed the Defense Department to ask about this, and they did not issue a denial. They said that, you know, they won't discuss the operations that they're conducting. They didn't say the U.S. forces weren't there, so I would assume that non-denial is just about as good as an omission. And we've had reports from Taiwanese media that they're on that island. So the only thing I could imagine them being for their judge is a tripwire

that they're concerned that maybe China was going to act on that island. And so they put U.S. troops there as a deterrent. And they do this throughout the Middle East, where, you know, US troops are occupying Syria, basically to prevent Assad from coming over and, you know, retaking the Syrian territory. So yeah, US troops are just placed in different places around the world, basically to hold them like on a risk board or something like that. Someone that you and I and our friends in the anti-war small government taking free speech seriously movement admire very much is on his last appeal, and it will be heard at the end of next week, and that's Julian Assange. Julian Assange, of course, has been charged by the United States government with espionage for being a journalist, for receiving documents from someone who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 45 years in jail, Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, whose time in jail was commuted by President Obama. What Julian Assange

did, in my view, was perfectly lawful, absolutely protected under the First Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court definitively in a case known as the Pentagon Papers case in which a similar thing happened, and the person who exposed it was the famous and now deceased giant of human liberty, Daniel Ellsberg. The reason I mention this to you is because Assange's last appeal to deny extradition from Great Britain, where he's been held for four years in solitary confinement in a hellhole, is next week. And a lot of the Assange people have been asking a lot of us that believe this is a profound injustice to look in the camera and say what we feel about Julian Assange. I didn't tell you ahead of time I was going to ask you to do this, but something tells me you are not uncomfortable doing it.

Assange exposed war crimes committed by the Bush administration and exposed the perpetrators of those war crimes laughing. And he did so absolutely under the protection of the First Amendment. The Trump administration obtained very improvidently. Kyle, I almost talked President Trump, he was the president at the time, into pardoning Assange, but others talked him out of it after my phone call with him. But the Trump administration charged him with espionage. The then Secretary of State, former head of the CIA, former Congressman Mike Pompeo, actually hinted that Assange should be assassinated. It's a horrible, horrible state of affairs. He no longer belongs in jail any more than you or I or anybody watching this now.

Your thoughts? Absolutely. Julian Assange is one of the most important journalists, if not the most important journalist of our time. He's lead some of the most important journalists, if not the most important journalist of our time. He's leaked some of the most, has had some of the most important documents that has shaped our understanding of what has happened over the past couple of decades, leaked to him and published through his outlet, WikiLeaks, 100% verification record. So just an outstanding record as a journalist, and he is being persecuted for those crimes. And not only is it just wrong that a journalist is being thrown in prison and smeared by this systematic campaign from the US government, the US and the UK government, not only to keep him in jail, but to diminish his reputation and to put other allegations against him.

But also, this is a huge attack on the First Amendment and can really restrict what it actually means and what you're allowed to do as a journalist in the United States. So this would absolutely be a huge judge. And we cannot allow him to be convicted, not only because Julian Assange is a hero and should be able to spend time with his wife and his children and run WikiLeaks, the most consequential outlet that we should have right now, but also to defend the First Amendment. Thank you, Kyle. A beautiful statement for Julian Assange, and thank you for your time. As always, we'll look forward to seeing you next week. All the best.

Thank you, Judge. Of course. Coming up, Professor John Mearsheimer and later on, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Napolitano. Professor Sachs on events in the Senate, which will lead to more slaughter in Ukraine. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.