Judging Freedom - LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski :Is Russia Afraid of NATO?

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski :Is Russia Afraid of NATO?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Today is Tuesday, November 4th, 2020-25 election day in much of America, off-year-year elections, not for federal offices. Karen Kutkowski, Colonel Kutkowski, joins us now. Colonel, always a pleasure. I wanted to talk to you about Russia and NATO, and we will get to that. But before we do, to the news of the day, which is the death of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was Dick Cheney a war criminal? Yes, and a political criminal and probably a common criminal as well. All right. Well, write down that list as you see fit. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I saw a tweet that summarized the number of deaths that can be credited, really, to Cheney's overwhelming influence as vice president and the Bush administration, just that, you know, his bringing of neocon wars to the fore and making sure they happened, and promoting the lies, you know, making sure they happened regardless of truth, regardless of American security needs, you know, just he's, he was. wanted this. He wanted to get wealthy from it. He wanted the power, I think, more than even the

wealth that he had from his Halliburton ties. But, so, you know, politically he misused his power. He's, you know, the common criminal part comes from so many that we may be, we may have in our families, you know, people that will simply just bend the law for their own personal benefit. And they know better, but they don't care. Well, he's certainly led us, led the United States, and he led George Bush around by George W. around by the nose, but he led the United States into unjust wars on false pretences in Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean, together, he probably has the blood of a million human beings on his hands. I think it's more than that. I think it's more than that. When you talk

about the chaos that was sown in the region by that. And, you know, but there, and I hadn't thought of this because I obviously, it was just announced today, but, and I don't really think about Dick Cheney very much. But he is the face of the deep state in many ways before we started talking about the deep state. Yes, yes. I think in some ways, you almost need a criminal, a demon like that in the public view to wake people up a little bit, to the unwarranted power that people in our government can bring to bear, to really pursue their own interests. I don't think anybody today, whether they supported Dick Cheney or Bush or even the wars that we had at the time, I don't think anybody today looks back and thinks that America is better off,

is more safe, is wealthier, is more respected. All of the things that people from all across the specter might want, none of those things were achieved by the things that Dick Cheney advocated for and really made happen. He championed the Patriot Act, which as we all know, was written before 9-11 in anticipation of some 9-11-like event. This monstrosity bypasses the Fourth of, Amendment and allows one FBI agent to authorize another FBI agent to execute a search warrant

and direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment. That's right. He championed the concept of, and this I believe was actually his phrase, a friend of mine was in the Oval Office when this was discussed, enhanced interrogation, which is another word, another phrase for torture, and personally talked George Bush, George W. Bush, into authorizing torture. I often wonder if Bush didn't pardon the torturers. Of course, you can't pardon them from war crimes prosecution, and there is no statute of limitations on these war crimes of torture or murder. So you're really talking about a very, very bad guy that

hero had tremendous influence. I think between him and his buddy Donald Rumsfeld, they pretty much ran the Defense Department for about 16 years between the two of them and their various acolytes. Yeah, that's true. It's amazing to think about that, the power that they wielded. But people do have the benefit of hindsight now, and I think no one is worried that he passed. I think some people thought that he may have died before this. I mean, we hadn't heard from him much in a while. And, you know, he is getting the proper treatment by the people in this country and certainly the world. I mean, the world, the opinion of most of the world in their observations of what Cheney did and Rumsfeld too, but particularly Cheney, they celebrate his death.

They celebrate his passing. It is not a tragedy. It's the beginning. it's the very beginning of justice for him. I'm saying that's what most people around the world think. And many in America have drawn that similar conclusion. You know, it's possible that the nastiness of Dick Cheney and the fact that he was so hated widely

and he so abused the Constitution and he was so arrogant and war-mongering, profiteering, all these terrible things that people don't like in this country, it's possible that we the people have become, sensitized to the things, you know, we haven't seen a similar rise of a Dick Cheney-type character. You know, we haven't. Trump is not that person, but some of the things they criticize Trump for, we experienced with Dick Cheney, not as president, but as a very grasping and evil vice president. And I think, I think that's fair. I'm sorry that he, his family members may have seen a different side to him,

But I think as a public person, you know, it was a disaster. And I hope this country has learned its lesson. Yes, before we jump to another subject matter, here is our friend and colleague, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Now, this is, I believe, in 2024 on former Vice President Dick Cheney. Why does the West hate Russia? You know, people have this. capacity of delusion, rant, groupthink, but I'll tell you, I went back to take a look. At the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, our defense secretary at the time, Dick Cheney,

said, okay, they don't want communism anymore. Maybe Russia should be dismember. two. Why stop at the Soviet Union? The idea was already there. It wasn't about this communism or not communism. It was about Russia. Jeff is right. And that attitude now has resulted in the war in, well, the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the war in Ukraine now. And that attitude manifests itself, unfortunately, in the president. He claims he never had the attitude when he was running for office, but now he's surrounded by people who are acolytes, almost ideological descendants, if you will, of Dick Cheney, with respect to Russia. All things Russian are equal. Jeff is right. They did talk about wanting to break Russia up, European Russia, Asian, Russia,

Siberian, Russia. What right does the United States have to break up another country? Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing. And it's really kind of a, what they call it, a Napoleonic complex, you know, a person who, now, and this is not fair to Napoleon, because he was quite accomplished in many ways. But, you know, the idea, Dick Cheney reminds me of that, though, because he is a person who, under different circumstances, had he not got into politics, had he not hooked up with originally his mentor, Rumsfeld was his mentor, it switched over later, had he not taken that course of life, he would have been quite the harmless and inconsequential person. He would have killed no one, maybe, maybe, you know,

drunk driving, okay, but nothing, you know, in the context of what he has done through the state, through the power of the state to intervene and to conduct war and to starve people. all the things that our government did very happily in the Middle East and elsewhere. So he is a, he's a, he's a, he's a small person. He was a small person. And sometimes that overcompensation is, I think is what we see with him. And I think it speaks to what happens when you have a very, very large and powerful government. Of course, not the one that our founders envisioned, not the one they tried to frame for us, but the one we have, the one we have today. You know, it's a government that's highly indebted, it's globally militarized, it has a global

agenda. And part of that agenda is to continue its debt spending, right? I mean, this is what we have in America. It's not the American dream, you know, it's not what Americans think of when they think of their country, but it is what the government is operating. This is its environment. And in that environment, you get guys like Cheney who should have no power whatsoever. They should be laughed out of this, you know, when he went down to CIA to watch the analyst and tell them what he wanted them to assess for him because he wasn't happy with the intelligence they were producing. He should have been laughed out of the room, but he wasn't. And that's because our government is so large and so powerful and so filled with the bureaucrats

who think they're kings and princes that, you know, we, Americans have a big problem because, again, no American wanted that war in Iraq. And many people who trusted government and believed the lies that Dick Cheney and his crowd of neocons, you know, talked about constantly prior to that invasion, when people realized this really shortly thereafter that there was, there were no WMDs. And Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11, they were angry at having been used by Dick, you know, Dick Cheney and the government that allowed him to have the power that he had. And again, I blame Bush, too. Come on.

What was Bush doing? Being president. I think we've done better. I think there was another Bush that ran, wasn't it? Jeb, he didn't make it through the primaries. I think Americans, we learn slowly, but we do learn. Yeah. Is Trump preparing to attack or invade Venezuela?

Looks like it. He is doing all the things that intelligence in other agencies would see and say, yeah, looks like he's preparing, you know, increasing surveillance, increasing overflight threats and, you know, and monitoring. He's causing problems with the ships there. You know, we're rolling up little boats and things like that. We have publicly, we have a bounty on Maduro's head, and we have, claimed Trump has said, I want him gone and I want to put a friendly, you know, public talk of

regime change. Well, all those things would say, yeah, he's serious about it. But the fact that it's Trump, we don't know. How do you're a former Air Force, how do Air Force pilots feel, if you know, about bombing, releasing missiles and killing, nameless, defenseless, nonviolent, helpless civilians on a fishing boat.

If they think about it, they probably don't like it, but I'm telling you, they don't think about it. Most of them don't think about it. The opportunity for flyers, pilots, and even drone operators, get a kill to get to get that target hitting or that the bomb hitting target kind of thing. That is the overwhelming motivator. And I'll actually get a thrill out of killing people.

It's how you, it's your job. It's how you compare it. It's how you compete with your peers. These people are highly, highly competitive. And many of them want to go higher in the military. They would like to. And so this is the kind of thing you have to do. I want to tell you, there was a guy in Aviano back in the Yugoslavia,

when Yugoslavia broke up and we were at war, that NATO humanitarian war. And this guy had four kills and he got to go see President Clinton in the White House. And he came back. We said, how was it? He said, oh, Clinton's a really nice guy, et cetera, et cetera. But then you find out what his kills consisted of. And he was in an F-16, very high altitude. And he was above, a long way away above.

And he was shooting down fixed-wing aircraft that had been modified to carry by bombs. They were not warplains in the sense that you would consider a near-peer competitor. That's not what it was. And so it was basically like shooting fish in a barrel, which I'm sure they used that term at the time. And he was awarded Silver Star and was highly commended. And, you know, this was, he was patted on the back. You know, there is, I'm telling you, most people in the military and in the Air Force, I don't see, I don't see the officer corps at all being those who would question how their special skill set is used. They want to compete, they want to do well, they want to have that, quote-unquote, real-life experience.

And so I don't think you, no, I don't think. I think anybody who thinks about what they're doing in the military, whether it's Air Force or anything else, if they think about it and they decide they're not comfortable with it, it's an all-volunteer force and they leave. Again, this is one of the, I'm all for an all volunteer force, but there's a price we pay as a nation by bribing people to join the military and allowing people to simply slink away and do nothing about it just to clear their own consciences about how this military is used. Let me switch gears here. Why are EU elites determined? to engage Russia in wars that by any rational measurement, they can't win. Yeah. Well, Netanyahu wants to fight Iran, and he can't do that without our help.

So I think the EU elites very much want to make sure that America continues to back them up economically, militarily and politically, they're clinging to the only protection, really, that they can have. And that would be the American umbrella. And Trump has threatened that quite a bit. So we see them, you know, compliment him, you know, overwhelmingly, you know, call him daddy. You know, we see this kind of humiliation and this humiliating behavior out of the EU elites because they are in a position where they, you know, obviously their mouth is writing checks that they can't cash. And they don't know how to get out of it.

Well, they should take a lesson from some of the EU countries that are more independent and are listening to the people in those countries. But they refuse to because most of those countries are on the southeastern side. They're lower, they're not really equal. all, you know, not all animals are equal, right? In an animal farm, some are more equal than others. And so these... But if you listen, if you listen to Frederick Mersh or Kier-Starmer or Emmanuel Macron,

they sound as if they think, this is inconceivable, but this is the way they sound to me, that Russia is afraid of NATO. I don't think Russia, I don't think the Russian leadership is afraid of anything. No. Certainly not NATO. No. And NATO really isn't functional. It never has been functional without U.S. leadership and investment and, you know, direction. But it's not even functional even today because Trump's pulling away from NATO. So they're in a transition period that they cannot, they can't get out of. You know, they can't move through it because there's a way to move through it for Europe to be prosperous and free and not threatened by neighbors because the facts. Sorry. I mean, just to give you an example of how they're either lying or misreading Russia, they think Russia is going to come and, you know, do something to Europe, right?

Take them over, occupy their land. I don't know what. At the same time, in the same conversation, they'll notice, then they'll emphasize, hey, Russia's been fighting for four years in Ukraine, and all they have is a little sliver of land on the eastern border, you know, the Dunbass. That's all they really have. So they're really weak, you know. So what? What is it? Choose your narrative and stick with it. And they can't because the real problem is those elites are, they're on the way out. Whether they know it, whether they sense it, but they're on the way out. The movements in the European countries is towards populism. That's one thing. They're also heavily, you know, they have a large immigrant population,

which are not European and don't share European values. Whether that is the dominant force of the future, the immigration, or the popular sentiment of the people in Europe, either way, they don't have any use for these elites. These elites are pointless. They're expensive, they're war-mongering, and they're stupid. And that is the assessment, I think, of their own people. How do they get out of that, right? You have to, how do you, how do you exit stage left here? How do they do it? They don't, they're not willing to. So they're tagging along with the US, which Trump is happy to draw them in because the price of that is you buy

nobody else's gas and oil except American gas and oil to be marked up, you know, high, expensive. You'll pay our tariffs with a smile on your face. It's really terrible. You and I and the others on this show and our

large and fruitful audience for which, of course, I'm grateful on a daily basis, have not hesitated to be critical of the genocide perpetrated by the Netanyahu regime and financed by two American presidencies under Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But here's what they think of us. Chris the short version. And I just want the anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-West crowd to understand something.

You're going to have to come through me and millions of people just like me. And you're not going to make it. You think your stupid little podcast or your stupid little subscription program or your little TV show or maybe you have a little radio show is going to change the world like hell it is, not if I and everybody else have something to say about it. He would just as soon silence a program like this. Our audience, of course, is larger than his and the audiences of our colleagues,

Clayton Morris and Annie Davis and Tucker Carlson, our audiences are enormous, in part because the mainstream media has swung in that direction and tries to silence people as he wants us silence. But I couldn't resist asking you what you thought of Mark Levin, and if you thought he was speaking to us. Oh, of course. Well, he was very clear who he's speaking to. Anyone who asks questions or exposes the truth about the U.S. Israel relationship and specifically Israel's actions that are on our dime.

You know, I mean, a lot of people are talking about it. He doesn't like that. But the millions that he's talking about that we'll have to come through, I would suggest that it's not millions. It's probably in the dozens of hundreds. It's probably, I don't know, 2000. 2000, I think we can take you guys. So I'm not worried about that.

And he is preaching to the crowd, and it's a very nervous crowd. Because most of these people, like Levin, who very well compensated, right, for the things that he does and the stances that he takes, the minds that he tries to change with his radio program and his books, you know, they're worried because it's. it's not paying off. And it's like a marketplace of ideas. They're losing. They're losing customer share. That eventually means you're going to lose platforming and you're going to lose money. So what's his solution? Don't compete better. Don't come up with better ideas. No, we'll ban. We'll ban all these countervailing ideas and truth tellers. So it's kind of, it's really kind of sad. I think we have to realize he was speaking to the crowd of some of his some, you know, dozens of supporters and active.

Financial backers, yeah. Karen, thank you. I just want to say one thing. When you have to pay somebody $7,000 for a positive tweet that, you know, you're basically like a pharmaceutical company. And so Americans, we're over that. We're just over it. We are.

Thank you for your clarity, your moral, courage, and intellectual honesty, as always, Colonel Koukowski. pleasure my dear friend look forward to seeing you next week absolutely thank you judge thank you if you're watching us live we'll be up in four minutes on another link because at two o'clock eastern matt ho and at three o'clock eastern professor geoffrey sachs judge on paul tanner for judging freedom Thank you.