Judging Freedom - Matthew Hoh: Free Julian Assange TODAY

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, February 20th, 2024. Matt Ho joins us now. Matt, I want to ask you a lot of questions about Julian Assange, whom we both know and whose cause for freedom we have both supported you more so than almost anybody I know. But before we get there, the slaughter, the IDF slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza seems to be getting worse and worse. What can stop this? Is it a diversion of the Israeli military to southern Lebanon, where I think they will meet a force greater than theirs? Is it a conversion of Joe Biden's demented view of this? What do you think can put a stop to Netanyahu's slaughter? It has to be external, Judge, right? And, you know,

thank you for having me back on. But it has to be external. We're seeing clearly that it's not going to come internally from the Israelis. And I think most people understood that, you know, four months ago, people were saying that, including many of you, many of those who are on your channel. So it has to come from either an outside force acting on the Israelis to cause them to stop, such as, say, an armed invasion by the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Turks, et cetera, which is highly, highly unlikely, and would offer and bring its own catastrophes to that. So I don't think that's a course of action that anyone who is sane would recommend. So the

other aspect of this, of how it stops, is by the Americans telling them to stop. We are providing the munitions, the bombs, the rockets, the missiles, the shells that are being utilized to conduct this genocide. And without that, the Israelis cannot continue it. Now we're getting into the final weeks, the final days, the final phase of their campaign in Gaza, at least in the sense of they have bombed nearly everything they can bomb. The last place left standing basically is Rafah. So I think, and I think many others agree that what's occurring here is the White House and many or most of our members of Congress are saying, please get this done. Hurry up and get it done. We just saw today, horrifically, disgustingly, obscenely, the United States vetoed another ceasefire resolution in the United Nations

Security Council today. So as the United States continues to provide this assistance, this direct support continues to enable the genocide, I think the Americans are saying, hurry up and get it done. We're running out of time here. You need to finish your ethnic cleansing. You need to move into the next phase. So at least it cannot be said that an act of genocide is in progress. And we can go and we can color this as this is rebuilding, this is reconstruction, this is stability operations. So I think that's what's occurring. But to your question, Judge, the only thing that could stop the Israelis are the Americans. And it doesn't seem like that's going to happen at any point. For all the Americans and Israelis that have a tremendous animosity towards Prime Minister Netanyahu, here's his likely replacement,

Benny Gantz, a retired general. You'll hear him in just a few minutes. Cut number one, Chris. He says, Balakos as Netanyahu. The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know, if by Ramadan hostages are not home, the fighting will continue everywhere to include Rafah area. We will do so in a coordinated manner, facilitating the evacuation of civilians in dialogue with American and Egyptian partners to minimize the civilian casualties as much as possible. I think you've told us, Colonel McGregor has told us, Scott Ritter has told us, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.

You know, Netanyahu has tremendous personal flaws, but whoever replaces him will be just as warlike. And that's probably the person that it will be. That's exactly right, Judge. That's exactly right. There's very few in Israeli society who are standing against this war. One of those, a good member of the parliament, they tried to kick out of the parliament and they were unsuccessful today or yesterday. But there is no space for any type of dissidence against this war. It doesn't seem like people want to fill that space. This war is popular in Israel with the caveat that the hostages are what's causing the

aggravation among the Israeli public towards the Israeli government. So it's not as if the Israelis are in the streets demanding an end to the war because of the moral, the ethical, the legal, the strategic reasons to end this genocide, but rather because the hostages still have not been returned home. And what we've seen is we saw over the weekend, the prime minister of Israel say that, you know, there will be no Palestinian state. He then doubled down on that by saying, I am the reason why there has not been a Palestinian state. I've been the one who stood in the way of a Palestinian state for decades now. and he received great acclaim and applause for that. And then his cabinet voted unanimously to support that position that there

would be no Palestinian state. And then as of yesterday, there was supposed to have been a vote in the Israeli parliament affirming that. However, it was pulled, and I believe maybe it was being voted on today, because the reason why that was pulled, this affirmation that there will be no Palestinian state because what was proposed, what had been put forward by the prime minister's office was not strong enough. So we really are. I had a fear that that's where you're going. Switching gears, about two hours ago, we had Patrick Lancaster on. He's the intrepid American journalist who reports from Donetsk. And while he was in his apartment in Donetsk, he heard tremendous explosions and ran out into the street. And the Ukrainians had attacked a crosswalk, a pizza parlor, and a public library. And he examined the wreckage

and held in his hands what he could establish with absolute certainty was from American HIMARS. So question, what military, conceivable military benefit is there for aiming at a library and a pizza parlor? We know how accurate the HIMARS are, or are the Ukrainian troops so decimated that they don't have anybody that understands how to use this equipment? Right. There is no military justification for it. And this is what that's that has many of us. We have we have said over these last two years now, the fear of this escalating, the fear of this getting out of hand. And in this specific case, as you have basically a stalemated front line, the Russians are making advances. But, you know, the idea that the Russians are going to be able to end this war militarily unless there's a Ukrainian collapse, which is possible.

But unless there's a Ukrainian collapse, there's no military victory at hand for the Russians. So, you know, what then becomes from this? What then occurs? And do you then get into basically a war of cities, which is what occurred in the Iran-Iraq war 40 years ago, where the front is frozen, it's stalemated, neither side can win militarily. So they go about attacking each other's cities in order to, one, bolster their own civilian morale, right? Look what we just did to them. Look what we did to those Russians. Look what we just did to those Ukrainians. We paid them back. But of course, that is a self-reinforcing cycle, right? Because then the Russians respond in kind because they have to respond to the Ukrainians attacking a shopping mall,

attacking a marketplace, attacking a pizza parlor. So they feel the pressure to prove to their citizens that they are going to respond in kind. We won't take this from these Ukrainians. Look what we did to them. And that just is a tit for tat that, as everyone can understand, escalates. And then you get to the point where you have this basically stalemate, this frozen conflict, this inability for either side to win militarily, unless, again, there is a collapse. You then get into basically this war of cities, this basically trying to punish the other side in the completely unreal expectation that you are going to force the other side to give up because you're producing harm on them. And of

course, we all know that that's completely false. It's never been proven to work. And it's only been proven to show that it doesn't work, whether it was the Allied bombings of Germany or Allied bombings of Japan, Nazi Germany's bombings of London, the American bombings of Vietnam. I mean, all the different examples we can point to attacking civilians with air power to include, say, high Mars rockets does not weaken the resolve of the other side. It actually does the opposite. And so that's the danger you're seeing here where this conflict can go in the next year or two is into this war of cities where they punish each other, attempt to boost their own morale by killing the civilians of the other side. But that, of course,

is that self-reinforcing cycle of violence that ultimately leads to greater and greater destruction, which, of course, means greater and greater risk that this conflict either expands horizontally or expands vertically. And by that meaning, horizontally bringing in other players into the conflict or vertically, meaning you get the bigger and bigger weapons up to and including nuclear weapons. It must be a sign of near desperation for the new commander of the Ukrainian troops to be attacking innocent civilians. He can't possibly have much faith that his military is going to go anywhere. Or it's switching gears to the man over your left shoulder. What exactly did Julian Assange expose and reveal about the government that caused it to indict him for espionage. Before we even get to what's happened to him in the London embassy and

the Ecuadorian embassy and this horrible London jail, what did he receive from Bradley Manning and what did he expose? Well, certainly what he published, and I think this is one of the things that we always want to make clear right off the bat, is that Julian Assange was not a whistleblower. He was a journalist or he is a journalist and that he published information. So he you know, he is different than the Chelsea Mannings, than Ed Snowden's and the John Kiriakou's. You know, those who went forward as whistleblowers. Julian Assange was performing as a journalist, as a publisher. And what he published, what he showed the world, that he did collaboratively with the major media outlets

of the world as well. We got to keep that in mind that when Julian Assange published this information, he did it through, of course, the WikiLeaks platform, but he also did it through major Western media. So the biggest newspapers in the world, the biggest media outlets in the world participated in what WikiLeaks was telling the world that the United States government was doing. And what was being told about were these war crimes that the United States had committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly the first tranche, the Iraq war logs, which is where WikiLeaks and Julian Assange become well known. The Iraq war logs of 2010, of course, are led off with, in April 2010,

the collateral murder video, which is the gun camera footage from an Apache gunship in Baghdad a few years previously that had killed 11 or 12 people, including journalists, have wounded children. And this footage was shocking. It was stunning to Western audiences, especially American audiences, who even though we have been at war in Iraq for all those years, for seven years at that point, people were stunned to see this is what the war looks like. And then over the summer, they released what's called the Iraq War Logs, which were secret files provided to WikiLeaks from Chelsea Manning, who was a military intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army in Iraq, that detailed one episode after another of war crimes, of malfeasance, of corruption, of lies, of misdeeds that, to put it simply, embarrassed and made uncomfortable and inconvenient

the American government. And these sorts of things that were exposed included the fact that the United States was turning over Iraqi prisoners to Iraqi government militias that were what were known as death squads that were going to torture and execute these people. So we willingly were taking part in torture. The scale and the scope of the civilian casualties that were having kept hidden from the public view was laid wide open. In the Afghan war, we learned that the Americans know that the Pakistani intelligence services, which receive hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars every year from the Americans, are turning around and giving some of that money directly to the Taliban, who are then using that to kill American troops in Afghanistan. I mean, so those are just

a few examples, but I mean, the list of how much was revealed is really extensive, Judge. I mean, you go and you read up on this, what was revealed by the WikiLeaks files, by the various releases, and you're talking about scores and scores of revelations, you know, regarding that the FBI was helping the Egyptian police in their training, which basically amounted to torture. We recognized that what we had done in Honduras, what had taken part in Honduras, what we had condoned in Honduras was a coup, right? So you have the American government saying what just take place in Honduras, this is going back to 2009, if people remember, what just took place in Honduras was a coup,

and we were involved, and we're not going to talk about it. You know, I mean, so just one after another of revelations, uh, you know, including some things that are fairly comical. You go back to the Saudi, uh, uh, uh, King back in about 2006 and 2007. This is my favorite one only because it's so, so, so comical. It basically shakes down the U.S. government to give him their, you know, his version of Air Force One, right? I mean, so you had, it goes from war crimes to corruption to lies, you know, I mean, this is what he exposed. And so the empire was incredibly embarrassed. It had been it was it was it was made to nation, as some form of American exceptionalism, right? So, I mean, what he did, his crime was, was to expose the workings of the empire, expose the crimes of war, and to embarrass the empire. And this is why he has been held, whether under house arrest effectively at the Ecuadorian embassy or in Belmarsh prison now for 12 years.

This scenes that Chris is showing are just a few hours old. These are scenes outside the high Court in London. I think our viewers know the reason we're discussing Julian Assange is because of two days of oral argument today, Tuesday, and tomorrow, Wednesday, which is really his last opportunity to avoid extradition. The British have a different system than we do. Two judges are hearing this. If both agree that he should not be extradited immediately, there still is another appeal. If they order his immediate extradition, he can file an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. It's questionable as to whether the courts in London would even recognize the court of human rights.

And I think there's a fear, too, Judge, that if extradition is allowed in this case, he could be extradited in such a quick manner that the petition to the European Court of Human Rights won't even be heard. Correct. Right, yeah. So there is this fear that if whenever the decision comes from this true judge panel, that he is going to be extradited to the United States, he will be bundled up and put on a plane to avoid the possibility of that appeal to the European Court. It'd be very difficult for him to get a fair trial here. I mean, the case against them should obviously be dismissed because of the Pentagon Papers case.

This is a mirror image of Daniel Ellsberg, another hero for freedom of the press. Daniel Ellsberg stole about 7,000 pages of documents from the Pentagon and gave them to the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Justice Department under President Nixon persuaded a federal judge to enjoin their publication. The Times and the Post appealed it to the appellate court. The Supreme Court reached right down to the appellate courts, Second Circuit in New York for the New York Times, the D.C. Circuit in D.C. for the Washington Post, took the appeal, heard the oral argument, and ruled in record time by a vote of six to three that whenever a publisher has matters of material interest to the public, it does not matter how the publisher acquired the matters. The publisher is immune from criminal

and civil liability for the act of publication. That should be the end of his case. I've said this before on this show. I'll say it again. I spent a few minutes on the phone shortly before he left office with President Trump, persuading him to pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. When the phone call was over, I couldn't contain myself. I was so excited because I thought I had succeeded in talking him into it. And he later told me that I had, but that his mind was changed by two of the 15 people listening to the conversation. Right. And he called me. I didn't call him.

He called me from the White House. Anyway, we'll see what happens. Maybe Trump will be in the White House again and we'll go with his original instincts. He has, of course, been tortured, not in the sense of beaten or anything like that, but the solitary confinement, the dreadful condition, the absence of hope has so severely weakened him physically, mentally, and psychologically that his lawyers can't even bring him into the courtroom. In fact,

the first judge to hear this case ruled against extradition, not because she thought he would get an unfair trial in the US, but she thought he was too sick to participate in his own defense. And then that was reversed. And all the other appeals, there have been five of them throughout the British system, have come down in favor of the extradition. Right. And his health was so poor today that he was not present in the courtroom. Correct. And part of that too, the denial of the extradition by the original judge, by that first judge, had to deal with the condition of American prisons. So not just that Julian would be tortured by the American prison system because of who he is, but just the very nature of the American prison system itself. You know, and, you know, what his his lawyers were continuing that line of argument. But they were also I think it's important to bring up the other points that they were arguing today to try and prevent him from being extradited.

You know, the first is that this is a political prosecution and what they went through in terms of laying that out and how that is, you know, cannot be the British. The British criminal justice system cannot go along with that because of British law and European law, as well as international law, that does not allow for someone to be extradited to face political prosecution in another country. They argued as well, the point that you brought up, that he will not receive a fair trial. One of the most salient and striking aspects of that argument is that the British government will be extraditing Julian to a country that plotted to kill him. And this, of course, refers to the plot by the CIA under Mike Pompeo to assassinate Julian Assange. If people have not read Michael Isikoff's reporting on this from Yahoo News back in, I think it was September or October of 2021, please go do. It shows you not just, you'll understand more about this case, but you'll also understand about what type of gangsters run our government. And then of course,

the last argument that his lawyers were presenting, you know, to prevent extradition was that, you know, under both British and European law, there is an argument for public interest. And that if you cannot, if you have this type of information released, what was it done for? The very nature of this release was for the public information, was for public interest, right? I mean, so they're presenting a whole host of arguments to counter this extradition that hopefully you would think independent judges would would few hate would treat favorably. probably not the case here because we are dealing with a very compliant and meek British government when it comes to American foreign policy. Even subservient. We have to go because of a busy afternoon, but thank you very much for your comments and for your expertise and for all you've done to publicize to the country and to the world the

injustices visited upon him. Who knows? Maybe we'll be surprised. Well, wouldn't that be something, Judge, if I have to ask your viewers to recommend who should go on the wall behind me if his extradition is denied? Wouldn't that be something? Yes, yes. Well, we breathe, we hope. Thank you, Matt. We'll see you again soon. the best all right thanks judge okay uh coming up at three o'clock karen kwatkowski and at 4 30 scott ritter judge the politano for judging freedom I'm out.