Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Turkey Invades Syria.

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Turkey Invades Syria.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 Thursday, December 12th, 2024. Our dear friend and colleague, Max Blumenthal, joins us now. Max, a pleasure. Thank you very much for the time that you always spend with us. What role did the United States play in toppling the Assad government in Syria? Well, the main role the United States played was destroying the Syrian economy after financing and arming a dirty war with one out of every $13 in the CIA's black budget for about seven or eight years, if not a decade. And Trump kind of cut it off in 2017, 2018. Then the US.S. remained in northeastern Syria. In the words of Dana Strahl, now in the Biden administration, former member of the Syrian study group, because we were the owner of that land in order to starve the Syrian state, deprive it of its wheat fields, and to siphon off the oil

from the Canoco oil fields to sell off on the black market. Basically, controlled demolition of the Syrian state has taken place since 2011, 2012, and the U.S. was right behind it. Following the U.S. military occupation of Syria, the U.S. imposed the so-called Syria sanctions based on an intelligence deception spearheaded by the monarchy of Qatar, displaying atrocity propaganda in the halls of Congress in order to mobilize a vote to sanction the Syrian Central Bank and de-link Syria from the world economy, being able to trade in US dollars, causing a massive inflation crisis, impoverishing the majority of Syrians, weakening the Syrian morale, depriving them of the post-war boom that most populations enjoy. And it led us

straight to this moment where these jihadist Sunni supremacist bandits, all aligned with Al-Qaeda, led by the former deputy head of ISIS, Mohammed al-Jolani, storm into Aleppo to a demoralized population and take over? And what was the first thing that they did when they got to Aleppo? Syria, before the dirty war, had 24-hour electricity. It had free universities that were providing education to people who came from poverty and bringing them into, giving them engineering degrees. Foreigners would come to Damascus to study Arabic. After the dirty war, people were getting two hours of electricity. Everyone was relying on generators. So with Turkish support, the rebranded Al-Qaeda forces of HTS provide full electricity to everyone in Aleppo on day one with generators.

That was their kind of sort of Turkish takeover messages. Hey, we destroyed your state. But if you just stand with us, even if you're Christian or you're a member of another minority group, you'll get the electricity, you'll get the things you've been missing for so long. And that's one reason why you're seeing crowds cheering in the streets now, even though Syria is rapidly being Libyanized. I didn't realize the extent of the American sanctions and the harm that it caused, Max, and I truly appreciate your educating me on it. Tell us about the neocon mentality. Tell us about the reason for this. Well, the reason for sanctioning Syria was

to foment regime change, and it succeeded, and it punished the entire population regardless of their political views or how they related to the Assad government. According to research by the Venezuelan think tank Surres, spelled S-U-R-E-S, close to one third of the entire global population is currently under U.S. sanctions, which have disconnected them from the global economy to some degree and forced them into permanent poverty. And that's simply because their governments refuse to obey the dictates of Washington. But the Caesar sanctions imposed on Syria were so severe, so much more severe than sanctions that we see elsewhere, that Syria was under siege on so many levels. Okay, first of all, you have U.S. troops in northeastern Syria, which is Syria's breadbasket.

That's where the oil fields are. So two of the main sources of Syria's productive base were destroyed. Then you have Aleppo, which had been looted by the Turkish military and Turkish MIT intelligence services. The factories and even medical warehouses had been looted and stolen and taken to Turkey during the dirty war by Turkish-backed jihadist forces. Then you have Idlib, a NATO protectorate controlled by Turkey, where Jolani and his goon squads were holed up, that carved out a major section of northwestern Syria, right near the coastal heartland of Latakia, which is where the Alawite population is now being tormented and may soon be ethnically cleansed. And then you have the sanctions on Damascus, on the central bank, which make it impossible for Syria to trade in dollars, which deprive it of cash, make it impossible for them to pay their military. It's actually amazing that the Syrian state was able to hold on this long. And now, if you look behind the headlines and look behind the

executions that are taking place in public squares in Syrian cities, you'll see that the new putschist Sunni supremacist government that has taken power in Damascus is selling off Syrian state assets in a fire sale. It's a lot like Russia in the 1990s, where the state is being looted and just being sold off to the highest bidder, which could even be BlackRock. Was President Assad at some point in his career, along with his intelligence services, a CIA asset? Well, he was not a CIA asset, but basically the Syrian government and also to some extent the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. And a lot of governments in the Middle East after 9-11 said, wow, the US just got attacked by Al-Qaeda. These are the same lunatics, the Egyptian government for sure, that have been killing our own people, that have been bombing our own cities, that are determined to overthrow us.

Now the United States is going to get it, and they're going to finally help us to purge these forces. And so Syria, along with all the other post-colonial Arab governments, worked with the United States, including the CIA, on these rendition programs. And they would render suspects, the CIA would render suspects to Syria, but also to Poland. I mean, they rendered them to NATO states. The rendition program was horrific and disgusting. Yeah. And they would torture suspects. Unconstitutional and criminal. Absolutely. And some of them were unfairly accused, but that was why they did it. And then in the end, by 2006, after Syria had done that, they also actually quietly joined the first Gulf War

coalition. Syria was always seeking some kind of olive branch with the West to prevent its own destruction. By 2006, neocons in Congress, like the Cuban-American Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, had introduced the Syria Accountability Act. Basically, the Israel lobby wrote this legislation to begin sanctioning the Syrian state. And at the same time, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry were making visits to Damascus, pushing Bashar al-Assad to introduce reforms, and the reforms were incoming. There were reforms happening across the board, political reforms, economic reforms, and then the Syrian dirty war begins. And that goes off the table. Syria is placed under total siege again and becomes a much more repressive state.

Is the Israeli Hezbollah ceasefire now recognized as a fraud, as a facade, in order to divert Israeli assets and attention to eliminating Assad. Let's go back and watch Netanyahu's speech announcing the ceasefire when he said he was going to, he issued a blunt warning to Syria and said he would attack Syria if they participated in any resistance-related activities while declaring that he was going to now turn his attention to Iran. Just a few days later, that's when HTS, rebranded al-Qaeda, initiates its offensive on Aleppo and then begins storming into cities across the country. Netanyahu then appears in the Golan Heights, in the Syrian Golan Heights, violating the 1974 agreement, UN agreement. Israel begins to take over Kunetra and the whole Syrian

side of the Golan Heights. I mean, the non-occupied Golan Heights. And Netanyahu declares that none of this would have happened, the toppling of the Syrian government, without Israel's help. And Netanyahu in that case was 100% right. Without Israel's blitzkrieg on Lebanon and without its attacks on Iran and without this ceasefire, the HTS forces would not have been so emboldened to carry out that attack. And the Syrian state had been weakened by hundreds and hundreds of Israeli attacks on scientific research facilities, military bases. It's what was left of its anti-aircraft devices. So Netanyahu is right. This was a sort of a pincer attack by Israel and Turkey with its HTS Al-Qaeda proxies. Was it truly a surprise or was it planned, the Turkish-Israeli pincer attack on Damascus?

A Syrian analyst who's based in Berlin now because he's an Armenian Christian and was pushed out like so many religious minorities from Syria. Kevork Al-Masian predicted two months ago that there would be, I mean, in precise terms, he predicted that there would be an offensive, just like we saw from Idlib. And yet the Syrian government seemed unprepared. And there were a series of negotiations behind the scenes with enormous pressure, always imperial pressure, Zionist pressure on Syria to push, to sever the relationship between Syria and Iran. You saw a weakening of the Iranian presence and the presence of Iranian allies like Hezbollah in Syria. Russia, meanwhile, which maintains the Hmeymim air base, had been forced to redirect a lot of its air power to the Ukrainian front line, which was one of the knock-on effects or ricochet effects of the Ukrainian proxy war, which was to weaken the Russian

alliance with Syria. So it was much easier at that point. There was sort of a perfect storm. And it was at that point that HTS, backed by Turkey, stormed in and was able to just mount this lightning offensive with very little resistance. And there's a lot of debate now on why, for example, the fourth division that was protecting Aleppo and Homs, I mean, they had two divisions there, why they just folded and disappeared, why they were ordered to retreat from Homs, Why large columns of Syrian soldiers were just seen abandoning their weapons and walking away? What was the deal? Was there a deal where Moscow basically, I mean, what's been almost confirmed is that Moscow took Assad to the Khmeimim airbase and offered him a ride out

to Moscow. He would have certainly been killed at this point if he hadn't escaped. But did he give the order for those forces to just give up? Or did the order come from somewhere else? And there are also rumors that Assad's farewell speech, which had already been delivered, was basically axed and never broadcast. So there are all these intrigues that still have yet to be determined about why this happened. What's clear, though, is that it is a bunker as the defendant in his own criminal case, Netanyahu is unleashing the IDF to steal Syrian real estate. How much real estate are they taking? entire Syrian side or the non-occupied side that Syria got in the 1974 UN agreement. So to the point where Israeli Instagram influencers are going up Mount Hermon, the highest point in Syria, and taking pictures of themselves skiing. And they're never going to give it back because the putschist Sunni supremacist government that emerged from Al-Qaeda and now controls Damascus refuses to say one bad word about Israel.

And it's pretty clear why. Israel has destroyed the Syrian military in the past two days. They have mounted one of the largest aerial operations in history. And there's video you can see online shot by, of course, Israeli soldiers who are proud of this, firing at homes in Syria's city of Quneitra with no resistance. If you look at the Wikipedia entry of who's fighting, it's Israel and it lists its generals versus nobody, because that's what the Syrian counter-revolution has done. It has delivered a hollow form of liberation where Syria's sovereignty has been eliminated, Syria's deterrence capacity has been eradicated and Syria's ability to resist its imperial foes that have besieged it for so many years has been liquidated. So there actually is no liberation.

It's just, we couldn't even call it regime change because there is no regime anymore. There's nothing but a bunch of gangs and bandits occupying government offices that they didn't even build. They're destroying the very tomb of Hafez al-Assad, the father of the modern state of Syria, who built this state. Whatever you think of him, he built the state. These petty gangsters will build nothing. Their only talent is in destruction and intimidation, and Israel is the ultimate beneficiary. How does the United States, and maybe this is a cynical question, Max, justify supporting this guy, Al Jelani, when the State Department has a $10 million bounty on his head because he cuts people's heads and hands off? The State Department justifies supporting Jolani the same way that the State Department justifies supporting Andrei Beletsky, the

Ukrainian neo-Nazi white supremacist, founder of Patriot of Ukraine, who used to carry out attacks on minorities in Ukrainian streets and declared that Ukraine's war was a war for the white Christian against the Semite-led Untermenschen. And now he is the head of a division or brigade, which receives direct support through the US State Department and Pentagon. He's someone who received the highest military honor directly from Vladimir Zelensky. The US doesn't care who it's supporting. It cares who it's destroying. And this is all a war against Russia, against what they call near-peer competitors. And Syria was Russia's last ally within the Arab League. So destroying Syria was a top priority. I wrote a book about this called The Management of Savagery. And it basically charts the history of the US supporting jihadists going back to 1979. I get it. I'm unfamiliar with your book. I'm certainly familiar with your thinking from our friendship and our work together. I get it. But I also understand that there's a federal statute that

prohibits providing material assistance to terrorist organizations. There are people sitting in federal prisons in the United States who were victimized by FBI stings. It wasn't even a real crime and they thought they were providing material assistance to terrorists. The State Department offers a $10 million bounty to this guy. The State Department declares his group a terrorist organization, and the CIA trains his fighters. Yeah. Well, the CIA has tried to hide, and the US government has tried to hide this relationship. It's Turkey that's providing the direct assistance. And the way they've gone about it is to communicate with Jolani through think tanks like the International Crisis Group,

which was headed by Robert Malley, who's been in the Biden administration, as well as various de facto Al Qaeda lobbyists who are sponsored by Gulf states like Qatar, which is a direct backer of Syrian Al Qaeda, like Charles Lister in Washington at the Middle East Institute. So they have these different kind of liaisons in the US, but Turkey is the main liaison. There are reports that the head of Turkish MIT, their version of the CIA is now in Damascus right now managing this whole operation. But yeah, you make a great point. If we're now going to delist the most powerful Al Qaeda faction in the world from the State Department terrorist,

can we get rid of the Patriot Act? Can we just end the war on terror? Is it over? Bring a smile to my ears when you say get rid of the Patriot Act. I've argued many times with the president-elect back, argued, spoken with him on the phone. You don't really argue with him about this, but another story for another time. He did, however, say on Sunday evening, and say, posted it in his Truth Social, Assad fell because his patron, Vladimir Putin, abandoned him. How do you look at that? I don't. It's a simplification of what took place. And there were, as I said, a confluence of factors which led to the rapid collapse of the Syrian military. Were you surprised the Russians were indifferent at some point?

I guess they had just had enough of Assad. We're going to have to hear from Assad directly. And he's in Moscow. I think we're going to eventually Russian media is going to interview him. I'm sure that they'll get the exclusive. But there are all these theories going around. And what's clear to me is that Russia and Iran, which had helped Assad, not just Assad, but the Syrian government, avoid the demise that we're seeing now for so many years, didn't want to lose hundreds and even thousands of officers

when the Syrian army wasn't willing to fight. And there wasn't a will among the population to stand behind it. And then, as I mentioned before, Russia's air power was critical, for example, to liberating East Aleppo from jihadist gangs backed by NATO, which occupied five neighborhoods of East Aleppo and terrorized the entire city for years, destroyed the old city. It was Russian air power that helped really end that occupation in 2016. And Russian air power is not what it was before. There were also advanced weapons systems that were being employed by HTS that they didn't have during the first phase of the dirty war. Drone swarms, for example, which obviously were Turkish drones and electronic weapons jamming the communication systems of the 4th Division of the Syrian military, which made it impossible for them to communicate on the battlefield.

That was likely a Turkish system, but for all came in, which would have been coordinated with the U.S. And then you just had the Israeli military destroy all Syrian military assets to prevent any resistance on the day after. Before we finish, Max, while all this is going on, has there been any let up in the slaughter in Gaza? We're seeing massacre after massacre in Gaza without any let up, any sign of a ceasefire. And Brett McGurk, one of the architects of the genocide from within the Biden administration, within the Biden White House and National Security Council, just welcomed the wanted war criminal, Yoav Galant, former Israeli defense secretary, to Washington. They published a smiling photograph of themselves

inside, I believe it's inside Congress, and just basically gave the finger to the International Criminal Court and the so-called rules-based order built up after Nuremberg. Israel's constantly getting rewarded again and again. And Jake Sullivan, someone who in 2012 in a private email to Hillary Clinton declared, Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria, recently told the New York Times, we won't shed any tears for the Syrian government collapsing. So it's obvious that they coordinated this aerial assault on Syria and this invasion of Syria, this complete abrogation of a UN agreement with the Israelis and with the Turks. Matthew Miller, State Department spokesman, is defending this. Invasion is justified. And it really highlights the hypocrisy of all the language

they used on Russia invading Ukraine because NATO and the US were placing so many advanced weapons systems right on Russia's doorstep. They're justifying what Israel's done for the same reason. So the hypocrisy could not be more clear at this point. Right. I think now I'm mouthing Colonel McGregor. Only force of arms is going to put a stop to what Netanyahu is doing. Max, I have to run. Thank you very much for your time today.

I know we started late. We're ending a little bit early. Much appreciated, my dear friend. My regards to Anya, and I hope we can work again together soon, as soon as next week. Absolutely. Looking forward to it. Sure. Coming up later today at two o'clock Eastern, a new guest, Ian Proud, former British diplomat stationed for many years in Moscow. And at three o'clock, our dear friend, Matt, excuse me, Matt Ho, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.