Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi : Knesset Debates Torture and Summary Executions

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

Phil Giraldi : Knesset Debates Torture and Summary ExecutionsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, July 31st, 2024. Our dear friend Phil Giraldi joined us. Now, Phil, I missed you. I have a friend, Filippo, and every time I called him by his name in Italy, I thought of you. Maybe next time you and Angela and I will join Colonel and Mrs. McGregor, who also laments not having been at Lake Como last week. I had a great vacation, but obviously was disturbed by the events that occurred here.

One of those events that occurred here that disturbed me deeply, obviously the attempt to murder the former president disturbed me. Obviously the Biden thing, I still don't know if he jumped or was pushed, disturbed me. But the one that I want to talk about with you was this rapturous reception that Prime Minister Netanyahu received in the Congress. which was longer than a minute, in a 55-minute speech, a bellicose, combative, nasty-toned

speech that made no offer of peace whatsoever. What were your thoughts about the representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, bought and paid for by Netanyahu's people. Well, I was on one level disgusted for those reasons that you just enunciated, that essentially this is a guy who is a demonstrated war criminal, probably the leading war criminal in the world. And he's being praised and followed and nurtured by our government, which is a full accomplice in the war crimes that he's committing. So I was depressed as hell about that. And it was just I began to think, what did Netanyahu seek to achieve here? I mean, he could have come in with a soft approach and be playing kind of the peacemaker and doing other things, but no, he went the other way. And I suspect that he went the other way precisely because he wants war. He wants essentially the United States in his pocket, absolutely, to go to war with the Lebanese, with Hezbollah if necessary.

But his real target, of course, is Iran. And he wants to see the United States, with its kind of lame duck president right now, holding the line on being israel's supporter and i think he got that i think he got that in so many words that uh we are with you if we if if it goes to war with his bola we are with you if it goes to war with iran and there's absolutely nothing in this for the american people it's hard for me to believe that the American people would support the United States military in a full-fledged war against Hezbollah and against Iran, and maybe that means against Russia as well. I don't know. When, as you say, there's nothing in it for the United States other than satisfying the donor class.

And the donor class was on full display on the 24th of July on the floor of the House of Representatives. Congressman Thomas Massey, the only Republican that didn't show. Kamala Harris, to her credit, didn't show. A hundred Democrats didn't show. Now, these Democrats that didn't show, many of them still voted to aid Israel, but at least they didn't want to be in the presence of this war criminal. But the response that he received showed me that the Congress at times does not represent the best interests of the United States.

It represents gratifying its financial benefactors. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that really outraged me was the fact that if you go through the speech made by Netanyahu, it's one lie after another, and there is absolutely no truth in any of it. It's either out and out lies or gross exaggerations of what is true. And here these so-called congressmen, many of whom are in one way or another involved with foreign policy and knowing what's going on internationally, they sat there and they knew he was lying. They had to know he was lying. And yet they are jumping up and down like monkeys and applauding him and giving him whatever he wants. So there's something very wrong in our system. And this is something that's evolved over, in my feeling, ever since 9-11. This has been a road that should not have ever been followed in terms of giving the presidency more authority than it should have constitutionally, and also giving the war party basically everything they've wanted. And this has been bad for America,

bad for Americans, and not necessarily even good for Israel. What kind of military aid do you think we would supply? Naval-based air power? Naval-based air power is the obvious choice because we can, the ships are, I believe, at least one or two aircraft carriers are within fairly close striking range of what we consider the targets in the Middle East. And so it's an easy transition. And of course, there are a couple of land-based air bases in Kuwait and in Doha, places like that, but it's questionable as to whether those bases could be used at the host governments that that happened.

So I don't know what comes next. We're certainly not going to be landing Marines because our fighting forces in terms of traditional combat, are, as I'm sure Larry Johnson has said to you, are very weak and unprepared for this kind of thing. So here we'll be doing something stupid. We'll be bombing people. We'll be getting airplanes shot down. And as this goes on, as it proceeds, we're getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. I would defy them, Netanyahu and the neocons, to explain what benefit there is to the American public, or conversely, what threat Hezbollah, Hamas, the poor Gazan people are to the United States of America?

I don't think they can answer that without lying. Do you? Well, they did answer it by lying. Netanyahu said it's civilization against barbarism. Right. What Netanyahu is doing in Gaza right now is not

barbarism. It's the epitomizing barbarism it's genocide ray mcgovern uh reports from his sources that the rampant disease in gaza now was something i thought had been eradicated from the face of the earth apparently it hasn hasn't. Polio. Polio. And of course, there are no vaccines available. There are no hospitals available. The only doctors there are risking their lives to do the best to make people comfortable. That's about all they can do. Last Sunday, the Knesset had a very unusual debate. I can't imagine such a debate happening in a democracy that respected the natural rights of human beings. whether or not its IDF soldiers should be immune from prosecution if they engage in rape and other torture tactics of Palestinians. And they debated whether or not it would be lawful to engage in summary executions, one bullet per prisoner, quote, in order to expand beds in the jails. I mean, this is repellent, but did this debate

actually go on? Well, it was less a real debate than kind of a discussion around a specific incident that occurred recently in which a prisoner a palestinian prisoner uh was in a detention center and uh run by the army and he was being uh it's it's hard to say this in a nice way being repeatedly raped uh and repeatedly sodomized. And there's some details of this in the Israeli media. Some radio stations have had the courage of actually coming public with the details they picked up from the government of what happened. And it's just so grotesque. It's so disgusting.

As I say, it's probably better it's so grotesque. It's so disgusting. As I say, it's probably better not to go into the details. But the fact is this guy was tortured essentially. And this whole thing was exposed because he was tortured so badly that he was basically dying. He was bleeding. He was unable and uh they he they shipped them off to a hospital and in the hospital somehow it got exposed that the uh this is what was going on so this became a a talking issue about you know what did we do to this guy is this all right should we continue to do this and you have uh itamar Ben-Gavir, who's the secretary or the minister of security for Israel right now, who basically has pushed two bills, as I understand

it. One of them is to shoot the Palestinian prisoners to alleviate the pressure of prisoners on the structures. And the other one is, of course, to give full immunity to Israeli soldiers and policemen who kill Palestinians or severely injure them. They have full immunity from get-go. And the two bills, and one thing really interesting about the two bills, is that both bills specify that these bills will not apply to Jews, that we are not allowed to put a bullet in the back of the head of a Jew, and we are not allowed to rape a jewish prisoner uh if if that circumstances permitted that we're not you know so this is a racist document a racist policy that's quite incredible to believe in this century wow uh was there an outcome to this debate or what my understanding is there was no actual vote yet and that one of these bills has been around there for a while.

Yeah. As I say, one of these bills has been floating around for two years, and the other one is more recent. But there was not a, or put it this way, there was not a vote of approval on either of these bills yet. They're still sitting in the Knesset. But the Likud Coalition, which offered these bills, has a majority, does it not? By definition, they have a majority, or Netanyahu wouldn't be the prime minister. Yeah. There were concerns expressed by some of the more liberal factions in the Israeli government, in the Israeli parliament rather than government. And the concerns that were expressed is that these bills were written in a way, particularly the exemption of Jews and applying them only to Palestinians, would be used as a cudgel against Israel and against Israel's record in terms of crimes against humanity and war crimes. So those were the concerns that I saw that were expressed.

Speaking of war crimes, I'm assuming you were not surprised by the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights and the West Bank is contrary to international law. It only took them about 40 years to come down with that ruling, but they did come down with it. Yeah, of course, that was very welcome. And there was just no question about it. Just that there's no question that the fact that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. It's indisputable. And it's about time for the U.S. Congress to wake up to what's going on and to realize that this is just not sustainable.

This is just not something that comports with the decency that our country has long claimed to possess. I can't imagine the U.S. Congress waking up to anything about Israel since so many of them in both parties, particularly the Republicans, have had their campaign bills paid by the donor class. We saw that manifested when Netanyahu was addressing them, there was no criticism at all. Remember the Speaker of the House saying you can applaud all you want for him, but if you boo, I'll have the sergeant at arms arrest you? And so one member of Congress, I don't remember who, held up a sign that said war criminal. If she had articulated it, they would have yanked her off the floor. Yeah, that was Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress. And she held up the sign

and it was very brave of her because he would have hauled her up. The man is a fanatic. He is blind to the interests of the people in his own country, and yet here he is, Speaker of the House. What is wrong with us? In the past two days, there has been an assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut and a Hamas leader in Tehran. Both were murdered along with whoever happened to be near them at the time. How the hell can you conduct peaceful ceasefire negotiations, there's the Hamas leader,

when you murder the chief negotiator on the other side. What does Israel gain by these assassinations? Well, what Israel gains is that basically it didn't want the peace negotiations to be successful, and killing Yunus, who was, as you say, the chief negotiator in Doha and also in Egypt, will accomplish nothing except making the process not work. So that's one reason. And of course, the other reason of killing the Hezbollah military leader, I believe the deputy leader, was basically to bring us one step closer to this war that Netanyahu clearly wants and clearly has gotten a green light from the people in Washington to go ahead with. Colonel McGregor is of the view

that aircraft carriers are sitting ducks, and it is very easy not necessarily to sink them, but destroy their decks and render them useless. That then brings other ships to them to bring supplies and repair equipment, and that makes those ships sitting ducks. Do you agree? Yeah, he's certainly the expert on issues like that, but it just makes common sense that the people in Washington who are very knowledgeable on these issues have for years been saying that we keep building aircraft carriers and the aircraft carrier is the weapon of the past uh supersonic missiles and other things can not only disable these these vessels by by ruining their uh decks they can also sink them and all we need is an aircraft carrier with 5,000 personnel on board to be sunk.

Is this just something else that, well, we do have a Secretary of Defense and a Treasury Secretary who seem to think we can fight dual wars with China and Russia at the same time as all this other stuff is going on. But this is uh insanity as if to remind us of that insanity the Russians and the Chinese Chris can you run the Alaska clip uh ran a flew bombers within a couple of miles of airspace uh over Alaska uh I guess this is basically to say you guys are over the Black Sea we're over the Bering Straits there they are why would Putin do this and why would she do this or let me ask it differently would it have gone up to putin and up to xi to do something this daring well as i think that these these people are actually respectable intelligent leaders

uh it certainly would have gone up to them to make this kind of decision uh which certainly has its risks uh but at the same time they're sending a signal. The signal is you people are not invulnerable, whatever you seem to think. And you've been pushing the envelope for a long time now, and it's got to stop. Here's President Putin not very happy about the news that the United States and other Western nations are going to deploy missiles in Germany aimed at Russia's early warning system. This is President Putin on Sunday afternoon. Cut number one. The situation recalls the events of the Cold War era. If the U.S. implements such plans, we will consider ourselves free from the previously imposed one-sided moratorium on the deployment of medium and shorter range strike systems. We will take

mirror measures for their deployment. We will take mirror measures for their deployment. Where would they take those mirror measures? Submarines off the coast of Miami? Well, that would obviously be a possibility to have that capability. I rather suspect that the pressure coming from Russia will initially be more directed against Europe. Many of the European publics, more again than their governments, are very lukewarm on what is going on currently in Ukraine and where this might escalate. And so I would think that when he's talking about short-range missiles, short-range missiles have a much shorter time in terms of how you can launch them and how you can use them and how you can target them. And that's why they were in the 1980s

a subject for major debate when I was in Germany, because these were seen as triggers to much more, shall we say, expanded action if a military option is to be selected. So it was decided these are not a good thing to have around. And now suddenly we're going back the same route. The TNF problem has been around for a while, and obviously Russia understands it very well. Is this the treaty that President Trump abrogated in 2019? Yeah, it is. It's one of others. There are a whole series of treaties that impact on this issue. But that was probably the most central part of it in terms that it created like a ceiling in terms of the creation and deployment of these types of weapons.

Phil, does the United States ever cheat on these treaties, or is it just the Russians that have cheated? Or is this a ridiculous question? Well, the claims that the Russians were cheating were made by Trump, so I kind of wonder. But the fact is that the United States cheats on all kinds of stuff. And they have done so with, as we saw in Iraq with phosphorus weapons, which were banned. They've cheated on a whole lot of different weapon systems, where they're deployed, how they're deployed, what they're used for, so on and so forth. This is an old American trick. How do you see the Israel situation going?

I mean, the IDF is exhausted. They couldn't defeat Hamas. They're at public odds with their own prime minister. Their economy is in shambles. Does he really think he can wage a major war against a power larger than one he has ever fought, that Israel has ever fought, even with the U.S. backing. Well, that's the point. They recognize their vulnerabilities on these issues. And the fact is, that's why Netanyahu was here, and that's why he took the steps that he did to tie america in with him so i think his feeling is that america is in the game with them now whether that will prove to be true in fact depends on whether we can develop some intelligent and thoughtful leadership

something that's been very much lacking in the United States for some time now. And we have to take the initiative on this. We have to say, look, no more war. We don't need this. What's been going on in Ukraine and what's been going on in Gaza benefit no one. And yet, we've allowed them to happen because of this neocon perception that we are the ruling power of the world and we make the decisions and we make the rules. Very eloquent, Phil. We'll end with that. Thank you very much for your time. I missed you. It's a pleasure to be with you. I hope you'll come back again at your usual time next week. I sure will. Thank you very much. Of course, my dear friend.

All the best to you and Angela. Coming up tomorrow, Thursday, we have a full and fulfilling day for you. At 8 in the morning, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow. At 9 in the morning, Tony Schaefer. We haven't seen Tony in about a month. At three in the afternoon, the great Professor John Mearsheimer. And at four in the afternoon, Aaron Maté.

And on Friday afternoon, Max Blumenthal and the Intelligence Community Roundtable. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.