Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: CIA In Search of Enemies

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: CIA In Search of EnemiesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. One judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Thursday, August 22nd, 2024. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a moment on the CIA searching the world for enemies. But first this. A divisive presidential election is upon us and the winner is gold. Let me tell you what I mean. Since 2016, our national debt has grown a staggering 70% and gold has increased by 60%. Do you own gold? I do. I bought my gold in February 2023 and it has risen 33%.

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Protect your savings and retirement before it's too late. 800-511-4620, learjudgenap.com. Remember, hope is not a strategy, but gold is. Professor Sachs, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. I want to spend some time on your recent article opining that the American intelligence forces were likely behind the overthrow of Imre Khan in Pakistan and the recent overthrow of the prime minister of Bangladesh and what the reasons for that would be and the unforeseen consequences. But before we do, I need to explore your opinion on recent developments. What is your view on the invasion of the Kursk region of Russia? Is it not likely that NATO was behind it? And is it not certain that this couldn't have happened without the knowledge and approval of

the American intelligence community? I'm sure that the U.S. knew and has participated in this. The storyline is that it is primarily Britain, but if it is Britain, it's also the United States, so it doesn't really make that much difference. This is a highly organized invasion in a northern, relatively rural region of Russia. The assumptions now are that Ukraine has actually brought together tens of thousands more troops into this northernory and is going to continue this operation. Why it is doing this is still open to speculation and there are many different theories. One of them, which seems quite possible, is that Ukraine was out to seize a nuclear power plant that is in this territory, the Kursk nuclear power plant. It has, of course, attacked another nuclear power plant in the Zaporizhia region and continues to do so and to threaten that power plant. There is actually a statement by President Putin today that Ukraine attacked the Kursk nuclear power

plant yesterday. I saw on the wires, I don't know whether it's true because it just came over the wires, a report that the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, is on his way to the Kursk power plant. All of this shows the extraordinarily dangerous escalation that is underway in the Ukraine war. At the same time, with this massive mobilization of troops to the north. Ukraine has left itself apparently utterly exposed in Donetsk, where Russia is making major advances. But we are in an accelerating phase of this war, maybe an end game, but it's very dangerous and very dramatic. If the West is participating, which seems quite possible, in attacks on nuclear power plants, what are we doing? We are courting unfathomable disaster. Our situation in the United States is that we don't hear anything honest or intelligent from our leadership. We don't know what is going on. We don't hear truthful accounts from the mainstream media. We're trying to understand what's happening, mainly through alternative media and by statements

by the Russians, because we have a president who is perhaps past his capability of speaking to the American people about these issues. We don't hear in any direct way from our Secretary of State or our Secretary of Defense or our National Security Advisor about the grave risks of escalation that are underway in the world, and especially in the war in Ukraine. So I find the whole situation absolutely alarming and not in control. I don't trust the British for one moment because they are the greatest cheerleaders of escalation. Their empire nostalgia is always there. They are completely irresponsible. The former head of the British military was

quoted yesterday as saying that all restraints should be taken off of Ukraine to go for victory. That is against a nuclear superpower that feels that it is being, and understandably, is being attacked not by Ukraine, but by NATO. It's also widely reported, again, we don't know the quantitative facts, but that a lot military in this invasion of northern Russia are in fact foreign troops that are sheep-dipped, as they say, turned into Ukrainian soldiers by putting on Ukrainian uniforms. There's extraordinarily dangerous. Our president is maybe incapable or just incompetent. It's very unclear which it is, but it's extraordinarily dangerous. Do you have any sources or understanding about whether any of those forces on the ground were American persons, CIA contractors, soldiers of fortune, American troops out of uniform, as you say, sheep dipped, meaning put into Ukrainian uniforms. I ask you this because our friend and colleague Larry Johnson argues

that since the military equipment used was provided by the Americans, since much of it required American technology to trigger it, so to speak, since the ammunition used to kill Russian soldiers was provided by the Americans, and since this must have had the approval, and because they don't approve without coordinating, the coordination of American intel, America, the United States of America invaded Russia. Do you agree with that conclusion, with Larry's conclusion? I think that this is Russia's perception, and it is a plausible one, that is not refuted by the United States. So we have to take into account also how this is regarded by a nuclear superpower. And again, because we do not hear anything

truthful from the United States, I don't watch around the clock to see if American leaders are actually speaking to us, but my strong impression is that they are not. confidence that this isn't spinning wildly out of control given by Lincoln or Sullivan or Biden or Austin or any of the other supposed leaders or leaders of Congress. It's silent on the U.S. side. On the Russian side, it is the claim that we have been invaded by NATO and with a lot of plausibility, and with more to come, and with a lot of bravado, and with apparent attacks on nuclear power plants. What is going on? What is going on? We need clarity of de-escalation from what is a rising nuclear threat. Switching gears, Professor Sachs, again, before we get to the CIA and its mission to find enemies real and fanciful, here is Secretary Blinken, who, by the way, our good friend John Mearsheimer has a nickname for Secretary Blinken, Netanyahu's lawyer. But here is-

Okay, here we go. Very fair one. But here is Secretary Blinken on August 19th, which was Monday of this week. Cut number seven, Chris. I'm here as part of an intensive diplomatic effort on President Biden's instructions to try to get this agreement to the line and ultimately over the line. It is time for it to get done. It's also time to make sure that no one takes any steps that could derail this process.

And so we're working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way could move us away from getting this deal over the line, or for that matter, escalating the conflict to other places and to greater intensity. I note that he's standing with President Herzog, not with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who only puts a plan on the table that he knows Hamas cannot accept. Prime Minister Netanyahu, whenever Hamas accepts a plan, adds to the Israeli demands. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who murdered the chief negotiator on the other side. Prime Minister Netanyahu has no interest in the hostages or a ceasefire whatsoever.

Who does Tony Blinken, a.kinken, aka Netanyahu's lawyer, think he's fooling? He's not fooling anybody. I don't know who he thinks he's fooling. There is no ceasefire. There is no prospect of a ceasefire because Israel does not want a ceasefire. Israel wants a wider war. Israel undertakes, as you said, provocations every time there is even talk of a ceasefire to make sure that there is no ceasefire. Israel rejects any idea that there could be a solution to this crisis. Israel doesn't want a solution other than Israel's full control over Gaza, over the West Bank, over East Jerusalem, in other words, over millions of Palestinian people. And that's the goal. With that, the goal, Israel will never agree to terms that could end this violence. The United States, under this administration and under our current political dispensation in which the Israel lobby owns so much of Washington, there is no end to the violence. So the drama for us is whether the United States

is going to go to a wider war or whether we just continue to provide Israel with the weapons to slaughter tens of thousands of people on an ongoing basis. Because as these, quote, talks are going on, every day Israel is bombing schools, killing children, killing innocent people. It's happening not only in Gaza, it's happening in the West Bank. And of course, Israel is making international provocations through its campaign of assassinations. So we are in a very clear pattern, which is that Israel wants to use full force to get its complete domination over the region, and the United States a sense to that. And then it mumbles about peace or ceasefires, but these are all absolutely useless in the context in which there's no political prospect whatsoever, because Israel blocks every political prospect. A former Mossad director was quoted by our friend Alistair Crook on Sunday as having said,

quote, Israel is a racist and violent state that cannot survive, close quote. Do you agree? I think that the extremist nationalist fervor that runs Israel's politics right now is absolutely genocidal in intent and in its actions. This is an extremism of ideology, partly of religious fervor, of hatred that is dominant in the political class and that creates fear among the Israeli public. information regime as well that controls what Israel sees, knows, and understands about what's happening by its own forces and what's happening in the wider world. Do I think that this is absolutely, completely unrescuable? No. I have argued from the very beginning that the United Nations should impose peace on these two peoples and two states, that the United Nations Security Council should admit Palestine as the 194th UN member state and with the force of the UN Charter impose the two-state solution along the universally understood boundaries. That's the 4th of June 1967 boundaries. This is what should be done. There is one country and only one country in the whole world that blocks that. It's not Israel, because Israel could not block that. The only country that blocks that is the United States of America.

It uses its veto in the UN Security Council to block the peace. But this could change. It is not in America's interest what is happening. It's not only unjust, it's completely against America's interests in every sense, in the sense of peace, in the sense of security for the United States, in the sense of global American diplomacy, because we are isolated alone with Israel on these issues in the international legal sense. So from every point of view, the United States could change its position, but this is what is the fundamental barrier. The U.S. position, of course, is an absurdity. It says that the solution must come from negotiations of the two parties. Well,

all that means is the United States saying that Israel has a full veto over the political rights of the Palestinian people, even over their survival. That's the U.S. position. Well, it's completely untenable. Nobody believes it. It's a game when it's stated. But my feeling is that because the whole world is united against this and because the American people don't support this, this is basically the Israel lobby's control over the Congress, not the valid position of the people of the United States, nor is it a tenable position for the U.S. So the sooner we change, the faster there will be peace. But do you think there will ever be a two-state solution without it being imposed by force? No, of course not. Never. Never.

But imposing a solution is not such a complicated thing. This has been international law for 57 years. And in fact, it is 77 years since the 1947 General Assembly vote of a two-state solution that this has been on the table. So this is not so hard. In fact, there are dozens of resolutions in the General Assembly and in the UN Security Council that exactly point the way to ending this war, ending this violence, ending this mass killing by Israel of the people of Palestine.

Why does the American CIA search the world for monsters to slay, why did it dislodge the popularly elected Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan two years ago and incarcerate him on a phony charge? And why did it just dislodge the President or Prime Minister of Bangladesh? Well, let me clarify one point. In both the case of Pakistan and Bangladesh, I don't know what the CIA role was per se, but it was a U.S. government role, almost surely in Pakistan, and quite possibly in Bangladesh. So the face of this is actually the State Department in this case, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Donald Liu, who is playing, it seems, in the region of South Asia, the role that Victoria Nuland used to play in regime change operations in Eastern Europe, Ukraine. And what that means is that there is a general pattern where the CIA is typically the lead, but not necessarily the

lead, where the U.S. government decides it doesn't like another government, so it will bring it down. Now, the U.S. is just about the only country in the world that does this, but the U.S. does it with such unbelievable frequency that it is essentially our modus operandi of foreign policy. Instead of diplomacy, instead of trying to find a means of coexistence, the U.S. pursues what we call regime change. And it does this around the world with the CIA playing a very frequent role, but other institutions as well. It can be State Department, it can be the Defense Department, it can be the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a so-called NGO fully funded by the U.S. government. But it all means that the U.S. is using supposedly deniable means to determine other countries' governments. Sometimes it's by

fomenting a literal military coup, sometimes by an assassination, sometimes by marching a president out of his office and onto a CIA unmarked airplane and flying them halfway around the world as the United States did when it deposed the president of Haiti. In the case of Pakistan that I have written about, Imre Khan, the prime minister, was trying to maintain relations with Russia and China and the United States and saying, we don't want to take sides. This is the worst offense in the U.S. regime change playbook. If you're not with us, you're against us. And so the United States decided that Imran Khan had to go. And in this particular instance, Donald Lew, the Assistant Secretary of State for that region, for Pakistan, made his visit with the Pakistani ambassador and made threats that U.S. relations with Pakistan were in dire risk because of the prime minister, and the prime

minister had to change. And if he was voted out of office by a vote of no confidence, then amends could be made by Pakistan. And this was relayed back by the Pakistani ambassador to Pakistan, and the machinery started showed him what the United States was doing. Then after he was deposed, he was charged with espionage for holding the document that showed that the United States had overthrown him. And he sits in jail today, by far the most popular politician in Pakistan. Even after he was thrown in jail and his party was outlawed, his supporters won an overwhelming victory at the ballot box. And then the military had to fake the vote count. And the United States said, yes, great results. And so they kept him out of power that way. Now, when it comes to Bangladesh, which is another South Asian country, the government that was thrown out in protests by students advantage of them. There's even a name for this phenomenon called color revolutions. It's real. The revolution of dignity. Exactly. So it's the same business that you take real measures or you take a real unhappiness over some issues and you build it,

you stoke it, you use US funded media, you make threats, you cajole the military, you threaten the military, you do all sorts of things. Now, Donald Liu, the same Donald Liu who played before her overthrow told her political associates that she had been threatened by the United States. And it was at the time of Lou's visit. A few weeks later, the protests, a few weeks after that, the military told her, we can't defend you, and she fled to India. That's what we know. In my article, I call for an independent UN investigation. I don't say that it absolutely was the US hand. I say that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence and a lot of claims that require an investigation. But what I can tell you, Judge, after 44 years of close observation all over the world, not because this is my day job, but because my day job is economics, but I see a lot. I see a lot of what the U.S. is doing and how it is manipulating, and leaders tell me we feel

threatened by the United States. This is an ongoing, deadly operation of the United States. These operations almost always fail, by the way. Sometimes they fail to dislodge the government, but the other kind of failure is they dislodge a government and then the result is ongoing chaos, civil war, coups, further assassinations, complete unrest and disarray, terrorism. We don't succeed in this kind of action. We destabilize. And the U.S. does this so often that it is understood by other countries that this is the U.S. aim, purpose, and modus operandi. And it's why, for example, Russia, President Putin says, don't tell us you're a friendly power and that NATO is a defensive operation. We see with our own eyes how you overthrow governments, how you intervene, how presidents sign

intelligence findings to overthrow governments. They're not naive. President Putin's anything but naive. As a senior KGB official, he understands how the U.S. government operates. That's why he doesn't want NATO anywhere near his border. Thank you very much. And this is the problem. We are destabilizing the world and driving the world closer and closer to World War III this way. Now, in my article, I do not make a definitive judgment because the evidence isn't there on Bangladesh. But the circumstances are enough to tell everybody, first to the U.S., stop this behavior. This is completely reckless for the world. And second, it's important to investigate what happened. Can I argue with you that this is even worse than you have painted it to be,

because the people who orchestrate this are not popularly elected, are not transparent, are not answerable to the voters. Surely this didn't go up to Joe. Let's say Joe Biden is a younger Joe Biden who has full control of his mental faculties. Surely something like this doesn't go all the way to the president. These decisions are made by unnamed faceless people. Am I right? Faceless to the public. I have faces. You know what I'm talking about. Of course. It's some of both. You know, the CIA has participated in assassinations of foreign leaders where the assassination was ordered inside the White House. Usually not in the words, kill him. Usually in the words of, get rid of him, make him go. This is how Eisenhower talked about getting rid of Lumumba, the popular first democratic leader of a newly independent Congo after the near century of slave rule by the Belgians. But the U.S. played a big role in doing him in with an assassination.

So in some cases, presidents absolutely know and they call for it. In other cases, this is just deep policy of the U.S. President Obama signed Operation Timber Sycamore in the fall of 2012 to overthrow the government of Syria. This is very important. The American people know almost nothing about this. And we sometimes hear the absurdity, look at Putin. He intervened in Syria. He intervened in Syria three years after President Obama gave the order to overthrow the government of Syria to the CIA, which was to train and to arm and to finance the insurrection to overthrow the president of Syria. So this kind of behavior is, it's almost unique to the U.S. because the U.S. has this network of CIA and military bases around the world and has this ideology that it can determine who runs other countries. So the U.S. just about the only practitioner of this, certainly at anything

close to the frequency and scale, but the destabilization that comes from this because it's quote, deniable, because John Kirby stands at the White House and says, whoa, we had nothing to do with this, or Matt Miller at the State Department. No, it wasn't us. As a game. And we don't have investigative reporters at the New York Times or the Washington Post.

They're mouthpieces for the government now. So this has been... The New York Times this morning reports that the government is very interested in people that say nice things about Putin, particularly people who go on Russian state television. Do you believe that, that the government is attempting to chill the free speech of those of us who've communicated to Russian citizenry? It's even more remarkable. They said that it is Russian propaganda telling the truth. So if you tell the truth, for example, that NATO enlargement played a major role in provoking the war that is now taking place in Ukraine, which every senior diplomat and historian

knows absolutely. According to the New York Times today, that is Russian propaganda that, you know, could be subject to a crackdown by the U.S. government. It's really foul, but also a kind of desperation as well. These are dark days, Professor Sachs, and you helped to eliminate them. And I am deeply grateful for it. I know you're in another part of the world and it's very late at night where you are, but thank you very much for your time, for your analysis, for your personal courage. We'll look forward to seeing you again next week. Wonderful. Very good. Thank you so much. All the best. Thank you. Coming up tomorrow, Friday at two o'clock in the afternoon, Eastern Matt Ho at three o'clock in the afternoon, Eastern Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at three.45 in the afternoon Eastern, the end of the day,

the end of the week, the Intelligence Community Roundtable, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.