Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffry Sachs: The Feds and COVID

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Prof. Jeffry Sachs: The Feds and COVIDSee 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 Tuesday, March 19th, 2024. My dear friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, thank you very much for your time. We have so much to talk about. You have a fascinating, fascinating piece out on the origins of COVID. But before we even get to that, there's breaking news in the areas that you and I talk about. Let's start with Israel and Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu told a committee of the Knesset just a few hours ago earlier today that there's a bit of a breach between the United States and Israel. And I don't know if this comes, it certainly comes on the heels of Senator Schumer's comments and after a conversation, non-public, that he had with President Biden, the first in

32 days. So let's back up a little and tell me your thoughts first on Senator Schumer's statement on the floor of the Senate. And I'll play it for you, not the whole thing. We'll play 45 seconds, which I think is the guts of what he had to say. Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take the precedence over the best interests of Israel. He has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, and as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.

Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah. As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me the Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7th. I mean, Professor Sachs, some of this is inassailable. He's in a coalition with far-right extremists. He's indifferent to the civilian toll in Gaza. Israel cannot survive if it is a pariah nation. Take it from there. Well, we've been discussing this for months.

I think Senator Schumer, who has been perhaps the strongest supporter of Israel in the U.S. Senate, certainly one of them, made very direct and correct observations about the extreme state of affairs. And it's important for us to note today another report that came out of an international, intergovernmental group that tracks famine and hunger. This is a report of the integrated food security phase classification. People can find it online. It's IPC. This is the report that you sent me earlier today. Exactly. And it says that projected for the period 16 March to 15 July, 1.1 billion people will be in the most extreme catastrophic dimension of hunger, meaning that they're starving to death more than a million people during this

phase right now. The situation is absolutely dramatic. The Israeli government is absolutely criminal. The International Court of Justice will find these actions genocidal. The only words I would have changed of Senator Schumer would be to say, therefore, the United States will immediately stop all munitions, all backing for this murderous rampage of this extremist government. He didn't say that. I don't actually like Americans calling for change of other countries' governments. I like us. You've spent a career opposing that. I like us standing up and saying what we will do. We as a nation, we will not be complicit in genocide.

We will not be complicit in mass starvation. We will not be complicit in mass murder. We will not stand by as American munitions are used for Israel will attack Rafah, including in the context of starving the people of Gaza. If we had international honesty and justice, which we do not, the International Criminal Court would be indicting Netanyahu as a war criminal. It's plain as can be. Of course, that court is really under the control of the US and UK, which unfortunately has a career of supporting murderous actions. And the ICC, therefore, doesn't take steps like that. The ICJ is a different matter. That's the International Court of Justice.

And that has the case before it of Israel that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention. Absolutely something unimaginable, shocking, dismaying, profoundly wrong. But the fact of the matter is what the strongest supporter of Israel said in the Senate is accurate. This is an absolutely extremist, out-of-control government in Israel. It needs to be stopped from these murderous actions. The United States can do that without regime change, without toppling a government. It just has to stop the American munitions being sent to Israel essentially every day. We have just posted on the screen the cover of the report that you gave. People should look for this if they're interested in it. It's extremely detailed and it's heartbreaking showing the famine. Jeff, while on the air yesterday,

I received a text from a former student of mine from when I was a professor at Brooklyn Law School. He's Egyptian, Egyptian-American, a lawyer in Northern New Jersey. His cousin, a 35-year-old pediatrician, head of pediatrics at the hospital in Gaza City, was cut down by machine gun fire in a hospital room while attending to two children. A pediatrician attending to children? Yes, because Israel has systematically attacked all the hospitals.

It's blown up the universities. It's destroyed the schools. It's blown up the universities. It's destroyed the schools. It's blown up the mosques. It's blown up the water supply. It's blown up the infrastructure. This has been a genocidal action by the most extremist government in Israel's history. It needs to stop. You have put your finger on the same thing that many of our colleagues on this show have, that while Senator Schumer stated truisms,

he hasn't done anything about it. There need to be actions beyond the words. Now, you know Joe Biden is a Roman Catholic Zionist for 50 years. I don't know what will change his mind, and much of the aid that's been sent over there has been executive action. I don't know what the Congress has done, so I don't know what Schumer can do. But knowing Schumer, as you and I do, he didn't say this on his own. I'm sure he ran this past the OPEC folks and probably past some of his colleagues in the Senate. They need to do something beyond these words. He started a conversation. My hat is off to him for that. But those cargo planes keep arriving over there every two or three days. We don't have any presidential leadership on anything right now. We don't really know President Biden's state of mind or capacity other than when he is put before a teleprompter.

I'm very worried about it. The drift is not only with regard to Israel, it's in every crisis zone of the world right now. The crises are rising. Things are getting absolutely out of hand. The rhetoric as well is over the top. There are immediate dangers in Ukraine of massive escalation. There are risks reported today, by the way, of U.S. troops on the ground in Taiwan, not on the main island, offshore, quote-unquote, training the Taiwanese army. Well, I can't express in civil words what I would like to say about that. But I believe that we are adrift in foreign policy. I have long believed that this foreign policy team itself is incompetent and out of control. But I believe we don't have a president in control right now also, because this is not isolated to Gaza. It's not a matter of being a supporter or not of Israel.

That's what Schumer showed, because what we're dealing with is something different from a question of support for Israel. We're actually witnessing something that could imperil Israel's own survival through its murderous behavior towards others. But the president, we don't see or have confidence that he is on top of any of this at all. So who made the decision to send U.S. troops in uniform, combat troops, to this island, this small island off the coast of Taiwan? Well, I'll tell you, the public hears nothing about anything. I don't even know if this is being reported in the U.S. media. I picked it up in the Chinese media, and I don't really know. But nothing about foreign policy is discussed, debated.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is essentially moribund. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is essentially moribund. I don't have much confidence that it's even the president making any of these decisions. We don't know what's happening, but this is absolutely a situation where we have multiple crises that are not in control. We have no explanations. We have no intelligent, honest, public discussion of anything. And we don't have leadership. Why would the German intelligence agency engage in a conversation suggesting that Russia wants to start World War III? Why would they leak something as preposterous and absurd as that while NATO's on its last legs in Ukraine?

This has been a long project of the CIA and others to bring Ukraine into the U.S. orbit, as it were, to have military bases in Ukraine, to weaken Russia, to divide Russia, to defeat Russia, to have regime change in Russia. This has been a long, dangerous, reckless project. All my life, I have seen such reckless projects, game playing that aren't games at all, because hundreds of thousands or millions of people die from these games. And the German intelligence is, of course, absolutely tightly knit with the US. We call it intelligence agency, but it is, as we always talk about, two completely different things. One is an intelligence agency, and the second is a secretive, unaccountable army that is an army of disruption. And so we don't have any clarity about these points right now. Why is it that the Chancellor of Germany said that they

would not, Germany would not send long-range Taurus missiles, and yet four of the generals of the German army were caught on tape saying how they were going to use these Taurus missiles. And I mean, they, the Germans, would use them to destroy the Crimean Bridge, absolutely contrary to what the German chancellor said. Why is the French president now talking and not just talking, saying that he is sending troops to Ukraine. Where is the president of the United States on something that could escalate to World War III? As I say, I don't know whether President Biden is compass mentis enough to know. Who knows? I'm not saying I have any more information than any of us watching. But where is the

President of the United States when a major ally says that they're sending troops to Ukraine? It's unbelievable how dangerous this period is. There are no clear goals. President Putin has said repeatedly, we are open to negotiation. And the only response from wherever in the State Department or the White House or anywhere else is, there's no one to negotiate with. And the Russians say, but we're here to negotiate. No, there's no one to negotiate with. There's no one to negotiate with. And the Russians say, but we're here to negotiate. No, there's no one to negotiate with. There's no diplomacy. There's no explanation. There's no leadership.

There is no clarity. I'm sorry to say it. I just can't recall a time like this. When Ukraine falls, and it appears that that's going to happen by June, will that not be the moral equivalent, even the military equivalent, of Russia having defeated NATO? Well, the U.S., I mean this small coterie of people who have been plotting this for years, including Biden, Newland, who is now on her way out, Sullivan, Blinken. Where's Newland now, Jeff? I don't remember. I don't know. She's two blocks from you at Columbia. She's on her way over,

I'm told. So this whole approach has not had any possibility of, quote, success, even if you define success in their terms, which for me was not success, but it hasn't had any chance. So in that sense, the defeat was right at the start. The question is, how bloody would it be? How much would it escalate? As President Putin has said, absolutely correctly, by the way, he said, this is tactical for the West, but this is existential for Russia. That is the most basic point. We have people here playing games. They consider them games. It's even the language of game theory. It's, we're going to game this out. We're going to do the war games. We're going to see if we can win this thing. And for Russia, it's viewed by all of those in the political class as existential for Russia's security. Couldn't we figure that out? It was obvious. They can't figure out anything in this country right now in our leadership. The leadership is vapid. Let me take you back to Israel and Gaza.

As we came on air, our friend and colleague, Phil Giraldi sent me a headline that Jared Kushner, the former president's son-in-law wants to get involved in investments in ocean front property in Gaza. I was telling Karen Kwiatkowski in a prior podcast that here in northern New Jersey, not far from the George Washington Bridge, not far from you, is a synagogue that invited two Israeli real estate companies to come and make offerings. And of course, they're offering property that can only be bought by members of the Jewish faith, which is against New Jersey law. And then it turned out they were offering to sell real estate in Gaza.

There's a word for this, Judge, but you can't use it on polite television, so I won't use it. It's so over-the-top obscene in this context, so fundamentally irresponsible and gross that one is lost for words. Why is there no Arab aid, Arab country aid, other than the symbolism of the King of Jordan pushing a parachuted box into the Mediterranean Sea coming to the Gazans? Well, all aid physically is blocked right now. One of the things that happened today, and I've been on email about this, is that the head of the UN relief agency, the head of the UN relief agency at a moment when I'm reading that the population is starving to death, was denied entry by Israel. So this is the real situation right now. This is so-called facts on the ground. Israel has blocked aid to Gaza. It is starving a population. It is about to launch a military

attack on the very place that it has pushed the Gazan people. There will be more massacres and bloodshed. But will there be resistance from any state actors, military resistance from heads of state that have said enough, like you and I have been saying, and others on this show, and the millions that watch us, enough is enough. I doubt it. Egypt does not want a war. Nobody actually wants a war. That's not crazy not to want a war. There is still hope, maybe completely in vain, that somehow the United States will have an iota of humanity and decency remaining and put a stop to this. I don't think there's any hope for that happening from inside Israel at all. The Israeli government is utterly out of control and utterly murderous, but it is

utterly dependent on the United States. And I don't personally want to hear one more time Antony Blinken wringing his hands or Jake Sullivan wringing his hands about, oh, we've warned them. Don't do this. Don't do that. Come on. You are responsible for this. It's not your hand wringing that we care about. It's the weapons that you are sending every single day. That's your job, is to stop sending American weapons. That's what we need to hear. No more hand-wringing. No more excuses. No more telling us all the things you told Netanyahu.

We know what he is. We know what he says. We listen to him every day. It's your job, Mr. Blinken. It's your job, Mr. Sullivan, to stop American munitions going to do this killing. You expressed a view that it's unlikely that state actors will get involved. Suppose Netanyahu does, as he's been threatening to do, attack Hezbollah. Will Iran allow that to happen without resisting it militarily? And how powerful or sophisticated is the Iran military and the weapons it has.

You know, the strange thing is Iran is very powerful militarily. And if Iran went into a full-scale war, there would be mass bloodshed in Israel and throughout the Middle East. Actually, the Iranians don't want it. They're not chomping at the bit for war. They've, in fact, faced so many provocations, so many assassinations, so many murders. Most people do not want war. They know that war destroys their societies. War leads to tragedy. War has no happy ending. Hezbollah doesn't want war. Lebanon doesn't want war. Egypt doesn't want war. Jordan doesn't want war. Syria doesn't want war. Iran doesn't want war. They actually don't want war. I speak to their diplomats. We're the ones that think war is somehow a natural thing. And Israel wants the war. Israel wants a wider war. And we've got enough dunderheads in our

Congress that will always stand up and talk about war. And we have a government adrift right now. And Israel's trying to provoke a wider war. Nobody else wants it because they know that it's tragic. It's a disaster. It should be the normal state of affairs, by the way, that people say, how do we end the war? But we don't even have that in Ukraine, a war that has gone on for well over two years, killed hundreds of thousands of people. You don't hear one senior American official saying, how do we end it? And we have that utter fool, Senator Lindsey Graham, now back in Kiev saying, yeah, you fight on, because he's been at the core of this warmongering for a decade, back to the overthrow, to the coup, to the Maidan. They just

love throwing Ukrainians to their death in fighting the Russians because they think it somehow weakens Russia. So this idea that, yeah, it's going to trigger a wider war. Well, it could, but I can tell you, no one wants a wider war except some of our side. And we've lost track about this because the U.S. is in perpetual war. Britain loves a war. But remember, Britain was the most violent country in the world for about 200 years, fought the hell out of, beat the hell out of everybody, because that's imperial mentality. But most of these countries don't want war. It's to put a stop to its own arming of this bloodshed. It's not hard, by the way, to understand that because every few days a vote comes up in the U.N. Security Council and the U.S. stands alone in the opposition to a ceasefire or to peace or to a solution. We're alone in this. So we got to get our own heads on straight. We're the ones that prolong these wars. We're the ones that are talking about

war with China. Are we crazy? We're the ones that have American soldiers in Taiwan right now. Are we crazy? Even if they're just for training, what are we doing? We're provoking. They're there as a tripwire. One of them will get hit with a drone and old Joe or whoever's pulling the strings. Well, Lindsey Graham will say, now we have to have World War III. Correct. It'll be their excuse. I know you don't like hypotheticals, but do you envision Russia or China getting involved militarily in the Middle East if Iran is attacked by Israel? No. What I do imagine, though, is the whole world uniting against the United States and Israel as the last two countries that are in this absolute war mentality. I mean, what would it take for that to happen? It hasn't happened yet.

It's interesting. We talk about the China threat, the China threat, the China threat. China has not been in a war, in any war, for more than 40 years. And the last war that China was in 1979, 1980 was a very brief skirmish with Vietnam. And that had to do with the Cambodian disaster, which the US provoked. Other than that, China does not want wars. The whole idea that China's this great militaristic threat is, again, a propaganda line of our deep state. It's another game. China is superb, actually, at saying, would you calm down? Could everybody sit down? China's the one that brought Iran and Saudi Arabia together. Could the United States ever have done that? No, it wouldn't

even have been in American mentality that you bring two antagonists together, better stir the pot. That's better for the empire. But China wants it a completely different way. So what I would say is that if this war expands, what China and Russia will do is to bring the whole world along demanding peace. And that they will be very effective in doing. And the United States place in the world, which is just disappearing in respect and in what people are seeing, that will absolutely end up with us in complete isolation. Very dramatic and profound analysis, Jeff. I wanted to talk about COVID, but we'll put it off for the next time. I know you're going to begin another trip, but you're so good about coming on with us no matter where on the planet you are.

Thank you very much. Excellent. We'll see you from Asia next week. My best to your other half, and we'll see you in the zone. Great. Thanks. Right. All of your regulars, been two very busy happy days, but all of your regulars still coming on for you in the next few days. Professor Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Matei, and of course on Friday afternoon, the Intelligence Community Boys Roundtable.

Thank you for watching. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.