Judging Freedom - [SPECIAL] - Best of Judging Freedom 2024 - PART ONE

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

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gentle guidance and encouragement to create these incredible changes for yourself and see what good can come from them. Trust me, listening on Audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. It's the end of the year, and it's time for us to look back, and we did that for you.

Here's the best of Judging Freedom in the past 12 months. Merry Christmas to you. A friend of mine, Tom Woods, says of the American presidency, no matter who you vote for, you end up with John McCain. It doesn't matter if a person's ideology or a political party,

they all want to fight wars and they all want to kill. But going back to March of 22, almost two years ago, when the Russians and the Ukrainians had a handshake on an agreement that would have saved all this bloodshed and negotiated in turkey and then tony blinken and boris johnson talked president zielinski out of it did they uh dupe him or did they really believe that their supply of cash and military uh equipment would be long enough and endless so as to defeat the Russians? Well, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't answer what they actually thought at the time. The writing was on the wall. It's been on the wall for a long time. But it was a huge betrayal because there was an agreement and it was undercut um by particularly

boris johnson coming to him but america stood behind and said as long as it takes and all that it takes we will do it in order to defeat russia and of course now that offer has been withdrawn and it's been withdrawn at a time when money is drying up and weapons are drying up and so no doubt I mean zelensky I mean whatever you think of him but he must feel deeply betrayed um by by the West clearly, when you say whatever it takes, you mean there's a blank check. You can draw on it. We'll stand by you. For as long as it takes, it doesn't mean until this year and in January of this new year, you're going to get cut off financially.

So it was a lie and a betrayal, and he's trying to pretend it isn't. Zelensky is making very optimistic statements about how Ukraine is going to become the sort of the workshop of the world for making weapons. Well, good luck with that. Who's going to take the risk of building factories, weapons factories in Ukraine? They probably last about 20 hours before they're blown up by the Russians. So, I mean, it's just a big betrayal. And I mean, what is so pernicious is that between March and today, how many young Ukrainian men have died? And for what? Nothing.

I mean, it's just atrocious. It's appalling, this betrayal. I mean, and I'm sure, you know, even if they believed it was possible, did they believe it was possible or was it just wishful thinking? Were they just fantasizing that they could somehow bring Russia? I think that at the bottom of all these decisions whether about israel or about ukraine is no one has done due diligence no one has really thought it through like when they put sanctions on russia all of these things have had a blowback at us not at the target because they didn't think it through they were told you know

and advised not to do this just as netanyahu has been advised by a senior general general brick and he told him at the beginning you're walking into a quagmire in gaza trying to attack hamas i mean he was a very respected general and Netanyahu spoke to him one to one several times and he said it's going to be a disaster and now we know it is a disaster because all the other generals are now saying yes, I mean we're losing so many men there and we don't see either Hamas collapsing, General Aylan said this, we don't see them actually collapsing, we don't see them losing control over the ground in Gaza. And now we hear that the Central, Southern Command of the Israeli forces say, oh no, I mean, this war is going to be one to two years.

That's what I mean by quagmire. Two years of Hamas. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, always a pleasure, my friend. Thank you for coming back to the show. I have a lot to ask you about, but I want to start right off the bat with the latest from Prime Minister Netanyahu. Here's what he had to say yesterday. Excuse me. Here's what he had to say earlier today with an English translation. And I'd like you to unpack it for us. For 30 years, I am very consistent and I'm saying something very simple. This conflict is not on the lack of a state of Palestinian, but the existence of a state, the Jewish state. Every area that we evacuate, we receive terrible terror against that. It happened in South Lebanon,

in Gaza, and also Judea and Samaria, which we did it. And therefore, I clarify that in other arrangements, any other arrangement but in the future the state of Israel have to control on the entire area from the river to the sea this is what happens when you have sovereignty this truth I say to our American friends and I also stopped the attempt to impose us a reality that will jeopardize us a prime minister in Israel has to be able to say no even to the best of friends to say no when you need to and to say yes when you can when I first saw this I thought he's listening to Max he knows that you have to be able to say no Joe Biden could say no to him. He can say

no to Joe Biden, but Joe Biden can't say no to him. Well, I we have the benefit of live translation there. The actual phrase Netanyahu used is from from the west of the Jordan River. Basically, Israel has to used is from the west of the Jordan River. Basically Israel has to control everything from the Mediterranean to the west of the Jordan River. So essentially it is from the river to the sea. That's where the exclusively Jewish state of Israel will be, where Israel will have total security control, which doesn't actually mean the state of Israel will officially declare itself, means the military will control everything, or it will control everything through a

security subcontractor like the Palestinian Authority, a kind of Vichy Authority. But essentially, one state, which is the reality right now, is what Netanyahu is openly advancing and always has. A few weeks ago, he boasted that he had helped foil the two-state solution. There's video leaked from a meeting he had with settlers in 2002, where he boasted that he'd destroyed the two-state solution and tricked the Americans that he knows how to move the Americans. This is Netanyahu's appeal to the Jewish-Israeli public, where there is no constituency at all for the two-state solution that Tony Blinken is so disingenuously pushing in place of an actual ceasefire and a cessation of this devastating

conflict, which constantly expands during his 10-country anti-diplomacy tour. So here's the reality of what the Americans are dealing with, and they refuse to accept it. And meanwhile, back at home here in the US, the presidents of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania were sacked because they refused to ban student groups that declare from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. In other words, Palestinians will not be governed by a military dictatorship from the river to the sea. So there's just this whole speech by Netanyahu is suffused with irony. And if there's time, I want to make one more quick point. He said, anytime Israel retreats from territory, it controls militarily, it's faced with terror.

And he pointed to Southern Lebanon, which is where Hezbollah currently operates. Israel created Hezbollah in southern Lebanon when it invaded in the 1980s, there was no Hezbollah. It was the Shia population that Israel thought it could actually use as a proxy of its own and which it abused and which formed into Hezbollah to resist the brutality and repression of Israel's occupation of Lebanon. So Israel's constantly creating these so-called terror threats in areas it occupies. Then when it withdraws, it uses their presence as justification to wage further warfare. What is your take on this almost musical chairs, but somewhat instability at the head of the military in Ukraine? President Zelensky says he's going to fire General Zeluzhny. Zeluzhny is still there. The troops want him to stay. Zelenskyy announced there was a replacement that's going to be. The replacement is a tool of MI6 and probably the U.S. State Department. How do you read this? Are these signs of the end game in the Ukraine government? Well, first of all, it's a sign of crisis within Ukraine. And the crisis is twofold. One is the crisis of reality. The fact is Ukraine is losing this war and losing this war badly. You know, you and I have been speaking for some time

now about what I've called the impending collapse. Well, the collapse is occurring as we speak on the battlefield. Ukrainians are virtually defenseless in the face of Russia's military. They don't have artillery. Ukraine, for all of its faults, and I've always spoken highly of the professionalism of certain Ukrainian units, and their long-range artillery was very good, very good at keeping the Russians at bay. Russia was unable to mass their artillery because of the accuracy and the lethality of Ukrainian artillery strikes. But now that the Ukrainians have run out of ammunition, Russia is able to mass artillery and once again, just literally devastate Ukrainian military positions before sending in their infantry to occupy it. And then the Ukrainians are unable

to launch an effective counterattack. So, you. So Russia will take territory, not get pushed out of it, then take more territory. So every day we're seeing just the incremental advances across the front by Russia. There's nothing the Ukrainians have in response. And so we're looking at a military collapse, which is engendering political crisis inside Ukraine. And the crisis is of a civil military nature. Look, any American who studies history, you know about the struggles between General McClellan and Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, where McClellan thought that he could do it better than Lincoln. But at the end

of the day, when Lincoln relieved McClellan, McClellan stepped aside without question. We know about Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman and how MacArthur was convinced that he knew best. Truman did not. But when Truman summoned MacArthur and fired him, MacArthur stepped aside because that's the way it works in democracies. Ukraine is not a democracy. Ukraine is a dysfunctional, you know, oligarchy, kleptocracy, but it's not a democracy. And what we have here is a situation where General Zaluzhny, the commanding general of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, believes he can do it better than Zelensky. He hasn't. Zelensky's saying, well, wait a minute, we've got Bakhmut, you chewed up a whole bunch of our guys there, we got the failed counteroffensive, and we got the ongoing disaster at Adyivka.

So, and Zaluzhny's saying, it's not my fault, man. You wouldn't let me fight the war the way I wanted to. If you let me do it my way, we could have won. We could have gone on the defensive, wore the Russians out, flipped the script on them. But Zelensky's also positioning himself politically, like McClellan did during the Civil War, saying, I can do a better job of running this country. And so Zelensky did what any rational political leader would do at that point in time, eliminate this man who has forgotten what his role is. But Zelensky didn't go away. Zelensky called him in and said, I want you to resign.

And Zelensky said, no. And therein lies the problem. Because once you get a general standing up to the ultimate civilian authority and saying, no, you have a crisis. This is why Victoria Nuland flew into Kieviv, because she needs to go in and negotiate the outcome, let everybody know who's in charge. And here's the third aspect of this crisis. There's no Ukrainian democracy. Ukraine is simply a functionary of the United States, doing that which the United States tells it to do. And even though the United States is

unable or unwilling to cough up the additional $64 billion that Ukraine desperately needs to survive, the Ukraine can't billion that Ukraine desperately needs to survive, the Ukraine can't declare its independence from the United States politically or militarily or economically. And so they do Victoria Nuland's bidding. But what we're seeing right here is the political version of the collapse that's taking place on the battlefield. This is the end of Ukraine. We're watching Ukraine implode from within. Do you think that Victoria Nuland was there to put her blessing on, I forget his name, you know his name, the general that's the head of the intel whom Zelensky wants to replace Zelushny? I think Budanov is the guy's name. And, you know, it's not her blessing. I think she she's not blessing anything she's dictating. I think she went in there and Budanov together on the same sheet of music. It's getting Zeluzhny to accept this outcome without causing a civil war.

Remember, when Zeluzhny refused to step down, he was backed by the totality of the Ukrainian armed forces. Right. He basically said, yeah, we back Zeluzhny. That's the beginning of a civil war. I mean, that's the beginning of the end. That's what precipitates a coup d'etat. So Nuland flew in there to stop a coup, to remind Zeluzny that if he tried this coup shake-up is systemic in nature it's every aspect of the government uh civilian and military is uh is going to collapse because the current government doesn't have a solution to the problem and zielinski desperately needs to come up with people um that will do his bidding he's lost the confidence of the ukrainian

military and he's lost the confidence of the majority of uh the Ukrainian uh political establishment so he needs to recreate a government that will you know at least adhere to you know his his instructions as dictated to him by the United States this is the ultimate uh form of American control we've come in and we're basically eliminating any notion of zolinski as an independent political actor. What this does is prove that he is little more than a modern-day Pinocchio with a bunch of strings attached and his puppet masters are telling him what to do. Is Budanov a Nazi or a nationalist or one of those hard right from one of those hard right groups in the Ukrainian military?

Well, he's a nationalist. Whether he's a right sector Nazi, I don't know. He's a man who's committed war crimes. He's the man behind the assassination of Darya Dugina Tatarsky. He's the man who's trying to kill me. So, Budanov, yeah, I know who you are. But I will also say this, as much as I despise the man, I had a very interesting conversation with a Chechen general who commanded Chechen forces in Mariupol. And he spoke highly of Budanov as a leader, as a commander, as an opponent. And so whether or not I like the guy or I like his politics, it doesn't matter. Budanov is a very effective leader. And I think if he were able to take control and have the army listen to him, you know, that that, you know, he could you know, he could solidify.

But you at the end of the day, Judge, Ukraine is building a sandcastle right now. The tide is out. And like the little kids going forward, they're building a sandcastle. Budanov can come in and put a spire here and flag it. The tide is going to come in and the sand there is no way to convert what they're building to anything other as sand castle and it can disappear under the russian tide how bitterly how bitterly ironic that the grand mistress of ukraine coups flew there last week to try and prevent a coup from happening. As we speak, earlier today, Ukrainian parliament was considering a draft. Who are they going to draft? They don't have the human beings if they're going to consider males within a draft-worthy age.

Well, one of the things they're trying to do is um gain access to the hundreds of thousands of ukrainian men who have fled the country and to create a foundation of law that gives them the ability to go out and ask nations to allow them to bring these people back to make it compulsory to threaten people with the loss of privileges of rights, the ability to have employment if they don't come back. So I think that's the basis. But the other thing is to open up to categories that previously were closed. Children of the age of 17 or younger, even 16. Women. I mean, you know, I try, I'm a father of two daughters, and I believe that they have every, I don't believe in glass ceilings. I believe that women should be allowed

to do whatever they're capable of doing. And if they, you know, to compete with men, and if they're better than men to get the jobs. But war is a separate category, and combat is very physical. And very few women have what it takes physically to function and survive on the modern battlefield. And today, you see Ukraine forming entire women units, sending them off to battle, and they're going to die. I mean, that's the reality of these women will not survive. They're not in rear area support. They're going to be frontline soldiers, and they're going to be slaughtered. And if I were a Ukrainian male hiding in Germany or Poland, I would be forever shamed by the fact that I'm hiding while the women I'm supposed to be protecting are fighting and dying. Ukraine is

falling apart as a society. When you have women doing the fighting for the men, there's something wrong. Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now. There's nothing to laugh at, but one of the viewers, Colonel, just wrote in and said, I'd like to hear Colonel McGregor conduct one of these interviews in a Scottish brogue. He's asking the wrong man. I couldn't do it. By the way, brogue is Irish.

When you say Scottish, they mean burr. Oh, burr. Okay. Actually, he didn't say Brogue. He said Scottish accent. I incorrectly called it a Brogue, but thank you for the correction. There's very little to laugh at, so the humor is out of the way, and I need to speak to you about Israel and Gaza and also Ukraine. I want to start with Ukraine. I want your comments on the French president, and I won't characterize them. I'll let you watch what he said, and then you can tell me if you think this is crazy or profound. President Emmanuel Macron, two days ago. There is no consensus today to send ground troops in an official, endorsed, and sanctioned manner, but in dynamic terms, nothing should be ruled out. I think there's a lot to unpack there first of all is the essence of it crazy that nothing should be ruled out and secondly is he suggesting that French troops may be there in an unofficial capacity I think the

man is certifiable let's get that straight. He's talking about effectively declaring war on Russia. And that's what people don't seem to understand. You send conventional military formations into Western Ukraine, you're going to end up at war with Russia. And I think President Putin has made that clear repeatedly. He's not going to tolerate any external intervention. And while he certainly doesn't want a war with NATO, he's made that clear repeatedly. He's not going to tolerate any external intervention. And while he certainly doesn't want a war with NATO, he's made it clear that if any NATO members send their forces, organized forces, into Western Ukraine with the intention of fighting Russians, they would be at war. You know, one of the things that needs to be kept in mind, there is always the

outside possibility that Macronron made this public statement so that everybody else in the nato alliance could immediately distance themselves from him which is exactly what's happened virtually everyone has said out of the question we won't do it even the united states in a a feat of or i guess a fit of uh reasonableness decided to say it's out of the question so perhaps that was the reason it was done but otherwise it makes no sense here's uh one of those responses the chancellor of germany is nato is not and will not be party to the war. That remains the case. We do not want Russia's war against Ukraine to become a war between Russia and NATO. We agree on this with all our allies. This also means

no German participation in the war. To put it bluntly, as German Chancellor, I will not be sending any members of the German armed forces to Ukraine. Our soldiers can count on that, and you too can count on that. Colonel, do you know if there are French or German special forces there, perhaps out of uniform, perhaps called contractors or mercenaries, but they are truly military personnel of Germany and France? I do not. I can't confirm or deny it. I know that British and American special ops forces in small numbers have been on Ukrainian soil. There's no question about it. And some of the attacks that you've seen with drones at sea and some of the

missile strikes they have undoubtedly been assisted enormously by the british sas i'm told sas elements or british special ops elements also play a role in mr zelensky's security but as far as anything else now i can't i i cannot confirm it I wouldn't exclude the possibility that there are others on the ground there trying to help or assist in some way, but I haven't seen it. When you hear a member of Congress refer to Israel as our closest ally, my argument is they're not an ally at all. Our relationship with them is not in the best interest of the United States. There's no treaty of alliance. It's an absolute misnomer. It's what AIPAC wants people to believe, but it's a misnomer to call us an ally of Israel.

Look, there is no question, and this crisis makes it manifestly clear, that Israel is an albatross around their neck, both from a strategic point of view and a moral point of view. I mean, we're talking here about the strategic dimension to this conflict, but you also want to remember that there's an important moral dimension. Because we are siding with Israel and providing Israel with almost unconditional support in its war against the Palestinians, we are complicit in a genocide. It just doesn't get much worse than that. Kyle Anzalone from antiwar.com joins us now. Kyle, it's a pleasure. My friend, thank you for coming back to the show. This morning, an Israeli journalist reported and

Alistair Crook reported and analyzed on the use by the Israeli military of an algorithm called Lavender, which is apparently AI, and by which the Israeli computers directed who should be killed. That the AI system using this algorithm actually put up images of people that the Israelis felt were in or were sympathetic to Hamas and assigned them numbers from zero to 100, zero being the must kill, excuse me, 100 being the must kill, zero being stay away. Does any of this surprise you? Does any of this absolve, I can't imagine how it would, the Israelis from moral culp, but pointing to a machine or a computer. Yeah, I guess shocked but not surprised, Judge. And this is a high-tech genocide, basically what's going on here.

They're cleansing their genocide. They're washing their genocide in AI tech, allowing that article that you're talking about is from 972 magazine a telv based outlet where they talked to several israeli officers and in per military personnel who are involved in the procedure here and what they say is you know this is the worst kind of social credit score in the world right where the israelis essentially assigned all the palestinians a score as you said between one and a hundred and above a certain number, which has changed by the way, they bumped it down or bumped it up a couple of times to, to, you know, add more people to the kill list, making it so that, you know, a lower score will put you onto the kill list. But the

Israeli military, they said, if a, the AI program Lavender recommends a name, they put it on the kill list within 20 seconds. the only thing they check is that the intended person is male they didn't even say they checked the age and so it could be some of these intended targets are very very young absolutely horrifying but maybe the worst part of all this if that's not bad enough is that the Israelis actually waited till the names on the kill list returned to their houses and killed not only the person on the list, but their entire families. And intentionally in the program was called Where's Daddy? And of course, this is a reference to when kids are excited for their dad to come home after a day of work.

They start asking, Mommy, where's daddy? Where when the Israelis answer, where's daddy? It is coming home with a very large bomb. The same article is interesting. with a very large bomb. The same article is interesting. You mentioned very large bomb. The same article indicated an Israeli propensity for the so-called dumb bombs. Even though the AI supposedly pinpoints and targets individuals. Now you have informed us it's not only them, but their family, whether innocent or otherwise.

The Israeli preference is for the 2,000-pound or even 500-pound dumb bomb, which destroys anything in sight, as opposed to the more expensive smart bomb that aims for... It seems like the more we learn about this, the worse it gets. Last week, we were all upset over the killing of the seven aid workers, which seemed to have caused more of a kerfuffle in the West, perhaps because they're white, than the killing of 33,000 Palestinians. Now we find out that those 33,000 were designated by a computer does netanyahu actually think he can absolve or he can escape uh moral and legal condemnation for this slaughter by pointing to an algorithm named lavender yeah i'm not sure if this is netanyahu's way to absolve himself or if he really cares if the moral international community condemns him for being immoral. I think he really just cares about his perception in Israel and maybe his legacy in Israel overall. And I think maybe he calculates that his legacy is either going to be one,

years of propping up Hamas and using Hamas as a cudgel so he didn't have to negotiate at all with the Palestinians until it ultimately led to October 7th. And of course, his legacy of corruption. And so if he could be the Israeli leader that finally deals with the Palestinian problem, and particularly in Gaza, and just ethnically cleanses the place and removes all the Palestinians, I think that's what Netanyahu is concerned about, his legacy being. And that's his thinking on what he wants to have his public image be, at least in Israel. Here's Leon Panetta, not my favorite public official, although a longtime friend of mine, admonishing Netanyahu on one of the talk shows yesterday, saying,

you're never going to destroy Hamas. Cut number five. Netanyahu keeps saying we're going to destroy Hamas. Look, you're not going to destroy Hamas. Hamas is going to be around. What you can destroy is the leadership that was involved by Hamas in the attack on October 7th. And I don't think he's made that clear, that ultimately this is about killing the leadership of Hamas not just wiping out Hamas if we had a better sense of mission here I think we'd have a better sense of how this war could come to an end Barry Johnson says um this is absurd for every leader you kill you he'll be replaced with two people who'll be more ardent than than he was right i i guess one important point let me just stop you what we're watch i want your answer but what we're

watching uh are the massive demonstrations in front of netanyahu's house this goes on seven nights a week now go ahead please kyle right i i guess you know the two points i would want to make on that clip are one this is something that most Americans have known. They watched what happened in the war on terror when on 9-11, the members of Al-Qaeda could maybe fit in a pirate boat, as my boss, Scott Horton at the Libertarian Institute likes to say. way from West Africa to the Philippines. And so obviously trying to eliminate jihadism with bombs only creates more jihadists. And so that would be a failure. But what I think he really gets wrong in his analysis is that Israel isn't trying to wipe out the leadership. As we saw and talked about with the Lavender program, what they were doing, they put 30,000, I think 37,000 names on the list. And most of these were junior members of hamas if you look at the you know the number of people in hamas that israel claims to kill almost all of them are low-level fighters they've gotten almost none of the leadership and so what israel

is trying to do isn't even kill the leadership of hamas as uh panetta is suggesting phil welcome to the show uh my dear friend much appreciated appreciated. Before we get to your piece on Apocalypse Now, Israel is playing a dangerous game in the Middle East, I want to ask you a few questions, particularly about this comment by our friend and colleague, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, that it is more likely than not that the CIA was involved in the attack on the Crocus Concert Hall outside of Moscow. And to be fair to Colonel Wilkerson and to you, here's what he said. This looks a lot like what Nord Stream turned out to be, a U.S. operation. Only the CIA led it. Let's face it,

we have done as much to create and to nurture ISIS as anything else on the face of the earth, whether it be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or any of the instigators of the so-called ISIS consulate in the beginning. We've used ISIS. And when I say we, I mean that agency called the CIA, the same agency that does so many nefarious things in our name. And they have worked ISIS and worked operatives from ISIS in order to do other things. And I'm hearing, and it makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm watching the behavior and the signals coming from Moscow, which are usually very indicative of the truth when it's something like this. And I think that's what Putin believes. And I think the intelligence community in Russia, whether it's the GRU, the NKVD, the KSB, the FSB or whatever, they believe it too. And that makes this Ukraine conflict a different conflict as of that killing of that many Russians that close to Putin and

blame lying at least in part with the people who orchestrated it being the CIA. What's your take, Mr. Former CIA? Well, I didn't do it. I don't buy that. I think there are many more players in this game than he's giving credit to. You know, it's always easy to blame the cia for everything because it's a a secret intelligence organization so it's a it's a permanent paps patsy as as the expression might go um my what i've seen is that if anyone had um more relationship with isis it was israel uh so if you're looking for relationships on the part of Ukraine, and Ukraine certainly has operational connections with the Israelis and with the CIA and with military intelligence. There are a lot of people that potentially could have come up with a scheme like this and done it. But in my mind, this was, apart from Ukraine, this was kind of overkill for the United States to get involved to this extent. It even would be,

I think, overkill for the Israelis to want to get involved to this extent. Would it have been overkill for MI6 to get involved? Yeah, MI6 is a different story. MI6 doesn't have a lot to lose or really a lot to gain, but they tend to get involved in these kinds of relationships. I think I've mentioned to you before that MI6, before the U.S. really got involved with what was going on in Ukraine, were kind of heavily engaged. I mean, they're Europeans.

They have a high reputation. MI6 could be a possible player in this, sure. Is Zelensky so desperate or so unwilling to face reality that he would have signed off on something like this. Yeah, I think Zelensky is capable of just about anything. He's desperate. He knows he's losing. And the fact is he's trying to make, he's trying to kind of, you know,

shake the dice and see what comes out the other end is it would be my suspicion and uh this uh killing of a lot of russian civilians uh is is kind of something that he would give his seal of approval on now bear in mind that you know there are a lot of stories floating around about who know what who knew what and i am waiting to see the conclusion and the results of the investigation that the Russians are conducting, because they're interrogating these people who carried out the attack. So there's a big hole there in the middle that we don't know anything about right now. How did Iran get the hypersonic from Russia? I imagine they had some help from the Russians, but I don't know that for a fact.

The Iranians are quite clever people and witnessed the sophistication of the ballistic missiles that got through the Israeli air defenses after the Israelis shot down 300 decoys, or what we call those hovering little things that came first. So the drones cost $10,000 apiece and maybe a few hundred of them were destroyed. The Israelis spent a billion, a billion in one night shooting these down. How much longer can they afford that? That's the question, course judge not too many more nights and uh that is the threat that's dangling out like a sort of damocles now for the

first time the israelis have been warned look not only can we hit you directly we will we just demonstrated that now knock it off this was just a warning. We can do far worse. And the United States is pleading with the Israelis, look, please don't retaliate again. And the way they're justifying that is we won. There are no lawful methods to keep your children from being drafted. The draft is still on the books as we speak, but it hasn't been used since

the Vietnam War years. Interestingly, in the war between the states, which the government likes to call the Civil War, it wasn't a civil war. A civil war is a violent struggle for control of the central government. That's not what the war between the states was. It was a war to leave the central government. Nevertheless, when the U.S. government, the North in the war, imposed a draft, it said right in the documents for $300, you can get out. So a lot of sons of wealthy people got out because they either got someone else to replace them or they paid the $300. That out exists no longer. If there is a draft, and God forbid this from happening, to me, the draft is a form of slavery. If there is a draft, there will be no monetary out. There will just be a physical and mental out. If you fail the physical or mental test, you wouldn't qualify for the draft. Okay, we'll take one more and then

call it a break. Kevin Boff. So when will the neocons be listed by names and shareholdings for the world's population to see who is triggering these wars for profits? Kevin, you can go to the five largest war merchants in the United States, Raytheon, Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, you can go to them and look up and see who their shareholders are. You can see who are members of their boards. You can also look up and see what think tanks they own and what former military officials they put on television, not on Judging Freedom. Aaron Maté joins us now. Aaron, thank you, my dear friend. Thank you for your time today. Speaking about time, you have just produced a dissertation, well, it's about 20 or 25 pages long,

which is available at Real Clear Investigations on what 10 years of U.S. meddling in Ukraine have wrought, an exhaustively researched, thoroughly presented, brilliantly articulated argument. And there's a spoiler alert in the title, but I'll let you deal with the spoiler alert. What have 10 years of U.S. meddling in Ukraine brought? Well, according to Joe Biden, and really at this point, the bipartisan establishment, because House Speaker Mike Johnson just helped push through the $61 billion measure to prolong the proxy war that Joe Biden and his team began. Ukraine's on the front lines of democracy. That's been the talking point from Joe Biden, that if we don't help Ukraine, then democracy will lose. It'll be a victory for autocratic forces everywhere. What I put out in the piece is simply looking back at the actual record

of the last 10 years. The US role in Ukraine has undermined democracy, not only in Ukraine, but also in the US, because after being, serving on the front lines of a really dangerous proxy war inside Ukraine, which has undermined Ukrainian democracy, starting with the overthrow of its government in February 2014, backed by the U.S., the Obama-Biden administration, Ukraine's also been used to meddle in U.S. politics in really consequential ways, factoring heavily in the 2016 campaign, in the first impeachment of Donald Trump, and then even in 2020 as well. And it probably stands to factor in 2020 for campaign two. And I go through just some of the key details in all this, and it is a very, very long piece.

But I have some extraordinary revelations, or I think some important revelations, which I can talk about, that come ukrainian insider who's seen all this from the start named andrei telechenko who took part in the maidan movement uh back when it began in late 2013 and then worked for the ukrainian government after the coup that the us backed and then worked for blue star strategies which is a democratic party-tied firm that worked with barisma which of course is the energy company uh that hired hunter Hunter Biden right after his father, Joe Biden, helped overthrow the government in Ukraine. So there's a whole lot to go through. But what I argue here is that rather than portraying Ukraine as being on the front lines of a democratic struggle, as is the standard narrative in the U.S., Ukraine's been used to undermine democracy in both countries,

both in Washington and in Kyiv. Give us the back story, if you would. I know there's a tremendous amount of detail here, and some of the names are quite familiar to us. Vice President Biden, of course, CIA Director Brennan, Victoria Nuland. Barack Obama resisting the efforts of the neocons around him to provide the type of weaponry and military support that Joe Biden has. But give us the thumbnail sketch starting in 2013, I guess. Well, you know, the experience of Obama really underscores a very common theme here, which is that it doesn't really matter. I mean, the whole story of Ukraine underscores that in both countries, whatever the elected president wants ultimately doesn't really matter. You had

Obama actually being pretty tepid about waging a proxy war against Russia and Ukraine. He resisted efforts to arm Ukraine. He actually, through support behind Angela Merkel as she negotiated the Minsk Two Accords. But right as Merkel was doing that, there was a meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in February 2015, right before the Minsk Two Accords were signed. And the Minsk Two was the deal that was supposed to end the war in the Donbass that began after the U.S. backed a coup in February 2014, this war between Russian-backed rebels in the East and the U.S.-backed post-coup government. So as Angela Merkel is negotiating a peace deal, Victoria Nuland is meeting with John McCain, Mike Pompeo, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference at

a luxury hotel. And she's saying, we're going to ignore the minsk accords basically she's saying this is an act of betrayal john mccain is comparing uh merkel to chamberlain and saying all this is appeasement and newland's saying we're going to keep flooding ukraine with weapons no matter what happens with this peace deal what did the minsk accords uh just for the benefit of our audience that may not be familiar with it what did they do in a nutshell? And who were the agreeing parties? So after you have the U.S. backing a coup in February 2014, and you asked me about that, so I'll go back to that in a second because I skipped over that part. But once there is that coup, you have a war breakout between Russian-backed Eastern Ukrainians who are opposed to this new government because they've not only overthrown their elected president, Yanukovych, but also one of their first moves is to try to ban the Russian language. And so people in Eastern Ukraine see all this as an assault on their very existence.

So they take up arms with Russia's support. There's, you know, some fighting. Finally, in February 2015, you have the Minsk bargain is these Eastern Ukrainians will get some limited autonomy, have their rights respected. They'll be able to speak Russian. There'll be no more attempts to ban their language. And they'll have some limited autonomy, the right to appoint their own judges and police forces, but they'll stay inside of Ukraine rather than separating. And in return, Russian forces that have gone there to aid them will withdraw along with their heavy weaponry and there will be peace that's the basic bargain but Newland meanwhile is saying we're not going to respect these Minsk Accords and she sides in doing so

with the ultra-nationalists of Ukraine who also don't want the Minsk Accords because I don't think they want these Russian aligned Eastern Ukrainians in their country and certainly they don't want anything that can respect their existence respect their, because they're so devoted to their conception of Ukrainian nationalism. And that's, by the way, the same faction that Victoria Nuland and her allies in the Obama administration got behind when, in February 2014, a year earlier, after weeks of protests on the Maidan that get increasingly violent against Yanukovych, there's a power-sharing agreement brokered by the EU in a very similar situation. And again, the ultranationalists said, we're not going to accept that.

We're not going to accept leaving Yanukovych in power. And after Yanukovych's forces pulled back under their terms of the deal, the ultranationalists took advantage, stormed the parliament, pushed through a new government. And the U.S., even though they had welcomed the power-sharing agreement brokered by the EU that would have left Danukovych in power, they immediately forget all that and say, yes, this is great. We support the new government. So you have two incidents there, the coup of 2014 and the signing of the Minsk Accords, where you have a compromise reached, ultra-nationalists in Ukraine backed by neocons in Washington, completely undermine it. In the case of the Minsk Accords, you have Victoria Nuland saying that she's going to undermine

her own president, Barack Obama. By the way, everything that's happening is proving day after day that the students are absolutely right. They're protesting criminality. They're protesting war crimes. They know it when they see it. Of course, all of those on the take of the Israel lobby deny it, but we see it before our own eyes. And, again, as we've talked about, when you see it before your own eyes, the Congress is trying to stop you from seeing it before your own eyes by closing down tick tock where a lot of

people see what's going on every day with their own eyes so stop looking you can't make this up you can't make this up i didn't i didn't make the connection with see it with your own eyes and tick tock until you just mentioned it well but you know even we had a conversation of Mitt Romney explaining. It was amazing. It was ridiculous. Yeah, he was so explicit and unabashed. He said, well, this is why we had to close down TikTok, because the young people were seeing things. We don't want and to get them onto the campuses and so forth. The game of the Israel lobby is to make us not look. You know, we don't ask the west to trust us

trust is not something which is illustrating the western positions the western actions and today there were many examples. I don't want to recite those failures to deliver on the promises, those failures to deliver on the legal obligations. Frankly, I don't care whether the West trusts us or not. The West must understand the real situation. They don't understand anything except real politics. Let them go to the people. You are democracies, right?

Ask the people what the West should do in response to Putin's proposals. What do you think? He lost his patience, George. Yes, he did lose his patience. It appears President Putin has He lost his patience, George. Yes, he did lose his patience. And it appears President Putin has not lost his patience, but the people around him have. Yes, and Lavrov is a gentleman. He's like a Taoist monk.

Dealing with those lunatics. You must tell him that the next time you shake his hand. Dealing with these lunatics from the Beltway to Brussels, you need to be a Taoist monk. Otherwise, you know, you go crazy. But it's not only Lavrov. Everybody, Ryabkov, the number one Sherpa for Greeks, which is one of the deputy foreign ministers as well. And when we met him already a few months ago, he's already saying, look, we tried everything.

We are exasperated. It's impossible to have a dialogue with the Americans and with the people in Brussels, especially NATO. Let me remind you how impossible that is. Here is Secretary General Stoltenberg of NATO, followed by Secretary of Defense Austin of the United States. Cuts five and seven. It's not for Ukraine to withdraw forces from Ukrainian territory. Det er for Ukraina å forløpe kreft fra ukrainsk territorium. Det er for Russland å forløpe kreft fra ukrainsk land.

Dette er et forslag som betyr at Russland bør ha rett til å forløpe mer ukrainsk land. Alle de fire provinsene som de krever ikke er ukrainske. occupy even more Ukrainian land. All the four provinces that they claim are not Ukrainian. He is not in any position to dictate to Ukraine what they must do to bring about a peace. I think that's exactly the kind of behavior that we don't want to see. We don't want to see a leader of one country wake up one day and decide that he wants to erase borders and annex the territory of his neighbor. That's not the world that any of us want to live in. And so I think, you know, he is not in the, in my view, not in a position to dictate to Ukraine what it must do to pursue peace. Boy, the United States has been dictating to the world what the world must do

to please United States exceptionalism since the end of World War II. How close are we to World War III? Pick your spot, China, Ukraine, Israel. That's an interesting question. Actually, I was just talking with that with a group of former colleagues from the military. I was not there. I was not a fly on the wall. We all agreed that, one, we are as close to a nuclear use, if you will, nuclear weapon use, as we've been in the history of nuclear weapons, short as it is, 75 years or so. And second, that we were extremely close, as close, if you will, to a conventional conflict that would lead to this exchange of nuclear weapons. And this is the first time we have agreed that it is in multiple theaters of war, if you will, in the Levant. So there is no consensus on it's going to be in the South China Sea, it's going to be in Ukraine, it's going to be in the South China Sea. It's going to be in Ukraine. It's going to be in the Middle East.

The South China Sea was the least of our concerns at the moment. And that might be a warning because if Xi Jinping and the Chinese military wanted to take advantage of preoccupation and other theaters of war, it would be an ideal time to do it but we put that down as the lowest possibility in terms of what it is in our view the possibilities why is Ukraine's top general General sirski claiming that he's pushing the Russians backwards is there any evidence to this what at all I think I think he's been spending too much time with president zielinski and they're sampling the cocaine you know they're doing that or vodka shots something like that no i mean it's

it is delusional you've got you've got even ukrainian sources now saying what is he talking about all along the donetsk particularly in the nets but all along the line of conflict which where you know goes about six seven hundred miles from north to south russia's moving forward ukraine's moving backwards that's it it's that simple and and it's and ukraine does not have an answer for it because, again, we've gone over this repeatedly. They lack manpower. They lack air defense. They lack air cover.

They lack artillery. And they lack artillery shells to put in the artillery. Other than that, it's looking really good. You had an encounter with the FBI in your home last week. Can you tell us about it? Well, I mean, it was more than an encounter. The FBI executed a search warrant on my home. We lost count at 30, but we think there might have been close to 40 FBI special agents and auxiliary personnel who paid my home a visit. Did they tell you they were coming or did

they just show up? I just showed up. Two FBI agents showed up at my door, knocked on it. I went outside and they said they wanted to talk to me. I said, about what? And they said, we have a lot of questions and concerns about your online activity. And I said, really? Like what? And they said, well, it relates to the Foreign Agent Registration Act. I said, huh. You want to talk about it? I'm not letting you in my house.

We can sit out here and talk if you want to. They said, well, actually, we're coming in your house. And they showed me the search warrant. And then suddenly the whole area swarms and they brought out a SWAT team in full tactical gear and um you know they're like we got to clear your house and i said guys i got four dogs behind the door that are worried and uh you're not opening this door going in with a SWAT team because you're not shooting my dogs and so what's going to happen is put a gun against my head but i'm going in that house and i'm moving my damn dogs

out to the backyard then you can do whatever you want i don't care and so they were cool i mean look i have to get to the fbi guys they um they're very calm very professional very courteous the entire time um clearly executing orders that they've been given. And they, you know, the search warrant allowed them to come in and seize my electronic devices. I mean, it's very specific about what they can and can't do. You know, so they could seize electronic devices, cell phones, computer storage, electronic, you know, things of that nature. Clearly, they stole everything. I mean, I'm calling them out right now. You guys know what you took. They took gifts that were given to me of a non-electronic nature. They took documents

beyond the ones that they ended up. They took my entire WMD archive, you know, when I was a weapons inspector in Iraqq the receipts that allowed me to stare down the united states and all the other liars who were trying to go to war on iraq based upon their lives about wmds you know it wasn't just my word that uh that helped me prevail is the fact that i had done the job for seven years and i had seven years worth of receipts none of it's classified all of it is considered sensitive by the United States, but none of it's classified. You can't give classified information to the United Nations. But they found that down in my basement and they seized that whole thing, 24 boxes, 80,000 pages. I said, you got to give it back guys. You can't have this. And they said,

well, we have to review it. I said, okay, but you have to give it back. It's not classified. Thank you.