"Amb. Charles Freeman: Ritter, Ukraine, and Israel - #ScottRitter"
by Judge Napolitano
Judging Freedom (August 9, 2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjFd09A1Lg

0:18 Judge Napolitano: [Introductory Remarks]

0:53 “Two days ago our dear friend and a mainstay on this show had his house raided by the FBI. I say raided. They were executing a search warrant. They removed many boxes of materials including his notes from when he was the chief UN arms inspector in the 1990s and including the draft of his next book as yet unpublished of course. They took all of his electronic equipment, about 35 boxes of papers. Scott Ritter, of course, is defiant and rightly so and believes that he was targeted by the United States government because of his active, aggressive, and passionate opposition to the tenor of American foreign policy, specifically with respect to the tenor of American foreign policy, specifically with respect to Ukraine and Israel. What are your thoughts on this, Ambassador?

01:58 Ambassador Charles W. Freeman: “Well, it looks to me like a classic case of the use of the prosecutorial and investigative power to cripple a critic of government policy. We’ve seen things like this before in our history. I remember – though I was not alive – but I know of the Palmer Raids under Attorney General Palmer after World War One which targeted people with dissident opinions and in some cases jailed them, critics of the war that we had entered in Europe. The McCarthy Era, the same thing. The power to investigate, to call before a Congressional committee was the power to destroy the reputations of people and silence them. And we’ve seen in recent years that as I said the power to prosecute is the power to destroy because you can basically force someone to run up legal fees to such an extent that you bankrupt them. And you can also, of course, smear their reputation. And this looks to me like that. Scott Ritter has been on the Ukrainian enemy list which apparently was put together with the US Department of State. For years they’ve been trying to silence him. He has been the most potent corrective to false information on what is happening on the battlefield that we’ve had other than, perhaps, Douglas MacGregor. So there has been an effort to silence him. His passport was confiscated as part of the investigative process but it doesn’t seem to me that he has done anything that a journalist or an academic doesn’t normally do.”

03:54 Judge Napolitano: “Ambassador, here is Scott on this show on June 4th of this year, that’s the day after the feds seized his passport. By the way when they served the search warrant yesterday they quite properly gave him a copy of the search warrant and a receipt for what they took and he said he had no complaints whatsoever about the FBI on the scene. He obviously has complaints about people who dispatched them. When they took his passport at JFK airport. They didn’t identify themselves. They didn’t give him a receipt. They didn’t give him an explanation. He doesn’t even know who they were. He came on this show the day after and pretty much summarized what the State Department has been doing to him, not knowing of course what was going to happen two days ago. Cut number 16:

04:48 Scott Ritter: “ . . .”

. . .

06:15 Ambassador Charles W. Freeman: “There you have it.”

06:16 Judge Napolitano: “There you have it is right. Remember how George Orwell warned us in 1984 about the destructive power of words. You start calling somebody who speaks out against you a terrorist and make that person the moral equivalent of a bomb thrower and people are going to want to silence and harm the person or cheer you on when you, after having demonized him, raid his house and prosecute him. Scott, of course, is not one easily to be silenced. Ambassador, I just wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg.”

06:52 Ambassador Charles W. Freeman: “Well, I think it is. We have seen the other day Tulsi Gabbard put on a terrorist list and stopped and searched every time she gets on an airplane apparently accompanied by plain-clothes marshals and bomb experts. She’s an active ember of the US Army Reserve, former presidential candidate, commentator on Fox News. And she says things the administration doesn’t like. And so they are using the same sort of “terrorist” charge to harass her. This is all too common.”

07:37 “And I would note also that there is a real need for people like Scott Ritter to stand up and tell us what is happening on the ground in Ukraine or for that matter in Gaza which he does. He does not wax indignant morally. He sticks to the facts. His expertise is military matters and he is an unquestioned expert in that area. And countering him is, you know, Admiral Kirby, for example, who reminds me of Baghdad Bob, if you remember him, and State Department spokesmen who are smarmy and totally without any credibility at all. So, we are in a moment, and you know, I was reminded because I gather yesterday former President Trump again boasted about the size of the crowds he draws – in this case January 6 – but if you remember Sean Spicer his spokesman coming out after his inauguration and claiming it was the largest crowd on the Mall ever. This is the kind of nonsense that we have in our official statements these days. And it needs to be corrected.

08:57 Judge Napolitano: “Yes, you know you talk about Tulsi Gabbard. She is, of course, also a former member of the House of Representatives. I remember when the Bush Administration put Teddy Kennedy on a “terrorist” watch list. And for a couple of weeks, he couldn’t take a plane from Reagan National to Boston Logan. And this was because of some statements he had made in support of the Irish Republican Army and its fight against Great Britain. It’s unbelievable what the government will do to punish speech.”

09:38 “Ambassador: When Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke to Congress two weeks ago and he was interrupted 51 or 58 times by standing ovations in an hour-and-five-minute speech, the longest standing ovation for him went on for longer than a minute. Try standing up and clapping for a minute. Your hands and arms get tired no matter what kind of shape you’re in. The longest standing ovation was when prime minister Netanyahu condemned American demonstrators outside of the capital building for demonstrating against his policy. And 400 members of Congress, each one of whom took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution -- which includes the First Amendment which is the essence of freedom of speech -- applauded him. That’s where we are today.

12:54 Judge Napolitano: Here’s a foreign agent speaking to the United States Congress, prime minister Netanyahu on July 24th. [screed aimed at protesters follows: “You have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.”]

12:19 Ambassador Charles W. Freeman: “Pretty clear that the Useful Idiots were the members of Congress.”

Judge Napolitano: “Nicely put. I have a number of friends that were in that demonstration including regular contributors to this show, some that you know. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Anya Parmpyl, none of whom were paid anything by the Iranian government. This is a total fabrication on his part. It was shameful that the members of Congress chose loyalty to a genocidal maniac over their fidelity to the constitution. How dangerous a position is Israel in today? About to pick a fight with Hezbollah. About to pick a fight with Iran.”

13:04 Charles W. Freeman: “I think it shows every sign of imploding. It has alienated its foreign partners and friends. The protests are part of a general move toward very negative views towards Israel in response to its behavior. The majority of polls show that a majority of Americans do not believe that the United States should come to Israel’s defense. There are partisan differences there. For Republicans there is a slight majority in favor. For Democrats mostly opposed. And Independents somewhere in the middle. So the foreign support for Israel that has been essential to Israel’s existence is attenuating domestically. Israel has never been so divided. A couple of years ago Mr Netanyahu in order to save his bacon from being in jail for corruption moved to remove the independence of the Israeli judiciary. That set off massive protests. October 7 and the hostage taking has led to very correct charges from the hostage families that Mr Netanyahu is not interested really in recovering them. It has come out that the Israeli armed forces were responsible for almost half of the deaths on October 7, not just Hamas. The ultra orthodox in Israel have been told that they’re to be conscripted. They’re protesting, some of them saying they’d rather die than go into the army. The generals in the Israeli army have condemned their own prime minister for lacking his strategy and running a pointless war in Gaza. They want a ceasefire. He won’t give it to them."

14:55 “He has just assassinated the chief leader on the Hamas side with whom he was allegedly negotiating a hostage release. You don’t assassinate The Negotiator on the other side of the table if you’re serious about negotiating. And he clearly isn’t. And now he’s trying to produce a wider war and that, too, is dividing Israelis. There are, of course, a couple of hundred thousand Israelis who’ve been displaced from their homes by the turmoil that has ensued since October 7. Both Hezbollah and Hamas fighters have made parts of Israel unsafe. And so we have an economy in Israel that is down by about a third the GDP. There are many thousands of small businesses that have closed. The military on the ground are saying that they're exhausted. They're rung out. We have conscientious objectors appearing for the first time in significant numbers, and probably five or 600,000 israelis have emigrated out of whatever, you know, either because they in good conscience can't be part of what's going on or because they fear for their safety."

16:16 "There are about two million Israelis who have second passports and we don't know what they're going to do. This is not a country that is in any kind of good shape. And Mr Netanyahu doesn't have any path apparently out of the abyss that he has led his country into."

Judge Napolitano: Ambassador: your career is in the area of diplomacy, the peaceful relationship between nations. Has the United States, does the United States ever say "No" to Israel?

Charles W. Freeman:We haven't done so for a very long time. You have to go back to George H W Bush and Jim Baker to find an example of the United States States really using the leverage that we have on Israel. Israel can't do very much of anything without our support. And we have given them a blank check. And if you lecture them sternly about their behavior but there is no consequence whatsoever for their continuing it, you're just wasting words. There is no diplomacy towards Israel. Diplomacy is getting the other party to see that what you want them to do is in their interest. Israel resolutely resists any attention to American interests other than its own."

17:51 Judge Napolitano: "Does the United States enjoy any military, geopolitical, diplomatic benefit to its obeisance to Israel?

Charles W. Freeman:We may have done so during the Cold War to some extent. But the cold war is long over. Israel is basically an albatross around our necks. The opprobrium that it has generated through its behavior, including most recenty this disgusting spectacle of authorizing the providing of sodomy, the sodomization of Palestinian prisoners and actually a livestream show of a rape for the benefit of the Minister of National Security, Itamir ben Gavir. This has just spilled over to us. Our reputation has nose dived along with Israel's. Our influence has taken a huge hit. And Israel in the Defense area basically receives gifts from us. It does useful research and development work. But that could, in my view, just as easily be done in New Jersey. It doesn't have to be done in Israel."

19:14 Judge Napolitano: Switching gears, Ambassador, and prevailing upon your experience in the Department of Defense, of what value as you see it ws the short-lived invasion of Kursk by a crack team of Ukrainian soldiers? And you can add to that, of what value is flying 40-year old, one-seater F-16s over Kiev?

Charles W. Freeman: Well, the incursion into Kursk basically had political purposes rather than military. Although there may have been an effort to divert Russian attention from the Donetsk front in which case it didn't really succeed. Politically, I think Mr Zelenski and Company were trying to boost Ukrainian morale which is very low given all the losses Ukraine has taken. And I think he was trying to show his American and European backers that he could still punish Russia, hurt Russia, which is the major objective of this war from the Western point of view. It's not about saving Ukraine. It's about isolating and weakening Russia. And that hasn't succeeded. So this was, I think, an act of desperation mostly for political effect. I don't know whether these forces, I have not heard whether these forces are still even alive. And they're going to have a hard time. You always take more losses on the battlefield when you attack than you do when you defend and they have walked right into a Russian trap, in my view."

21:06 "The F-16s are, you know, sort of a magic talisman that we have waved for a long time. You know they're going to -- this is like the -- you know we were going to send Abrams tanks and that was going to turn the battefield over to us and it didn't happen. And they didn't work and now we're going to see whether F-16s can survive the world's most effective anti-aircraft missile system which the Russians have developed. And my guess is this is going to prove just as empty a gesture as the transfer of the Abrams was."

Judge Napolitano: "How much longer do you think Ukraine can last? I'm going to guess -- and of course my field is not military or defense -- at least until election day."

Charles W. Freeman: "I think that's a very good guess. What I note is that Mr Kuleba the foreign minister has been to Beijing and Mr Zelinsky who once said that he didn't want, he made it illegal to talk to the Russians, now says that the Russians have to be at the table, that if there is a peace conference Mr Kuleba said well, if they negotiate in good faith, we were ready to negotiate. Mr Putin on his part had said he wouldn't talk to Zelinski but he seems now to have backtracked from that. So I think there's some realism in the air on both sides. And both appealing, really, to the Chinese to help them find a path forward. And I should also mention that the prime minister of Hungary, now the six-month president of the European Union, Victor Orban, has made a valiant effort to jump start some kind of diplomatic dialogue and produce the possibility of a negotiated resolution to this war. For that he has been castigated by us and some Europeans supported by others. But you know there's clearly an effort being made in Ukraine, in Russia, internationally to find a basis for bringing this war to an end through a negotiation which all wars have to end. This one is overdue for ending in my view."

23:29 Judge Napolitano: "To take us back to Israel . . ."