Judging Freedom - Can Leaks Prevent More War in Ukraine or Taiwan_ Ray McGovern

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. hi everyone judge andrew napolitano here with judging freedom today is monday april 10 2023 it's about 11 35 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, a belated Happy Easter to you and welcome back to the program. I want to begin by discussing, of course, the huge news over the weekend, and that's the leaks of these classified documents revealing either an effort to doctor the truth about Ukraine or revealing the truth about Ukraine. As I understand it, these documents were leaked weeks ago, but they became known, some became known early last week, some became known Friday evening. So educate us first about what was leaked.

Then we'll talk about how it was leaked. Then we'll talk about what good can come from a leak like this. Well, Judge, we're in the preliminary stages of judging, you know, exactly how this happened. It certainly doesn't speak well for the intelligence community to learn a month later that their deepest, darkest secrets are available online, for God's sake. Anyhow, there are all kinds of data in these leaks. Most of them show that people have been lying. I mean, like U.S. people, other people. The initial leak, I have a little tweet that I did on the initial leak. It talked about kill ratios, okay?

What's a kill ratio, Ray? It is, you know, how many Ukrainians were killed vis-a-vis how many Russians were killed. And it says that it was 71,500 Ukrainians and only 16,000 to 17,500 Russians. Now, those figures are low, but from what the experts tell me, like Doug McGregor, the ratio, the proportion is about right. In other words, Ukrainians are really taking it bad. The Russians, not so much. You started out by saying that these documents reveal that people have been lying. Can we identify these people? Are we talking about the highest-ranking American people, Secretary of State Blinken, Secretary of Defense Austin,

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley? Gosh, Judge, I hear a knock at my door here. The Bureau is listening to us here. You know, I'm shocked. Is this another Pentagon Papers? Does this reveal that the American government, whether it's in the name of those three people or not, has materially misled the public about the state of affairs, the state of military and intelligence affairs in Ukraine? I would say yes, Judge. Whether this was the intention or not, the data is so much and so official that it shows that there is a Vietnam deja vu here. Now, let me explain. Coincidentally, we are giving Daniel Ellsberg the Sam Adams Award for Integrity tomorrow up at his place there in Berkeley. Now, during Vietnam, President, well, he thought he was President, Westmoreland, the general there, was lying to his teeth with respect to how many enemy underarms there were in South Vietnam. He put an artificial limit on it. It couldn't be more than 299,000 Viet Cong underarms.

My friend, Sam Adams, who came into the agency the same day I did in 1963, found out that there were between 500 and 600,000 Vietnamese under arms in the South insurgents, okay? Now, Adams, even though he got all other intelligence agencies to agree with him in Washington, the Army would not, of course, and Westmoreland said, no, that's wrong, and the head of the CIA, Richard Holmes, at the time, cowardly said, Sam, we can't go with your accurate numbers because my job is to protect the agency. And I can't do that if we get involved in a pissing match with the U.S. Army during a time of war. Sorry, Sam. That was August, September 1967. What happened? Tet, the offensive, the Viet Cong offensive, at the end of January, beginning of February the

next year, so 1968, they attacked every hamlet, village, town, city in South Vietnam with how many? 600,000. Okay. So the denouement came here. Oh, what's going on here? How'd they do that? It became clear that Sam Adams was right and that Westmoreland was being deceptive. Now, Westmoreland at the same time was asking LBJ, President Johnson, for 206,000 more troops to be put into Vietnam and to widen the war into Cambodia, into Laos, into North Vietnam, up to the Chinese border, and maybe beyond. That was his request. He was asking, talking to Congress, it was all very, very secret. Okay, guess what happened? Somebody leaked that request. No. Dan Ellsberg told me for the longest time, he didn't know I did this.

But the request, the leak came on the 10th of March, 1968. Okay. The leak said Westmoreland wants 206,000 more troops in South Vietnam, and this is causing dissension among the top-level officials in the Pentagon. Now, when Dan Ellsberg saw that, he said, he told me, he said, look, Ray, when I saw that, I said, somebody had the guts to leak that. I'm going to leak the Sam Adams figures and show that Adams was right, that Westmoreland was lying through his teeth. I'm going to give him the estimate that Dick Helms

turned down, and he did. Neil Sheehan published that on the 19th of March. So here's the sequence. The leak, 10 March, Ellsberg's second leak, 19th of March. On the 25th of March, Ellsberg, second leak, 19th of March. On the 25th of March, Johnson told a close group of people, he said, you know, these leaks have really hurt us. We can't go on here. I'm not going to run for president anymore, and we're going to have to trim our sails. Whoa, 25th, and then the 31st, of course,

he got out on TV and said, I'm not running for president anymore. So. Okay. Bring, bring all of this up to the present, Ray. Well, now if these leaks show that General, General Milley and Secretary of Defense Boston are lying by saying the Russians are being slaughtered and the Ukraine can mount a counteroffensive this spring, well, it's all going to come home to roost because that ain't the case. The Russians are advancing. And sooner or later, the denouement is going to come. I've been saying another month or so, I think Doug McGregor says the same thing, when the Russian military will say, okay, look, are you going to give up now? Because we can go all the way to the Dnepr River and we will if you don't sit down and talk to us and carve out the best deal that you can. So it's all very relevant, it seems to me. Cui Bono, the leaks benefit those who want to get the truth out and to say, look, this is a fool's errand.

If we escalate still further, we're not going to win. And we do run the risk of some nuclear war. So my my hat is off to the leaker. Look, Ellsberg would have gone to jail if the FBI hadn't raided his psychiatrist's office and a courageous federal judge threw the indictment out. Now, maybe somebody would have pardoned him. I don't know. And whoever this leaker is probably has a long criminal litigation ahead of him or her. But the leaker is an American hero to show the American public and the world, correct me if I'm wrong, Ray, that we are being lied to by the government, that the government is wasting money knowing it's being wasted, and Ukrainians are

being slaughtered, and we need to know about it. Am I right or am I wrong? Well, let me just say that the leaker, he or she, has already been placed the nomination for the next Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence, this year's award. In what format was this data? It appeared as though it was on pages, pieces of paper that had been folded and then photographed. That's what it looked like. So is this kind of stuff laying around in a conference room? Is it on a secret link that you have to have a series of passcodes to get into? And then if you have these passcodes legally, can you download it and print it?

Can your children see it on your dining room table? If you have these passcodes, tell us how this works. Well, you're right, except for the last part here. You don't print it out, okay? because that leaves a trail in your computer. What you do is you find it or you see it on your desk and you photograph it, okay? That leaves no trace. They can't figure out, you know, what kind of photograph this? I don't think. And so that's why it's all folded. Somebody folded it in quarters and put it in their shirt or in their bra or whatever and took it out. So it's very clever. This person knew what he was doing or she. Now, let me just comment on a little bit of irony here. In the Vietnam example, I think I mentioned that Dan Ellsberg was pulling his hair. I wonder who did that first leak, that gutsy guy that said Westmoreland wants 206,000 more troops.

Leaking that to the New York Times on March the 10th, 1968. Man, that got me to make my first leak, says Dan. Who was it? He found out. You know who it was? It was Gelb. Wasn't Gelb in the government at the time? Yeah, Gelb was Assistant Secretary of Defense, for God's sake. So the parallel, you know, Gelb had that piece of paper on his desk, but he didn't have to sort of photograph it. He just take it and give it to Neil Sheehan and Rick Smith at the

New York Times, which he did. No. Gelb, of course, was the guy that McNamara placed in charge of collating the Pentagon Papers. Gelb himself is the leaker of this monumental leak, which stopped the widening of the war. And then he became a very, very distinguished president of the Council on Foreign Relations. And until his death, nobody knew that he leaked the first leak. And even though he was in charge of the Pentagon Papers, of course, he criticized, oh, who would he?

Have you had a chance to look at the documents? No, not you mean these most recent documents? Yes. No, I've seen a lot of reporting on it. I've seen some exemplars of the type. Can you form a judgment of the level of persons in the government who would have had the top secret no foreign, and tell us what no foreign means, security clearance in order legally to have obtained that. So in other words, what is the universe of people who could have leaked it? But first tell us top secret no foreign.

Top secret is handled in a different channel. So this person would have had access to top secret, no foreign? Top secret is handled in a different channel. So this person would have had access to top secret material. No foreign means that it is not to be shared with foreign intelligence agencies. It's U.S. You keep it in the U.S. You don't let anybody else know. So it's got to be from the inner sanctum, I think, of the Pentagon. And it had to be somebody who had these very high secret access permissions. Of course, it could be somebody at a lower level who cleans up after the generals, you know, who puts the stuff away and looked at this and said, my God, the Americans need to know about this, took out his little camera. So it's hard to know. What they should know is who had access to these

rooms where these documents were kept. And unfortunately for the FBI, there are probably several rooms. The Pentagon is not real good about keeping good custody over such sensitive documents. Do the documents reveal the names of the sources of data that go into the documents? In other words, are there Ukrainian intel, Russian intel, secretly in the employ of the CIA? I'm sure the short answer to that is yes, but if so, are those human beings involved in getting us this data, and are they identified? They're not identified, as far as I know, but what's dangerous here is that some sources are revealed. For example, intercepted communications. There's a separate law against that, of course.

This is very sensitive information. If we are listening to conversations in the Russian Ministry of Defense, my God, that's a bad, bad leak for intelligence collection. It's probably a good leak for American people who don't want another wider war. So the parallel between Vietnam and now, if I'm right, you know, who knows? But the hypothesis is that somebody wanted to expose just the facts, just like Les Gelb and Dan Ellsworth did, and let the Americans decide, do we really want to stay in here, or is this time to cut and make the best deal that we can? Is it probable that President Putin's people have scoured these documents from one end to the other already?

Oh, sure. I'm sure they've read them more thoroughly than I've had a chance to. But, you know, they won't get, well, yes, they will get insights into what our collection capabilities are, and that's the downside, you know, that shouldn't happen. But I think that the people who released this, assuming it was more than one person, you know, they had the idea that we ought to go big, release as much as we can to hide the fact that our real aim is not to widen this war, but to tell the American people, look, you've been had, you've been lied to. These guys are lying just to the truth, just as Easter, day after a three-day holiday, three days after the larger of the two leaks, the one that came out on Good Friday afternoon or Good Friday evening, what would the CIA have said to him this morning? Is there a face-saving?

Is there, look, we've got to deal with this. This stuff is accurate. We have to tell the truth. What kind of a conversation would William Burns have with Jake Sullivan or if the president is awake and interested with the president himself? Well, back in the day, we would brief the president on Saturday. So this would be Saturday and then catching up this morning. What he would be told, if I'm correct, is, look, we have the FBI looking into this. We're going to try to find out what this is. And we're preparing our PR story.

We have the New York Times coming in this afternoon. We're going to talk to them. We'll figure out how we kind of suppress the real significance of this. So hang on. We'll give you a briefing tomorrow on the PR effort as to how we're going to handle this. All right. You're William Burns, and I'm Joe Biden. Yeah, but, Bill, is this stuff true? Have we been lying to the American people?

I've been dying to role play with you in this environment. Mr. President, you know, I'm supposed to be titular head of the intelligence community together with April Haynes. But she's in charge of people like the Pentagon intelligence folks. And, you know, I don't know what they've been. You know, the Pentagon intelligence, I can't control what they say. And I think they may have been stretching the truth a little bit, Mr. President. But don't quote me on that, Mr. President, because I want to be part of the team. That's the problem, okay? If you're the chief intelligence advisor to the president, you're standing on your own two feet, call a spade a spade. If people are lying, you tell the president directly, and you don't fear the consequences because you're a self-made person.

You can go somewhere else. You're not going to be on the street with your hat out. So some human beings, Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, one of those other things, those three-letter words that only you and your end of the world know what they mean, gathered this information. And somebody assembled it on these documents and it defied what was being stated publicly. And now the defiers and their boss, the president, know about it. And the president has said nothing and the defiers have said nothing. Yes, you're quite correct, Ray. They have attempted to downplay it through their acolytes, their vassals in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times,

and the Washington Post. But nobody has stood up and said, this is true. We've been lying. We've been wrong. Here's what we're doing from now on. Is it fanciful for me to expect that that would happen? No, Judge.

And I think there's a ray of light here. The New York Times could have suppressed this information. I mean, it was lying around. They could have said this is phony, this is crazy. But they chose to put it on their front page. The New York Times front page always has dominated. We'll get here, here by that, and then here the children from the Russians kidnapped right in the middle of the thing right here. It's always dominated by these terrible stories about what the Russians are doing.

But, you know, now they're faced up to it. And I think, this is speculation, I think that there are a lot of people in the Pentagon at Ellsworth who say this is a fool's errand. I mean, I have 10 kids, let's say. I don't want them to be fried in a nuclear war. The American people are being lied to. Let's get this stuff out. Now, what I say here is that the New York Times did have the option of saying, look, you know, we're going to suppress this as they have suppressed the information. What's today? Okay.

It's been since May 6, 2020, that the New York Times has suppressed the information that the head of the cyber firm looking into those emails from the DNC, he testified under oath that there's no evidence of any exfiltration. It was a leak on a thumb drive. Okay, that was, the testimony was December 5, 2017. It was suppressed and finally the New York Times and other media got it on May 10, 2020. Now it's what, April 10, 2023? People still don't know that story, and it gives the lie in proven sworn testimony that Russiagate was a fraud, okay? So if the New York Times could do that so well with that key piece of information, they had the option of trying to suppress this too. So I think that a lot of people say, well, let's let the times deal with this, and maybe we can stop the president and those idiots today as advising him. And I use that word advisingly as advising the, you know, Jacob Sullivan and Tony Blinken. Maybe they'll be restrained when people know the truth that

they've been lying through their teeth. Wow. Kill ratio, 71 ukrainian soldiers to 16 000 russians we never ever ever heard that out of the mouth of any american official if anything they wanted us to believe without using precise numbers that it was the reverse uh ray McGovern, always a pleasure, my dear man. No matter what we're talking about, the people watching this now and emailing us from all over the world as you have commented are deeply appreciative of your courage

and your intellectual honesty as we discuss these delicate issues. We'll have you back again soon. Thank you so much, my friend. Thank you, Judge. More as we get it delicate issues. We'll have you back again soon. Thank you so much, my friend. Thank you, Judge. More as we get it, my dear friends. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.