Judging Freedom - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson: Can Ukraine Survive as a Country?

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson: Can Ukraine Survive as a Country?See 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 Thursday, October 31st, 2024. My dear friend, Colonel Larry Wilkerson joins us now. Colonel, a pleasure as always. I ultimately want to ask you if Ukraine can survive as a country, but first there's a couple of issues about Israel that I want to pick your brain on and then we'll lead up to the latest in Ukraine. Do we still not know if Israel caused any material damage when it supposedly retaliated against Iran using missiles fired from planes that flew over Jordan and over Iraqi airspace and then fired them at supposedly Iran's military facilities? This has been the most interesting enterprise for me, exploring the answers to that question,

as well as other things associated with it. First of all, let's take the King of Jordan. I'm told that he refused overflight rights only to be violated. No one even said, we're going to fly over your country. They flew over his country. So he was put in a dilemma. He either had to admit that he had been absolutely overruled by the empire and by Israel, or that he'd given permission. So after a little debate, he decided he would admit he'd given permission, which he never did. In fact, he fought it, as you might imagine. I mean, let's face it, his previous ruler,

ruler of Jordan, didn't even join in the early invasion of Iran in 1990-91 because he knew how it would cause him so many problems. So he, Iraq, I mean, he was an odd man out in that. But George H.W. Bush understood it, and so let him get away with it, or let him do it, and didn't censure him too badly. The other things I've been mystified by, first of all, the Israeli propaganda machine is the most powerful propaganda machine vis-a-vis us, not vis-a-vis other countries in the world. And so they have launched full out to make it look as if this was a successful strike. Iran has no such propaganda machine that could stand up and even, you know,

in the ring and duke it out with Israel, but they have put some things out. As best as I can find out from contacts on the ground in Iran, contacts on the ground in other countries, contacts I trust within various intelligence entities, there was not a lot of damage done. And Israel is hyping it preposterously. And one of the reasons that they are talking about a follow-on strike with lots more effort is because they didn't do a whole lot of damage and they haven't wowed Iran sufficiently enough to get them to come back in a major way. Even though Iran is still debating within its security circles as to what the response should be,

I think at this point, the response is, no, we kind of won this one, so let's let it rest. We do not want a war with the United States. Is King Abdullah a CIA asset or tool, the King of Jordan? I wouldn't go that far. I would say that his intelligence is locked in with the CIA and they with him. But there have been some past examples of real tension there. And there have been past examples of tensions between the leadership in Washington and the leadership in Amman.

And I think this is one of them. And this just might be the one that pushes the king over the hurdle. He may now be against everything that Israel wants to do. I don't know. There's a lot riding on it for him, perhaps his country. Here's another, if I may, $64,000 question, Colonel. Who or what gave permission for the Israeli planes to fly over Iraq? No one, I'm told. Not a soul. In fact, the prime minister there is livid, as you might imagine. But what can he do? He can sneak up on us,

perhaps, in other venues and at other times. But what can he do? I mean, let's face it, we're still ruling Iraq for all intents and purposes, particularly for external security, and to a certain degree for internal security. And so he's kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. Our buddy Scott Ritter, with whom you and I happily, along with Dennis Fritz and others, spent Sunday talking to a few hundred people at a restaurant in New York City, opined that the United States gave Israel permission to fly over Iraq as if the United States were still running it back, Iraq, going back to the Jerry Bremmer days. You remember all that.

Bingo. I think that's a good way of putting it. And I think from what I heard about the controversy in Amman, same thing with Jordan. We just said, I don't care what the king said, overflown. And then he had a choice, defy the United States and announce the truth or go along and say he had gone along. Would anybody shoot the IDF planes down because they invaded sovereign airspace? Well, there's another thing you've got.

You cross the ADS, the Air Defense Identification Zone of another state, you are subject to being shot down. Normally, countries don't do that. They just issue warnings and give you a bad rep. Iraq really doesn't have the capacity to do it in a way that would be anything other than suicide for them. So they're not going to do it. Alistair Crook's sources inform him that the IDF pilots confronted some sort of electronic or digital interference, perhaps some radar system with which they were unfamiliar as they approached Tehran, and some of them turned around, and a second and third wave that had been planned to follow this first one

with the pilots in it was immediately terminated before it even got off the ground. Does that make sense to you? So might that have been whatever the Kremlin sent over in the past couple of months? That's one bit of information that I've gotten that I think from enough sources to where I think it's probably pretty solid. And that tells you something. These gung-ho top gun pilots in their F-35s and F-15ZR and so forth, they're not going in.

And I think their plan was to go in. Their plan was to suppress the enemy air defenses, C, we call it, and then to go in with some planes and attack with those planes at a shorter range and therefore greater accuracy. And they didn't do it. And they didn't do it because they were mystified

by what they were seeing on their screens and they were afraid they were going to get shot down. And so they didn't go in. And the only thing I can say is the Russians have been there, and they've made the Iranians fairly formidable. I won't play you this clip because it's two minutes long, it's interminable, and his voice is so raspy. But former President Clinton, this is hard to believe, campaigning in Michigan for Vice President Harris, addressing Arab and Muslim Americans purported to justify the behavior of the IDF in Gaza. Does this surprise you?

Please take my word for it that he did. If you insist on playing this thing, we'll play it for you, but it will bore you to death. He's just not. I watched it. I watched it. I have a couple of algorithms that show me Clinton. I detest Bill Clinton. I think he did more to damage the security of the United States than any president, including my own George W. Bush.

And so I watch what he says and what he does. I watch those four-hour monologues he has where he's trying to justify everything he did from Monica Lewinsky to Serbia. He is a first-class rascal. And the fact that he has this prolific political skill makes it even deeper and more heinous. I despise the man. Well, I can understand how you feel about him, but I can't understand, I don't want to get into the politics, but you have to comment on this. I can't understand why he thought that was going to win votes for Vice President Harris, nor can I understand why the Harris campaign would send him to Michigan, knowing that he and his wife are committed to the Zionist cause, even its most extreme elements. Bought him the presidency, yeah, and he pardoned their most heinous criminal, Mark Rich, in the

last ignominious act of his second term. I can only conclude that, like Joe Biden, whom I'm told now is motivated more by his hatred of Barack Obama than anything in the national security picture confronted in this country, is something with Bill Clinton too, and that Bill Clinton was actually trying to undermine their possibilities. Wow. Is the IDF still trying to invade southern Lebanon, notwithstanding the catastrophic losses that they've suffered in the past week, which we only know about from leaks, because the Israeli government will never acknowledge casualties, whether it's death or serious injuries? I think they must be truly in a quandary. They can't decide whether to go on and lose more people and more people or stop and lose face or come up with some cockamamie scheme, which is their usual ploy that describes why they're doing what they're doing, retreating, moving to the left, moving to the right, whatever,

going only to bombing and bombing the bejesus out of everything in Lebanon. I don't know what they'll do, but I do know that they're taking it on the chin right now, and they're taking it very, very badly. Do you have a handle on the now very public dispute between Defense Minister Gallant and Prime Minister Netanyahu, or do we even care since Gallant is a committed perpetrator of genocide as much as Netanyahu is? The latter for me, but I do think it could cause some real problems in the command relationship between the IDF and Netanyahu in his cabinet. And even unseat Netanyahu, if it becomes apparent to those in his cabinet who are really rigid right wingers like Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, that things are going to fall apart, that we'd have an entirely different situation where they would pick someone to be Bibi's replacement, if you will, who's even worse than Bibi, not in the eyes of the Israeli people, which they think would help them, but certainly in terms of what he wants to do to the Palestinians,

because there are plenty of people like that around to be selected and put in place. All that's going to do, though, I think, is deepen and widen Israel's straits. They're in dire straits right now. I think there's a real possibility that we're going to see a massive retreat eventually. It'll be covered by massive propaganda, of course, and they'll say this, they'll say that, but they're going to give up on Lebanon, and they're probably going to have to give up on their idea of colonizing northern Gaza right away or within the next six months or so. I don't think they're going to be able to do that. Hamas is showing too much of a residual presence. Colonel, switching over to Ukraine, does the West, either with or without President Zelensky, have a plan B for after November 6th?

I think it is to float in a cruise ship down the Dnieper and wave at the Russians as they're wading into the river. I mean, that's... They're pretty close to wading into the river. We know that. I suggest their scouts are already doing that. This is just becoming preposterous. And I was told today by good sources that what you have happening in the ranks of the Ukrainian military, such as it is, what's left of it, the remnants, is a pregnancy that's about to happen. And what I mean by that is everybody's going to run.

Everybody's just going to abandon their weapon, abandon their foxhole, abandon their position and run, either go forward and surrender with a white flag or whatever, or go backwards and try to find their families. This is really a bad situation, and we've created it. We've created it, and we're sitting around with our nato allies acting as if it doesn't exist and what will become of the last tranche of 400 million that uh defense secretary uh austin announced he was bringing which i understand has not yet arrived um yeah uh two weeks ago by the way, how did they get cash there?

Did they simply wire it from An American bank or from the U.S. Treasury To a Kiev bank? That would be the way you would think But I'll tell you how we got it to Iraq We put it in pallets And put a forklift on a C-130 Or a C-141

Flew it over to Bagram Air Force Base And off-lift lifted the pallets. I saw some of them. How much cash was on those pallets? $16 billion. What the heck does $16 billion look like in cash? It's a lot. It's a lot.

My budget judge, my budget officer came into my office, an old army guy, had been in OMB, had been in the comptroller's office in the DOD, moved over to state, was our head budget guy. He came into my office. He closed the door and he said, are we alone, chief? I said, yeah, we're alone, me and you. He said, we're going to jail. We're going to jail. And then he described to me how we'd sent that money over and how we had already within 48 hours lost track of half of it. Wow.

Unbelievable. And that was added to the $9 billion that was residual in the U.N. Oil for Food Program, which disappeared too. Do you conclude from that sordid affair that the American government is doing the same with Kiev, literally using an airplane to deliver greenbacks? I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised at all. Now, at this late stage, I dare say much of this is a promise that will be unfulfilled because we understand we're dumping money down a rattle. So I don't know that that's happening right now. We may have made promises about money and announced them publicly, but it will never be there. So the person largely responsible for all of this has a new cause, and it's suppression of speech. I don't know if she

still has any kind of a hand in what happens in the war because she's now Jeff Sachs's colleague. He's going to kill me for calling her his colleague, but she's on the faculty of Columbia University, Victoria Nuland. Listen to this. She's rambling, but the he to whom she refers at the beginning of this clip, Colonel, is President Vladimir Putin. Chris, number 13. He's he's at it again. This time he's not even trying to hide his his hand and he has far more sophisticated tools.

You know, his A.I. is better so he can make these fake videos. He has done things like spend 10 million dollars trying to buy American influencers and get them parroting his lines and not even know it's happening. But he's also got a brand new, very, very powerful tool, which is Elon Musk and X. You know, in 2020, the social media companies worked hard with the U.S. government to try to do content moderation, to try to catch this stuff as it was happening. But this time we have Elon Musk talking directly to the Kremlin and ensuring that every time the Russians put out something like this, it gets five million views on X before anybody can catch it. So it's it's quite dangerous, although I do think the American electorate has gotten more sophisticated and more savvy about this stuff. Once the number three person in the State Department, did you hear that catch that

phrase content moderation, otherwise known as censorship of free speech? Yes. And what she is saying, in essence, is I want you to vote for Kamala Harris because I've looked at the two candidates and I think I'll do best under Kamala than I will under Donald. And so I'm going to make all these stories up about Vladimir Putin that'll make you hate anyone associated with Donald Trump. And I'm not saying that there aren't some shenanigans going on. There are, but I will guarantee you on my father and mother's grave that those shenanigans are being duplicated by Bill Burns and the CIA and a host of other

intelligence agencies. Was she in the State Department when you and Colin Powell ran it? I'm sorry? Was Mrs. Newland in the State Department when you and Colin Powell ran it? No, no. Had she been there, she would have been hung. All right. Because she has survived and thrived under administrations of both parties. She worked for Dick Cheney at one point. That's the trademark of a neoconservative. A really good neoconservative

just bounces back and forth as the political winds blow. Got it. Do we have an answer on North Korea? Is this just the gross exaggeration of a longstanding, decades-long practice of North Koreans training inside Russia, just inside their common border, which is probably a thousand miles, maybe more from Ukraine, or are North Korean soldiers in Ukraine, in Russia, fighting with Russians about to fight with them? In the beginning, as it were, I think it was exactly what you described. It was a routine training exercise for the North Koreans under the new agreement between Pyongyang and Moscow. Now, I think what's happened, though, is Putin has good intelligence. In fact, I would say Putin

rivals or surpasses Mossad. The NKVD is probably one of the best in the world. They might be ruthless, but they're really good. And I think he got the intelligence on what the South Korean government was planning on doing and how successful the United States had been in its entreaties with that government to come in and help more. It's already helping massively. It's made Poland, for example, the number one military power in NATO now, as far as I'm concerned, with all the sales of weapons to Poland. So South Korea is making tons of money off this. And I think Putin got that. And so he said, OK, I'll up you one.

And he's now making motions towards sending the North Koreans somewhere in the vicinity of Ukraine. And so we're in a tick for tat posture. Does no coco equal so-co? If North Korea shows up on the Russian side, will South Korea ipso facto show up on the Ukrainian side? Probably so, and they're in F-16s, and they're good pilots and are flying out of Poland. Wow.

These are F-16s that we built and sold them? Yes, and this is how we make so much money. When Lockheed's lines go fallow, they just gin up Poland or they gin up some other country and some other alliance. This is why we expanded NATO. And then their lines perk up again and they sell F-16s, F-15s, and other things to other countries. Larry Johnson, one of our colleagues, reports on videos he has seen, which he maintains show Ukrainian military and Ukrainian troops shelling Ukrainian civilians trying to escape to Russia. Do you know anything about this, Colonel? No, I've heard the reports, and it wouldn't surprise me, because if we go back to the beginning, and go back before 2014, and we go back to some of the shenanigans that were going on,

I shouldn't call them that, they were bloody, in Ukraine, that's what was happening. You had Ukrainians of one ilk fighting Ukrainians of Russian ilk, and you had them killing each other. And now we're back to doing that again. Here's Secretary Austin. I'm back two topics ago on the North Korean presence. Cut number 11. We're closely tracking the unprecedented level of direct military cooperation between Russia and the DPRK. In our meetings today, we shared our deep concerns about the deployment of DPRK troops to Russia. We also discussed how we're going to work together with our allies and partners to respond to this dangerous and destabilizing escalation.

The evidence now suggests that North Korea has sent around 10,000 soldiers to train in eastern Russia. And some of these DPRK troops have already moved closer to Ukraine. And we're seeing them outfitted with Russian uniforms and provided with Russian equipment. And I am increasingly concerned that the Kremlin plans to use these North Korean soldiers to support Russia's combat operations in Russia's Kursk region near the border with Ukraine. Now, let's just, let's parse that a moment. How in the world would you fall for the propaganda of outfitting them in Russian uniforms? That's exactly what I was going to ask you.

Can the satellites see- North Koreans look like Russians? I mean, can the satellites see the facial structure of a soldier in a uniform and determine whether that human being is Russian or North Korean? Absolutely. Not only are you looking at five foot two people out there instead of five, eight to six, four people out there, you're looking at people with very different facial characteristics. It doesn't take me. I used to look at North Koreans judge on a basketball court,

north of Pyongyang, and I could see the dental work in their mouths. So do you believe him when he says Intel claims the North Koreans are wearing Russian uniforms? Well, if they suddenly ran out of their own, but I can't believe that. They're the most pampered, taken care of group of people in North Korea. So I can't believe they didn't come to Russia with uniforms. And when you're talking about cold weather, the North Koreans could teach the Russians something about it. So it doesn't make any sense. It looks to me like they're making a lot of this up as they go along. Just to end with this, because it's so absurd, while you and Scott Ritter and Dennis Fritz and others and I were on the east side of Manhattan addressing a rally for peace on Sunday afternoon, a madman was on the west side of Manhattan addressing 25,000 people at Madison Square Garden.

Rudy Giuliano. You got it. Here's what he said. Cut number four. They are our best friend. I worked for Ronald Reagan for eight years. Ronald Reagan said, we have to be there for Israel always

because they are always there for us. Hamas is not there for us. Iran is not there for us. They want to kill us. And the Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old. They won't let a Palestinian in Jordan. They won't let a Palestinian in Egypt and Harris wants to bring them to you They may have good people I'm sorry. I don't take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two I'm on the side of Israel You're on the side of Israel. You're on the side of Israel. Donald Trump's on the side of Israel.

And they're on the side of the terrorists. Wow. Iran wants to kill us. Babies are taught to kill Americans. Israel has been there, in air quotes, for us. They've been there for us, all right. Machine gunning our sailors in the water in the eastern Mediterranean off USS Liberty. They've been there for us in 73 when they uploaded a nuclear weapon. They've always been there for us. And Ronald Reagan said, and Ronald Reagan was serious about this,

I am selling AWACS and F-15s to Saudi Arabia, and you can tell Israel to go to hell. Wow. Colonel, thank you very much. Thanks for your candor and thanks for your insight. And if I may, thanks for your friendship. It was a joy to be with you last Sunday. I hope I didn't overstep

my role as a moderator by sneaking up behind you in front of the whole audience and kissing you on the top of your head. That will be a moment, Judge. I will remember to my grave. Thank you, Colonel.

Thanks for everything. Thank you, Colonel. Thanks for everything. I hope you can visit with us again. I feel heavily flattered. Thank you. Dennis Ritz was on earlier this week and was a fan hit. I thought I would report that to you. Dennis is a good man.

Yes, he is. Thank you, Colonel. I hope we can see you again next week. Okay. Take care. Sure. Coming up at 5.30 this afternoon,, 530 Eastern, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at four o'clock tomorrow, Friday, the Intelligence Community Roundtable. Look at that. Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Tweedledee and Tweedledum is the title of my column this week. My family is angry at me because I won't tell them for whom I'm voting

for president. In my column, I tell readers for whom I'm not voting and why. You can get it at judgenap.com. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.