Judging Freedom - Conversation with former CIA Officer Phil Giraldi

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

A Conversation with former CIA Officer Phil GiraldiSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here, and welcome to Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, March 2nd, Ash Wednesday, 2022. And my guest is the inimitable Phil Girardi. Many of you watching and listening now know who Phil is. He is a former Army intelligence and CIA case officer for 20 years. He's a graduate with honors of the University of Chicago, and he has a master's and PhD on the excesses of the government today,

particularly with respect to foreign affairs, I thought it appropriate that we have this conversation, which I have longed to have with my fellow Italian-American from New Jersey, that we have this conversation now in light of the President's speech last night and in light of the dominance of foreign affairs in the news these days. Phil, it's a pleasure, my friend. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on. What has been the reason for the obsession of the American foreign policy establishment with Russia? Well, that's, of course, the key question. I speculate on it quite a bit and suspect that a lot of it is because the American duopoly of power

uses the issue of foreign policy as kind of a playing card when they're going against each other. And to do that, they always need to have what one might describe as an enemy. And the enemy can change on occasion. It certainly in much of the 70s was the country of Iran, and to a certain extent it still is. The Russians have been focused on particularly since the election in 2016. And again, I suspect this is a tool that's being used by our political class essentially to make it appear

that they are doing their job, that they are really serving the national interest, which, of course, in terms of foreign policy, they are not. We haven't seen a shred of national interest in many, many years. Well, the government loves to have an enemy, as you say. I mean, whether it's the Soviet Union, whether it's Iran, whether it's Saddam Hussein, whether it's COVID, whether it's Vladimir Putin, who's the enemy of the week. George Orwell in 1984 articulated that masterfully, and it's true. And this doesn't matter if the president and the establishment is influenced by Republicans or if the president and the establishment are Democrats. It seems to be the same.

Yeah, absolutely. That's the dilemma that we're in. There's no escaping process of looking at other countries as adversaries or as actually enemies. I find this is being cranked up in particular right now vis-a-vis China. China is not militarily or any other way threatening the United States in a in a serious way what china is doing is doing what we used to do so well which is out competing us and this has made the the ruling class in this country go wild uh they have to reframe this uh not to admit that they've been making a lot of strategic and tactical errors in terms of trade policy and all kinds of other things.

Instead, they put the blame on China. China is the enemy. They're probably going to see some pressure if President Xi flies some jet planes over Taiwan or if he aggressively tries to absorb Taiwan. You'll see tremendous pressure on Joe Biden and Antony Blinken and the defense establishment to resist militarily, which in my opinion would be absurd and even insane. Yeah, oh, absolutely. I mean, the thing is, you know, you have to look at history in all these developments. Ever since Nixon went to China, there's been an assumption on the part of the U.S. government

that China eventually would resume political control over Taiwan. And now we're kind of forgetting that history, just like what's going on at the moment, the arguments that we should be creating a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Ignore the fact that there is a lot of history going back in terms of Russia and Ukraine and how Ukraine has changed its borders numerous times and issues like that. But instead, we have people seriously talking about regime change, getting rid of Putin, and also this no-fly zone, which would be a declaration of war. The president last night sounded as though he relishes a cold war. We've been fighting absurd, useless, in my view, immoral and unconstitutional hot wars for the past 20 years. I don't even have to articulate them. You could articulate the list better than I, but they started with the Bush-Cheney regime right after 9-11. I mean, to what conceivable advantage to the security of the American people would be another Cold War against the Russians?

Well, certainly in my opinion, and I suspect also in yours, there's no advantage to be gained from it. I think it was Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister in the 19th century, said that policies of governments change, but their interests always remain the same. By that standard, the United States is a unique great power in that it never pays any attention to its interests. The only reason why people come together in government is to better themselves, to better the communities they live in and their neighbors. And as John Adams also put it, he said, well, we have democracy. We should not be in the business of going around the world and looking for dragons to slay. And unfortunately, for the last 20 years, certainly, we've had nothing but people going around the world looking for dragons to slay.

And it's brought us nothing but impoverishment. We have an enormous debt. We have not succeeded in doing anything in the wars we've fought in the last 20 years, except killing a lot of people, spending a lot of money, and making a lot of enemies. Was George Bush's invasion of Iraq any different from a moral perspective, Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine? No. In fact, I think some people are beginning to point that out, that the United States has engaged in this kind of warfare. Syria might be another example that you could cite. We have troops there right now.

Iraq, we still have troops there. And up until recently, we had, for 20 plus years, troops in Afghanistan. So somebody is not thinking straight. These engagements do not serve the interests of the American people. They don't benefit us. They don't do anything good for us. What interest does the United States have in making life miserable for Vladimir Putin and the Russian people and the American people by imposing sanctions on him in response to his invasion of Ukraine. I mean, whether he wins or loses, whether he leaves tomorrow, whether he's overthrown in a coup, whether he takes the country over and stands

in Kiev and plants the Russian flag, whatever the outcome is. What the heck do we care? That's the key question which nobody in Washington is asking. I mean, the fact is that neither Ukraine nor Russia threaten us over this issue. We are intruding into a fight between neighbors, essentially, with a lot of history background that explains what is happening and why it's happening. And basically, we're essentially, I hate to say it, but we're engaging in economic warfare right now. We're seeking to destroy the Russian economy. And one of the articles that you cited earlier that I wrote recently, I pointed out we're doing the same thing with Afghanistan. We've left with our tail between our legs, and now we're trying to destroy their economy. It's just like this is, there's something wrong in the thinking that goes behind this kind of action. You referred to a recent executive order of President Biden with respect to assets seized from Afghanistan banks as a crime against humanity.

Would you explain for us, Phil? Yeah, absolutely. I rarely write an article where I'm really angry, and this was one of them. I can tell. Three weeks ago, President Biden seized the $7 billion in assets that are held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is Afghan government money. He then divided it up. He said, well, half of it will go to set up some aid institutions that will help the Afghan people. Let me stop this. And he said the other half of it is going to go to victims of 9-11. Now, the Afghan government had nothing to do with 9-11 in the first place. And the money

is basically all the money that the Afghan central bank has. And it basically, taking that money will destroy their economy. Well, what is that money doing in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York? Well, it was sent there for safekeeping by the previous government. But it's not our money. And the fact- I don't know how the president could do this legally and constitutionally. Just see that money and decide how it's going to be divided. It's not his and it's not the American government's.

It's executive order is how he did it. And the fact is that the Afghan people are starving because their economy has been so disrupted by the civil war they had. And we are basically taking money that would save people. And we're condemning people to starve to death just because we can do it. And it's odious and uh I can't see how any government can can look at itself in the mirror in the morning after having done something like this what do you see as the uh likely outcome well before we get there. All the sanctions that Uncle Joe has been imposing on the Russians. In my view, sanctions are immoral. They don't hurt the people at the top of the government who are making the decisions. Look at Cuba. We've had sanctions there since 1962, and there's still a repressed dictatorship driving cars that were made in the 50s and living well, well beyond where the rest of the world is. businesses, consumers, middle class, lower middle class, poor people, Americans,

and they were immoral because it interferes with the free right to engage in economic intercourse. Absolutely. And I would add to that, that if we destroy the Russian economy, which is clearly the intention, Russia will retaliate. And the retaliation can be particularly nasty because Russia will be on its back and will have no options but to use its military. And this is not something to look forward to. This whole situation, and let's look at basically the history of the situation, this all started when we staged a coup. In 2014.

In 2014. And it's continued more recently because Russia made some reasonable objections to what was being planned for NATO and Ukraine. And we wouldn't even negotiate the issue. We flat out told them, no, no, no. So what kind of diplomacy was that? What did these people in the White House think they were doing? Your former colleagues staged that coup in 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency. When you were a CIA agent, there came a time when enough was enough. What was the tipping point for you? Well, the final tipping point was the Iraq War. I was a fairly senior officer in the agency at that time. I had a lot of friends who were

analysts, even though I was an operations officer. And they were all telling me when George Tenet was going up before the United Nations with our Secretary of State, they were telling me, this is all contrived. This is all information that doesn't check out. This is information that is flat out wrong. And Tenet knows it and the white house knows it and yet nevertheless we were going to war because the white house had made the decision to do so uh before we actually went to war i left the agency wow uh if if joe biden were to call you this afternoon and say uh phil i i i heard you on with Judge Napolitano earlier today. What do you think I should do? Forget about what I said last night at the State of the Union.

What do you think I should do with Vladimir Putin tonight and tomorrow? I would say that we should engage in serious negotiations, real diplomacy, where we are willing to make concessions, and that we understand that Russia is a country that must be treated with respect, and the same courtesies that we treat are so-called allies. Every country is worthy of respect, and it's worthy, it's the right answer for us to be cognizant of the fact that Russia has national security issues just like we do. If a hostile coalition were to take over Canada and build bases on our border, we would have the same concerns that Russia is having right now over Ukraine. Was it a mistake for Bill Clinton to push NATO eastward? Yes, that was the initial mistake. It was a terrible mistake. And of course,

this sort of thing that Bill Clinton was inclined to do. Was NATO a mistake? I mean, should we have listened to Senator Robert Taft, who famously voted against the treaty and gave one of the great speeches in the modern era, I'm sure you're familiar with it, on foreign affairs at the time? Well, certainly I think NATO was a redundancy after 1992. That's when, you know, all the questions, whatever they were, were no longer relevant. And we really should have just, uh, we, well, basically the, the, the organization should have given up and stopped. It has played no role since then, except to bolster American presence in places like Libya and Afghanistan and Iraq, where we shouldn't be anyway.

Well, what happens if some Russian tank commander reads his GPS wrong and sends a half dozen tanks into Poland? Are we starting World War III? We have 12,000 troops in Poland. Are we starting World War III? We have 12,000 troops in Poland. Yeah, and more on the way. Yeah, of course. See, this is the kind of mischance that can start a war. And if you look at the history of the First World War and the Second World War, it was bad decisions that were made by politicians and the failure to take steps that were commensurate with the problem. And instead, we got World War II killed about 60 million people, 80 million people killed in World War I. That's what we got. Phil Giraldi, it's always a pleasure. I could talk to you all afternoon. I promised you we'd stop at 20 minutes. We're just about there. I hope you'll come back and visit with us again.

Absolutely. Anytime. Thank you, my friend. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.