Judging Freedom - INTEL Roundtable: 2023 - A Year of Intelligence Failures.

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Join us for a riveting and enlightening INTEL Roundtable as we delve into the complexities and challenges surrounding the intelligence landscape this year. "2023: A Year of Intelligence Failures," we bring together two distinguished experts, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, to dissect and discuss the potential pitfalls, evolving threats, and critical issues that shape the global intelligence community.Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department official, brings a wealth of insider knowledge to the table. His experience in analyzing geopolitical events and intelligence matters provides a unique perspective on the inner workings of international affairs. Paired with Ray McGovern, a retired CIA officer turned political activist, renowned for his candid assessments of intelligence matters, the roundtable promises a dynamic and thought-provoking exploration of the challenges that lie ahead.Together, Johnson and McGovern navigate the landscape of intelligence gathering, analyzing past failures, and predicting potential stumbling blocks on the horizon. From emerging threats to the evolving nature of information warfare, our conversation will be an in-depth examination of the role intelligence plays in shaping global events and policy decisions.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 Friday, December 22nd, 2023. It's not only Friday, it's not only three days before Christmas. It's time for our Intelligence Community Roundtable by popular demand. Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern join us, as is usually the case on Fridays. Gentlemen, and that's October 7th. Larry, we'll start with you. What did the Israelis know? Where did they get it from? How did they look the other way? The attack that Hamas carried out on October 7th was a well-planned military operation that had been in under under preparation for for months if not more than a year and uh israeli intelligence analysts all female apparently uh identified this as a threat as likely to occur reported up their chain of command and were ignored because one there are there are girls you know women what do they know so? So Israel got caught completely with its pants down. And then as a result, because it's really important to emphasize that the Israeli narrative, which is a lie,

is that this was an unprovoked terrorist attack, that Hamas was beheading babies, raping women. They were just on a murderous rampage. They had no control at all. And that's just not true. And in fact, the evidence that's come out since then has shown, number one, no baby. The only children that were killed were killed by the Israeli tanks shelling houses in which there were both Hamas fighters and Israeli civilians, multiple Israeli eyewitnesses to that effect. That's number one. Number two, the Hamas ejected was primarily to do two things, kill Israeli military personnel.

They did that in a spectacular way against the Golani Brigade, which is one of the most elite units in the Israeli army. Killed 72 guys on that one day alone. And then kidnapped as many hostages as they could so they could both bring them back, use them as bargaining chips. I know that some have argued they also wanted to use them as bait to draw the Israeli military into a conflict in Gaza. So, you know, this is a tremendous black eye for Israel, and they allowed it to happen through independence. How did an entity with the reputation that Mossad has, and maybe they don't deserve the reputation, Ray,

I'll let you, of course, happily expound on that. But in the public's mind, Mossad is a sophisticated intelligence entity. How did an entity like that ignore warnings or miss them? Well, a couple of reasons. One was that they had this really high-tech monitoring device here that didn't really need any people, sort of AI type thing, and they could rely on that to find out what's going to happen. Another thing is that Hamas executed incredible security during the months and years prior to this attack. And the Israelis were fat and happy. They were focused on the West Bank and the problems of political nature in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem. And so they missed it.

Larry's rendition here is most important because the Israeli citizens are beginning to realize now what really happened and that the Israeli soldiers were shooting indiscriminately, so to speak. And also that when three guys tried to surrender, they were shot dead. This is going to come back to haunt Netanyahu. I wouldn't give him another 10 days in office. Wow. Pretty remarkable prediction. Before we get into Netanyahu, Larry, what is the reaction internally in an intelligence community or an intelligence agency when there's a failure as catastrophic as this?

Do heads roll? Do people get fired? Do they reform the way they gather intelligence? Do they resort to human intelligence and reject AI? Do they point fingers at each other? As an example, Netanyahu has blamed Mossad, and he has blamed the military, even though he is ultimately the commander of both. Yeah. What usually happens, because these are large bureaucracies, they punish the innocent, promote the guilty. Say that again, please, to make sure I heard it correctly.

They punish the innocent and promote the guilty. I mean, we saw it with My Lai as an example. You know, Lieutenant William Kelly was the only one punished when, in fact, that entire chain of command knew what he was doing and it authorized it. So the same thing in the intelligence community. I would actually anticipate that the female intelligence analyst who tried to warn their boss will probably get written up with a bad report

and won't get promoted. Meanwhile, the guys who ignored it, they'll get promoted. The problem, Judge, there's no accountability in these systems, particularly when they've become so politicized. Is Mossad, Ray, dangerously for the people they're supposed to be protecting, addicted to AI rather than human intelligence. It's stated differently. Didn't they have people on the ground, sort of double agents, people in Hamas that they were buying off, that they had flipped so that they would at least have a warning as to what was happening? That's a good question, George.

I can't believe that they didn't have spies in Hamas itself. The question is, as Larry has suggested, whether the upper crust there, the people at the top, would take them seriously. We know from our own experience in Vietnam and other things that we had it right on really important issues, but the people at the top were unwilling to do battle with the U.S. Army at war and expose the U.S. Army for totally falsifying enemy figures. That happened, 67, 68, and it led to LBJ not running for another term. That should happen again. I suggest it strongly to the White House. It's a good example. Why did you just a few minutes ago in your own inimitable way, just like the last comment you made, predict that Netanyahu will be gone in 10 days? You mean

literally 10, 24 hour days? Well, this is a guess, but he's in trouble deep inside Israel as well. And it really depends on how much pressure Blinken and Biden would be willing to put on Netanyahu and how willing he would be to defy that pressure and how willing his accomplices or his companions would be to choose the U.S. example here rather than Netanyahu. I used a very scientific method for this prediction. It's called the swag factor. Larry knows it well. It's army intelligence.

It's the scientific wild ass guess. So, Larry, are Netanyahu and Biden on a collision course? Yes, but Netanyahu is going to keep doing what he wants to do. And the Biden administration is showing zero desire to cut him off. You know, they've been sending these 2,000-pound bombs over there that Israel's been wantonly using against civilian targets, blowing up entire neighborhoods. So, you know, Israel's going to keep doing what it's doing. The problem that Israel, that Netanyahu's going to run into,

one, the political pressure from the hostage families, because the Israeli army is incompetent. They are poorly trained, poorly led, and they've been given rules of engagement that allow them to shoot unarmed people. Let me just stop you right here. Forgive me for interrupting. Is it essentially an army of civilians and reservists as opposed to professional soldiers? Yeah. You can have a decent reservist if they're properly trained. These guys are not properly trained. I've seen a number of videos. They're muzzle disciplined. I mean, where you point the end of the gun, they're pointing it at each other and others. And then we just got word yesterday that the Galani Brigade, the one that suffered 72 KIA on October 7th, have suffered so many additional casualties, they've been pulled off the line.

Now, Israel's going to great lengths to try to obfuscate how many casualties that they're really taking. And they keep saying, oh, we're defeating Hamas. We're defeating Hamas. And yet most of the people they trot out to parade as Hamas prisoners have nothing to do with Hamas. They're simply Palestinians that are being – that violates the Geneva Convention. Here's Professor John Mearsheimer on this show yesterday with his analysis of how many people have been slaughtered, how many Gazans or Palestinians have been slaughtered by the IDF and who they are.

First of all, the Israelis only control about 40% of Gaza. Just think about it. They control 40%. That means the other 60% is territory where Hamas can go and the Israelis can't get at them. Second, the Israelis have not captured any hostages. That's quite surprising. If they haven't captured any hostages, that probably tells you a lot about their ability to find the Hamas fighters. Furthermore, if you look at the number of people that the Israelis have killed, the number is about 20,000, as you said before. And most people agree that about 70% of that 20,000 is women and children. So that would be 14,000. That means that the Israelis have killed 6,000 males. Now, those 6,000 males were certainly not all Hamas fighters. Most of them, I'm sure, were innocent civilians. So let's say

of the 6,000, 4,000 were civilians and 2,000 were Hamas fighters. I don't think that's the likely number, but let's give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt. That says that they've killed 2,000 Hamas fighters. Well, most people argue that Hamas had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters to start with. If they had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters and they've killed 2,000, that means they have a whole heck of a lot of fighters left. Makes sense to you, Ray? It does. Now, remember, John Mearsheimer is out of West Point, okay? So he knows a little bit about military affairs as well. And he wrote the seminal article in Foreign Affairs nine years ago saying the West is responsible for what's going on in Ukraine. I asked him at one point in an open meeting, John, you're in Washington right now. Has the administration gotten in touch with you?

Anybody want to talk to you? He said, and remark this, he said, no, nobody has ever reached out to me. Never, never before. Not since I wrote that article, not since then, they have never tried to get in touch with me. Now, why do I make that point? I find it astounding. You would always want contrarian views if that's what you consider contrarian. I consider them the school of realism. I never knew that I was a practitioner of the school of realism, but I fit in quite well with John Mearsheimer. Look at the facts, extrapolate some cogent conclusions, and he's right not only about Ukraine, but now he's right about Gaza. It's awful. It's terrible. Those figures are valid as can be. We'll see how long this is allowed to continue. Larry, is it likely that more IDF have been killed than Hamas fighters?

I know the Israelis won't release any numbers at all. Professor Mearsheimer said he thought it was about 3,000 or 4,000. I mean, that's twice what he's saying is the number of Hamas leaders killed. And I'm not sure where he got that from. I take that back. Got it from a Hebrew language newspaper, which purported to defy the censors in the Israeli government. Yeah, I think Israel's lost at least as many as Hamas has. And Israel's really not in a position to take these kinds of casualties. So that's why they don't have a lot of fresh troops to throw into the mix. And the fresh troops that they throw are reservists that, again, we come back to the lack of proper training and improper leadership, poor leadership.

So Israel's got itself in a jam. And then they continue to try to expand the war up north with Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is very significant in terms of its ability to attack Israel. Do you share Ray's view that Netanyahu is a dead man walking, politically speaking? Yeah, yeah. And it's important to draw the distinction. Just getting rid of Netanyahu is not going to change Israeli policy in Gaza. Even the liberals are supporting exterminating the Palestinians from Gaza. So people shouldn't work under the false assumption or false belief that if we get rid of Netanyahu,

we're going to have more reasonable policies in Israel. That's not the case. The answer is that is not the case. Ray, President Putin has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of removing babies from their families. His argument is the babies were going to get killed and we saved their lives. The ICC says this is a war crime. If President Putin is going to be indicted for that, is it fanciful to expect that Bibi Netanyahu, Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, Jacob Sullivan, Antony Blinken will be indicted for war crimes as well? Or is this war crimes thing just a facade that's not based on any sense of morality or law? Well, Judge, the U.S. controls those kinds of courts.

The influence is so pervasive that if I were Vladimir Putin, I wouldn't really worry very much about what's going to happen to me in a judicial sense. What's needed here, Judge, and I'd just like to interject this, is an intelligence analysis unit that can tell the president, for example, what happens if the Yemenis really do block access to the Red Sea? And how about the Iranians at the street there? What should we expect here? And so that the people like Austin can kind of figure out, oh, well, okay, if we take out Yemen, what then? And I see no evidence, and Larry may know better, but I see no evidence that the traditional kind of national intelligence estimate addressing such key issues as this has been done. Or that Bill Burns is giving any good advice to Averill Haynes, who sits on top of him, and she preparing the PDB and the national intelligence estimates is giving to Biden. So unless people can come together and kind of beat Biden into realizing that he's been extremely poorly advised and he needs to change course,

there could be a major flare-up precisely in the Red Sea or in the Persian Gulf. Let's switch over to Ukraine, Larry. When we first began speaking on this program about the intelligence community in Ukraine, you both were of the opinion, well-grounded and substantiated by many other sources, that the information that was making its way to President Biden was doctored and put in a context to please his preconceived notions. It was not the same data that was being ascertained from the field. Has that changed now that Ukraine has practically collapsed? Does the intelligence community recognize that it was useless to give the president bad, knowingly bad information? And do they now give him true

information that Zelensky's government is on life support? Well, all I'm picking up is it's secondhand. I haven't seen it directly, but it appears that the Defense Intelligence Agency has been the most egregious in presenting false narratives, false hopes, false assessments, that the CIA has, at least in some sectors, has been more skeptical. But you don't even need to worry about what the intelligence is saying. Just read the newspapers. The newspapers are a great barometer to tell you which way the wind is blowing. And, you know, just this week, you saw the Washington Post. It used to go to its website, and at the top, the banner headline,

the second item from the left was Ukraine War. Clicked on that, got to all the Ukraine war articles yeah Monday gone not there and then Google put an information that top 10 searches for this year Ukraine's not in the top 10 searches Ukraine is now the forgotten stepchild it It is no longer the priority. We're going to, you know, there's a syndrome called walkaway wife syndrome. We're the walkaway wife. We're walking out on Vladimir Zelensky. He's on his own.

You know, you had Anthony Blinken saying, yeah, boy, we don't have any more money. We're sort of out. We're tapped out. Ray, is that because Israel is the priority due to domestic politics, or is it because the neocons recognize that Ukraine was a dismal failure? And what's the CIA's role in this kind of a walkaway? Is the CIA reporting to its agents, officers, analysts reporting to their superiors? Forget it. These guys are on life support. That's what they should be doing, Judge. Whether they're doing that or not, I just don't know. But I know enough of the history since,

well, since Bill Casey and Bobby Gates and all the other directors that came after them, that they are very malleable and that they play the political game. And if the president wants to say that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon, then they'll say that, unless on the rare occasion, a decent, honest manager comes in. I have one in mind who came in from the State Department to manage the latest estimate on how soon Iran could get a nuclear weapon. And the conclusion was Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon. It was unanimous and it was with a high confidence. It came in November 2007, just as Bush and Cheney were prepared with Israel to strike out at Iran. So I cite that as what I call the baby. You don't throw the baby out with the path water

readily, okay? The baby is the analysis that can prevent wars. That's the only estimate that I can attest to that played a large role in preventing a war against Iran. But now it looks different. There have been no national intelligence estimates that I know of, and usually you hear about them. And, you know, what are they doing? They're supporting targeteers. They're making, they're blowing up pipelines. What is the intelligence community, what is the CIA worth anymore? I've concluded that, yeah, there's no more baby. Throw the whole thing out with the bathwater. Start as you, start some sort of independent analytical unit that can be, as far as possible, insulated from political influence. Do you share Ray's view that it's that bad that the intelligence is almost useless because it's so politicized, Larry?

Yeah. I mean, what's happened is they used to keep the Directorate of Operations separate from the Directorate of Intelligence. And within the Directorate of Operations, then you've got this covert action element where they're given a task like support the war in Ukraine, we got to beat the Russians, or support the Contras, or, you know, and so once these covert actions get underway, they take on a life of their own, and then the people running them are under pressure to perform so that they satisfy the political masters downtown. And then they put pressure on the analysts to lie or to fudge the intelligence. So what has happened over the last 10 years started with Brennan, John Brennan. They fused a lot of the analytical elements with the operational elements. Now they're right in the same room. And the peer pressure to conform is enormous.

And that's really what Ray's talking about is the covert action part of CIA needs to be eliminated, put somewhere else. You know, the government's going to always try to do that kind of thing, but keep the intelligence analysis clean. Keep it out of that, where it can actually make the independent calls and give you the truth sometimes you may not want to hear. Here's a friend of Ray's, Colonel Marian Wright, a retired U.S. Army, harshly critical of the way the U.S. spends money to fight foreign wars.

It appears she's testifying before some entity in the U.N. Cut number 11, Chris. Right now, the United States is providing weapons in two conflicts, the Ukraine-Russia conflict and Israel-Gaza. We know much more, I know much more about, because I'm an American citizen and I watch this stuff, how much military equipment is being provided by my country. Just four or five days ago on December 7th in a press conference with the UK Foreign Minister David Cameron, Secretary of State Blinken said that in the last two years, the U.S. has provided over $70 billion to support Ukraine, and European allies have provided over $110 million in weapons.

Blinken said, if you look at these investments that we've made in Ukraine's defense to deal with this aggression, 90% of the security assistance we've provided has actually been spent here in the United States with our manufacturers, with our production, and that's produced more American jobs, more growth in our own economy. So this has been a win-win that we need to continue. Is this the kind of attitude, is this the kind of attitude in the government, sort of like, I think it was Senator Mitt Romney and Senator Richard Blumenthal, this is the best of all worlds, we're killing Russian boys and we're furthering American jobs and no American boys are being killed.

This is reprehensible if true and it appears to be true. Ray? It's a terrific investment in their view. Now at a recent Senate hearing, every senator except one, Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, emphasized that, yeah, it's a lot of money, but it's all creating jobs in your district. It's all being pumped into the military industry. It's really good for us. It's a really terrific investment. Every one of them made that point. And so did Biden in his most recent speech about four years ago. I mean, they used to try to disguise this kind of thing. Now they have to

sort of be up in front about it so that the military industrial complex realizes they're doing their bidding. And that has a lot to do with this. Now, yeah, I'll stop there. How does the CIA budget grow from this stuff, Larry? We always identify a new threat. You know, now the way it will be spun is now that Russia has beaten or is going to soon defeat Ukraine, that therefore we need to be prepared to beef up our analysis of Russia's intent to invade Europe, to conquer Europe, as well as working in tandem with China to maybe conquer the world. You know, this is a self-licking ice cream cone. DOD is going to be doing the same thing.

I mean, it budgets what now? $880 billion by, you know, within the next year and a half will be well over a trillion. So it's the more cowbell strategy. No matter what we do, we need more cowbell. Right. Gentlemen, thank you. Go ahead, Ray. I just want to kind of point out that there are structural things that have happened since my tenure and actually some of them since Larry's tenure, they heed objective analysis. We used to have an independent media analysis group that was disbanded, given to the other people

who are susceptible to political influence. We used to have an independent imagery analysis group that was given by John Deutsch to the Pentagon. And so when they were looking for WMD in Iraq, James Clapper, who headed up this unit, later admitted, you know, we found things that weren't really there. In this book, he said that, okay? And then there are other things that have happened since then, in addition to what Larry said, the operatives and the analysts working together. And what else do I have here? Yeah. I guess I'll stop there. I had one other idea, but it escaped me. All right. It'll come back to you after Christmas. Gentlemen, thank you. Thank you for your time

today. Thanks for all the time you give us. I hope we can squeeze a round table in Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday of next week because this is, as you know, a fan favorite and one of my favorites as well. Merry Christmas to both of you and to your families. Thank you, Judge. Thanks.

Thank you. 5.15 today, Eastern. The inimitable Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.