Judging Freedom - INTEL Roundtable: Johnson &McGovern: Are British Troops In Gaza?

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, January 11th, 2024. It's time for the Intelligence Community Roundtable with our good friends and colleagues, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. Guys, welcome back and thank you for coming here. Larry, to you first. How strong is the South African case against Israel in the International Court of Justice? Well, if it's decided based on evidence, it's rock solid. You know, I wrote a piece yesterday called, you know, like the fish dies by its mouth. That's a saying. And the

Israelis have basically hung themselves with their own big mouths. The complaint that was filed by South Africa and supported by over 30 other countries. Listen, great detail, specific statements from everybody in government, from Benjamin Netanyahu to President Herzog to every single minister, defense minister, national security minister, labor minister. They're saying the most outrageous things. So, you know, if it comes down to the evidence, they're cooked. And Israel's a bit panicked. I mean, they've been going out asking their ambassadors in various countries around the world to go out and put the arm on their respective governments to condemn this as baseless and blood libel.

You know, they can only hide behind the Holocaust so long when you're inflicting your own Holocaust. Admiral Kirby, of course, called it meritless, and the spokesperson for the State Department called it unfounded. Ray, I think one of the great significant parts of what Larry just pointed out, which is the words out of the mouths of Israeli leaders, is that it complies with the requirement of the Convention Against Genocide, to which Israel is a party, on intent. We're going to play a tape for you in a couple of minutes, which not only shows intent, but shows understanding and compliance with that intent by the IDF. So my question is,

can the Israelis credibly deny intent and deny genocide, Ray McGovern, in light of what all of us have seen and continue to see every day all over the world? Well, Judge, they can and they will, but they will not be very convincing. Rhetorical genocide is one way that these folks put it. When you have the statements that Larry just referred to, well, the South African complaint anticipated how the Israelis will react to it. And they said, look, don't tell us that those were only words. Don't tell us that you didn't really mean it because the effects of what we see and those words were put into effect. So I'm just wondering what the Israelis hope to do tomorrow, how they can possibly refute these

things other than saying, well, as they usually do, everything is anti-Semitic. The real choice here, of course, would be for the United States. Will the Biden administration associate itself completely with Israel on this issue? Or will it see later day and at least sort of abstain like and not be a party to this. My favorite speaker, of course, was the Irish lawyer who said, the whole world should be ashamed, and we should be. Well, he's right about the whole world being ashamed because we shouldn't be silent. The three of us haven't been silent. The thousands and thousands watching us haven't been silent, but the American government has. I'm going to play Max, our colleague and friend, Max Blumenthal. So this is cut 19, Chris. This is Max earlier today at the State Department. I am sure that this kid from the State Department went like this when he saw Max in the audience. Typical Blumenthalian,

if you follow me. And the answer is typical of the Biden administration. Watch this. Secretary Blinken has specifically accused China of genocide for its treatment of the Uyghurs. But Blinken didn't point to any mass killing there. According to Euromed Monitor, 4% of the entire population of the Gaza Strip is now dead or injured. In just 90 days, 65,000 tons of munitions have been dropped on the Gaza Strip, three times what was dropped on Hiroshima. You have evidence of industrial-style killing. The South African legal team presented 20 minutes straight of statements on the record by Israeli leadership expressing the intent to commit genocide, for example, referring to the

Palestinian population as Amalek. So how can you explain this discrepancy between Secretary Blinken accusing China explicitly of genocide with no mass killing, presenting no evidence of the mass killing of Uyghurs, and then dismissing out of hand the potential that Israel could be committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, calling it unfounded. How do you explain this discrepancy? The same way that I just explained it to your colleague, who asked essentially the same version of your question, which is that each conflict is different, and any kind of determination like this needs to be based on specific facts and law. And when it comes to the points that are being made in today's hearing, again, I'm not

going to speak to those specifically. Israel will have an opportunity to address some of those tomorrow. But we again feel that these allegations that Israel is committing genocide are unfounded. That being said, we do not disagree that additional steps must and need to be taken to minimize the impact on civilians. And we'll continue to raise that directly with relevant partners. And given that you fast-tracked a sale of 14,000 tank shells to Israel, bypassing Congress, given Secretary Blinken's participation in war campaigns— We didn't bypass. I'm just going to stop you right there, because the premise of your question is a little misguided. We did not bypass Congress. As part of that, there is appropriate congressional notification that

happens, and we complied with those appropriately. Okay. More and more members of Congress are demanding oversight because they're not getting adequate oversight. But no one disputes that the U.S. is isolated in protecting Israel as it conducts this operation, as it calls it, in Gaza. No one disputes the direct U.S. role. So the question is, the Secretary Blinken, who went to Israel first, declaring he was there as a Jew, identifying with the ethno-religious character of this state, which is now standing accused of the potential to commit genocide, is Secretary Blinken concerned that ruling in favor of South Africa in this case could set the stage for his own prosecution or that of your colleagues? I'm just not going to

get ahead of hypotheticals and you probably shouldn't either. Jackson, go ahead. I don't want to answer if Blinken and Biden are in jeopardy. If this court were a real court and had real teeth, the answer to that would be yes. He called it unfounded, Larry, and Admiral Kirby, doing one of his Baghdad Bob routines, called it meritless. So the United States is going to back up Israel, apparently, no matter what. We still don't know what Israel is going to say tomorrow, but whatever it is, the U.S. will back them up, it appears. Now, unfounded, meritless, I mean, what else would you expect from a crowd that can't define what a woman is or a man, that believe men can get pregnant, that believe men can breastfeed, that believe that Russia is running out of rockets any minute now that Vladimir Putin has everything from cancer, Parkinson's disease, hemorrhoids, and heartbreak of psoriasis.

I mean, these guys, they are born liars. There's no other way to describe them. You could stake them out in the desert and facing a burning hot sun, and they would deny that there is a sun. So there's no remedy for that. Do you think, Ray, that the intelligence community is doing something to soften the blow to Israel? I don't know what the something would be.

You guys would know better than I. I guess I should ask it broader. Does the intelligence community get called upon by the Secretary of State or by the Director of the CIA to do something to make things look better for America's ally in a situation like this, Ray McGovern? I can't conceive of any such thing, Judge. The CIA has become a cog dig up dirt on the judges. Tomorrow, I believe there'll be what they call a provisional, what is it, a provisional measure, which will include- Well, tomorrow, the Israeli lawyers, the lead lawyers of British Barrister, will make their arguments, much like the South African lawyers did today. We're going to play some of those arguments for you in a moment. And then the court will make a preliminary vote. I

don't know how they could possibly not find, unless there's corruption here, I don't know how, Ray, they could find that there is no intent to commit genocide. Yeah, the preliminary vote or the provisional measure, as it's called, will call for an immediate stop to the hostilities. Now, Israel is not likely to do that. Then the question becomes, will Blinken and Biden and the others continue to be accomplices in this genocide at the risk of actually being prosecuted themselves? I suppose they will, but that will be a decision they have to take. And whether they continue to go down the road of folly that Larry explains, there's some hesitation in my view that they

might finally come to their senses and do something a little bit different than 110% of Israel. We're going to play two opening statements. They reach a little bit longer than a minute. They went on for a few hours. The first is the chief South African lawyer whose argument is that this didn't start on October 7th, that this was an open-air concentration camp going on for generations. The second is the argument of one of the younger lawyers who plays a video during his argument, showing the IDF dancing and celebrating in a destroyed Gaza and chanting,

Amalek, Amalek, Amalek, the reference to the Hebrew destruction of the Amaleks, supposedly because God the Father told them to do it, a story from the Bible, but used, I think he probably regrets it, by Prime Minister Netanyahu to suggest an utter slaughter of the other side. These are two very compelling arguments.

Take a look at both. First, the opening argument number 13, and then the follow-up argument number 14 by two lawyers for South Africa. The violence and the destruction in Palestine and Israel did not begin on the 7th of October 2023. The Palestinians have experienced systematic oppression and violence for the last 76 years, on 6 October 2023 and every day since October 7, 2023. In the Gaza Strip, at least since 2004, Israel continues to exercise control over the airspace, territorial waters, land crossing, water, electricity and civilian infrastructure,

as well as over key government functions. No armed attack on a state territory, no matter how serious, even an attack involving atrocity crimes can provide any justification for or defense to breaches to the Convention, whether as a matter of law or morality. Israel's response to the 7th of October 2023 attack has crossed this line and give rise to the breaches of the convention. On 7 December 2023, Israeli soldiers proved that they understood the Prime Minister's message to remember what the Amalek has done to you as genocider. They were recorded by journalists dancing and singing. We know our motto.

They are no uninvolved. That they obey one commandment to wipe off the seed of Amalek. The Prime Minister's invocation of Amalek is being used by soldiers to justify the killing of civilians, including children. These are the soldiers repeating the inciting words of their prime minister. Larry? Yeah, sickening. I mean, it's just, you know, for a while, you know, all my life, I've been a supporter of Israel. I believed Israel was something special.

I remember training a group of Israeli police officers in the anti-terrorism assistance training program and asking them, what was your finest moment in counterterrorism? I said, I know what the answer is. And they looked at me and I said, it was when you went to Argentina and you captured the man responsible for supervising the execution of Jews, or at least sending them to death camps. And I said, so when you put him on trial, you showed the world the difference between you and terrorists. You showed the difference between you and Nazis. Well, that was then. Now the Israelis

are acting like Nazis. They are doing the exact, they're stripping people naked. They're shooting people who aren't carrying weapons. They're murdering women and children. They're claiming that Hamas raped and killed children. That's a lie. There's zero evidence of that. Zero. And yet, they continue to push that as their justification for killing other women and children. It's sickening, it's disgusting, and Israel has lost its way. Ray, does Israel, does the Israeli government care if it stands alone with just the United States and the rest of the world, either silently or overtly condemns its behavior? Up till now, it has not cared. Now, I believe it has to care.

After all, the Houthis are creating bedlam in the Red Sea. The Iranians are actually frontally capturing oil tankers that were captured by others. They are in for a tough slog here with Hezbollah in the north and their problems, their real problems, militarily in Gaza. So yeah, they have to care now because their economies can be severely damaged if the rest of the world believes that this is beyond the pale. I think the rest of the world does.

And citing Amalek, you know, I'm sure that Bibi Netanyahu was disappointed that he did that, but I'll bet God was too. If you take the Hebrew scriptures as your code of conduct, you're in real trouble. And when they said, Hamalek, of course, for the tribe that God supposedly told the Israelis to exterminate, and they did. That's what they're invoking here. They're not going to get away with it. It's an interesting argument in the genocide debate, Larry, because one of the things the lawyers have to show, I may have mentioned this before, is not only the acts of genocide, but the intent to commit it.

And I think Ray's 100% right. Bibi must regret the day he used that word Amalek, because in Israeli society, correct me if I'm wrong, it is a signal to slaughter every human being on the other side, which is the definition, if you do it by race or nationality, of genocide. Yeah, but it's not just Bibi. I mean, you've got Herzog saying similar things. You've got Ben-Gavir. He's supposedly the moderate Herzog. He's the president. He's not even in Likud. Right. And you've got Ben-Gavir. He's supposedly the moderate Herzog. He's the president.

He's not even in Likud. Right. And you've got Ben-Gavir and Smotrich. And you go down the list, and that's what's so impressive about the complaint filed by South Africa. And they're not cherry-picking. That's the other element. It's one thing to take somebody out of context or only take just a snippet of what they said, which would turn it entirely on its head. But that's not what happened here. South Africa was very careful to include the full statement, the full context for each and every one of these knuckleheads. And they did it to themselves. They shot their mouths off. It's the ultimate example of arrogance and hubris coming together. And they've made their own bed.

They've essentially killed themselves with their own words. Ray sent us a clip from Major General Mati Pellid. This is 1992. This is a retired Israeli scholar who was also a major general in the IDF, warning about two dangers. One, occupying a territory corrupts the occupier. And two, the U.S. is giving us far more money than we need and can use, and that's going to cause dangers. This is cut number 20, Chris. This is the situation we have to live with, and I have no doubt that the direct consequence of the occupation. Anyone who said occupation corrupts was absolutely right. And we are occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for the last 25 years and this is corrupting

us, maybe even more than the American aid. Well, I would like this to be eliminated altogether. I think that we should pay for our arms out of our own money. But in any case, this is one of the most damaging gifts that we get from the United States. Imagine if we had a tape today of Douglas MacArthur or Dwight Eisenhower or George Patton saying, stop spending hundreds of billions on defense. It's corrupting defense. It's corrupting the American military and American society, Ray McGovern. Well, power and money corrupts. When you have power over a whole people, the Palestinians, you get corrupted. Now, Mati Peled is the father of my good friend,

Miko Peled, who is doing his very best to follow in that tradition. In this case, the apple does not fall far from the tree. There are people that have a conscience in Israel. It's just that most of them have been so corrupted by the abundance of money from the United States and the Greek tragic flaw, after all, hubris, overweening pride, a sense that you are unassailable. They think the U.S. is unassailable. By virtue of that, they think they are unassailable. We'll have to see how this plays out because hubris led all those Greek tragic heroes into the depths. Correct. Correct. The goddess Nemesis was waiting for them. I remember my Greek mythology right.

Larry, in the military, what happens if you go AWOL for 10 days and don't even tell your boss that you're having surgery and you're under general anesthesia? The people filling in for you don't even know that you're sick. Yeah, they're going to do more than put you in the timeout corner. They'll probably put you into a cell and court-martial you and bring charges. I mean, as Ritter pointed out this morning, could you imagine Putin not talking to a general, I forget his name, who's the defense minister for 10 days and not knowing or caring? You mean Shoigu. Yeah, Shoigu. Correct, Shoigu. And yeah, I know this is outrageous, but it shouldn't be a surprise. I mean, look, the sad fact of the matter is that Lloyd Austin was an EEO hire. He oversaw lying.

He would do anything to get ahead. When he was at CENTCOM, as Ray has pointed out several times in previous conversations, it was Lloyd Austin who was overseeing the corruption of the intelligence process, all to serve political masters up the line. He was going to be the consummate smoocher of the derriere of Barack Obama and others. And so this is a man without honor, without integrity. And so why are people surprised when he does something so underhanded and stupid? I had guys that served under him when he was in Afghanistan, and they describe him as a dummy. And it was not intended as a compliment. Here's my friend and former colleague, Jimmy

Rosen. So this is cut 18. Now works with me at Newsmax, grilling the press secretary. Well, you talk about dummy. I mean, this lady makes Kirby seem like the Israeli general that we just watched, the father of your friend. Here's number 18. The motivations on the part of the secretary for doing this are unknown to the president. And you're telling us there's going to be a 30-day review, et cetera. Shouldn't the expression of full faith and confidence in this cabinet officer await the results of that investigation? And also, isn't it a key piece of information for the president to know why Secretary Austin did this before he expresses full faith and confidence in him?

I think one of the things that's so important and we don't see this enough in today's world is for someone to take responsibility. So someone to actually say I made a mistake and I take full responsibility and I think that's important here. I'm not gonna speak to that. I'm gonna speak to the action of taking responsibility here and I'm not going to speak to that. I'm going to speak to the action of taking responsibility here. And I think that's important. Well, the secretary surely doesn't take responsibility. Maybe he does now. But Ray, what does this type of behavior do to military morale? Well, I've been in the military. Larry's right.

There'd be a choice between putting him behind bars or giving him an Article 15 procedure. I choose the Article 15 because it'd be a lesson to all the troops that no one's above the military system. What this episode tells me, Judge, that, you know, Biden has great acumen in picking his advisors. Does the Secretary, does the Defense Secretary qualify because he used to go to mass with Biden's son? I mean, that doesn't do it for me. Look at his record. As Larry says, he demonstrably lied. And 50 intelligence analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency and CENTCOM attested to those lies.

And since Austin had four stars, the investigation went nowhere. So where does that leave us? Well, that leaves us with a question about what happens when Biden gets sick? You know, what happens when he's no longer able to fulfill his duties? I mean, the precedent is there. Can he go to sleep for a week and leave the country to fend for itself with the idiots in Congress that we have or our vice president? So it's a decent question to ask. You know, Austin should not be let loose on this. He should actually resign. And I feel that strongly because

he gives an example to the troops. And when you come up in formation and you say, all president accounted for, well, you can't say all president accounted for except the defense secretary. We don't know where the hell he is. Where's Waldo? Great segment today, gentlemen. Thank you very much. It's late in the day, but thank you so much for making yourselves available. We'll look forward to seeing both of you next week on Monday as usual, and then again at the end of the week. All the best. You're welcome. Thank you. On Monday, we do have a new guest for you, one of the most cantankerous characters I've ever met in my life, but I had the

privilege or misfortune, depending upon how you want to call it, of working with him for 24 years at Fox News. At 2.45 Monday afternoon live, Bill O'Reilly will tell us everything that's wrong with the world, and I will get to interrogate him. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Altyazı M.K.