Judging Freedom - kraine War Causing U.S. Tax Payers to Suffer? w/Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

kraine War Causing U.S. Tax Payers to Suffer? w/Phil Giraldi fmr CIASee 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 Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. 2023, 22 years to the day, almost to the moment, of the attacks on 9-11 in lower Manhattan and Pennsylvania, and of course, at the Pentagon. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. We have a lot to talk about. I want to talk about the Russian sanctions. I want to talk about the American sanctions on the Russians. I want to talk about BRICS. I want to talk about how those sanctions have pushed the Russians into economically desirable alliances with other countries. But before we get to that, I do want to spend a little bit of time on 9-11. On 9-11 itself, I you were uh in the central intelligence agency and you may actually have been at the headquarters at langley uh when it happened i'm sure you remember the moment and i'm sure you remember the day yeah absolutely uh when when um i was indeed at headquarters

i in fact was doing a lot of work with the Counterterrorism Center. So I'd been hearing rumbles about various terrorist groups. When the Pentagon was hit, there was a major panic at CIA headquarters. And basically, they evacuated the building, which led to several thousand people racing for the parking lots. And anyway, once we got into the parking lots, we waited and waited and waited when nothing more happened. We were sent home. So that was the big news in 9-11. And, you know, the friends of mine that were more directly working with the Counterterrorism Center had a lot of ideas about what was going on,

but they did not appear to have any particular insight, except they suspected a number of possible players. Before we get into the players who were suspected, big picture, from a distance of 22 years with all of your experience in CIA and in military intelligence. Is it more likely than not that the American government, elements of the American government, people in the Bush administration, knew before 9-11 what was going to happen? I would speculate that that is almost certainly the case, that there certainly had to be people in the government who had some idea of what was coming up. And I based that on, again, my contacts in counterterrorism who were suspicious of some senior officials in the government in terms of their behavior prior to 9-11 itself. Meaning that intelligence sources had revealed the likelihood of certain events

and people suppressed the revelation of those sources? Well, it's more specifically in the direction of those senior officials who were very close to Israel because the counterterrorism Center certainly believed that Israel at a minimum had prior knowledge of 9 11 that Israel also had motive uh and they had the capability to run this kind of operation in the United States uh working through their their proxies uh there were of, a whole lot of people in the Defense Department and also in the Vice President's office that had very close and continuing relations with Israel. So there is that thing kind of floating out there.

And I have speculated since the 9-11 commission report came out, whether we would ever see the redacted portions, the portions that were considered too sensitive to reveal to the public. And now it's 22 years later and we haven't seen them. What is your big picture view of the forces that instigated 9-11? Who were they and what was their goal? the actual attack with the airplanes. Then the motive obviously would be the United States' policies in the Middle East, which were very pro-Israeli and very hostile to a number of Arab interests. So that would be the simple way to look at it. And then of course, there are, you know, possibly there were people in the government, maybe in the vice president's office, maybe at the Pentagon, who for various reasons wanted the United States to basically go to war with a number of countries, a number of groups that were working in the Middle East. So there are a lot of there are a lot of potential motives here. Israel, for its part,

would have liked the United States to be closely tied to its policies in the Middle East. And what could be better than an attack on the United States staged by a bunch of Arabs? Do you remember the news reports as the towers were coming down of Mossad agents in Jersey City, New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan on a rooftop of an office building, cheering on the destruction of the towers. Was that ever investigated? Well, it was investigated they were in fact arrested uh and the interesting thing was that they were seen the day before the twin towers went down at that same location casing it for a good line of sight and then when the towers went down they

were dancing and singing they were referred to as the dancing Israelis. They were arrested by the FBI, by the local police. They were held for a month. And then George Bush, for whatever reasons, sent them back home. And back home was to Israel. Right. And were they Mossad or were they just Israeli citizens that were here because they had a heads up of what was going to happen?

Israel was running an enormous intelligence program within the United States that focused on Arabs. They were one component of it. This was a moving company out of Jersey City, New Jersey, I believe, as cover. But they didn't actually do any moving. They were there to spy on Arabs. And that was their job. Yes, they were Mossad employees. So if the CIA had evidence, and if the NSA had evidence, and if the FBI had evidence, all of this before 9-11, why would they have suppressed it? Well, you know the old expression that do-do runs downhill.

I would have to say there were probably some very senior people in this loop that we're talking about of who protected the correct or proper narrative of what was going on. And these people are very difficult to budge on these kinds of issues. They essentially can control the information flow. They can control what is revealed and what is not revealed. So you'd have to be kind of looking at culprits within the system. Is it a coincidence that at the moment this happened, the President of the United States was reading children's books to a kindergarten class in Florida, and the Vice President of the United States, a notorious neocon, was prepared to take charge of the government in its deepest crisis since Pearl Harbor?

Maybe no coincidence. That's one of the things that we would like to know more about. The vice president was in charge of the government. He was spirited away from the White House, and he was put in a secret underground government offices that are quite near to me here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. So that's where he was. And did he know that the Pentagon was going to be attacked before it was attacked. Had he been given warnings by a naval attache who was in that room with him whom he stifled and silenced? Yeah, of course, that's another question that we need an answer to. I mean, Cheney has never, as far as I know, gone into any great detail on what his thinking and what his responses were at the time that the these attacks

took place and uh I think the uh obviously when the uh if indeed it was airliners that hit the uh twin towers uh that was a wake-up call but obviously obviously for the inside the Beltway crowd when the Pentagon was hit whether that was by an airliner or by, as some believe, a missile, then it, you know, it casted a different light. It's an attack to bring down the U.S. government. And the 9-11 Commission chaired by Governor Tom Kaine and Congressman Lee Hamilton. Hamilton, a well-respected moderate Democrat with experience in the intelligence community. Kaine, a well-respected moderate Republican. Our friend and colleague and good buddy Ray McGovern calls it in caps,

because only Ray can when he's writing to you and he's angry about something, the mother of all cover-ups. Yeah, well, as I say, there are parts of that report that we, the citizenry in this country, have not seen now for over 20 years. So that is rather suspicious in and of itself. And cover-up, yeah. over 20 years uh so that is rather suspicious in and of itself um and um cover up yeah i mean basically it established a a an acceptable narrative that didn't blame anybody in the united states and didn't blame anybody in israel and um this was in spite of the fact that a number of FBI officers who were kind of following some of these issues about foreigners learning to fly four-engine planes, like Colleen Rowley in Minnesota, these people were reporting this stuff and sending it in. Somebody was making sure it didn't go anywhere else. Wow. 20 years later, is there any sort of wink, wink, nod, nod, nod,

acknowledgement or recognition among members of the intelligence community that there were elements of the U.S. government that knew about this ahead of time and either wished it to happen, caused it to happen, or knowingly looked the other way? Well, I have to go back to my time on that one. And of course, as I say, I had close connections with the Counterterrorism Center. And they basically concluded that, as I mentioned before, that Israel almost certainly had prior knowledge and that there were people in the government that basically hindered the process of finding actionable intelligence

and acting on it. And they suspected there were such people. I have never heard them named per se, though there were suspicions that some people in the Pentagon and again in the vice president's office, maybe even up to and including the vice president. This is called conspiracy to commit murder. And in this case, it's the murder of 3,000 innocents. We're not talking about shooting troops on a battlefield. We're talking about the slaughter of innocents. It doesn't seem as though this, even though there's no statute of limitations on this, it doesn't seem as though this is going to go anywhere, Phil.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, clearly the powers that be want this to be a go away issue. And I would just throw into the hopper. copper, this is kind of reminiscent of the assassination of JFK, where Joe Biden had promised pre-electorally to release the last files on the assassination. He has not done so and will not do so. And Donald Trump made the same promise. And he told me personally, Judge, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn't release it either. And I said, what did they show you? And he said, sometime when we don't have, and then he raised his voice, 15 people listening to our phone call, I'll tell you who they were and what they showed

me. Well, thank you for your thoughts on this. What is the significance of the rise? First of all, what is BRICS, B-R-I-C-S? What does it mean? What does it stand for? What is the significance of its rise and its potential challenge to the American dollar as the reserve currency of the world? Well, first of all, BRICS is an acronym for the five countries that founded it, including major countries like Russia and China, major economies. And the significance is that this is a rebellion of what we might call the second and third world against the sanction regime that the United States runs and is successful at running because it controls the dollar as a world reserve currency. So people are saying now in BRICS, we want to be able to use our own currencies, whatever

the exchange rate is, particularly to buy oil and energy products. And we don't need what happened to us, what you did to Russia recently, which was you froze all of Russia's dollar assets. And you now are saying we will use those assets to rebuild Ukraine. You basically stole the money from Russia and it amounted to something like possibly a trillion dollars. And the United States has done the same thing to Iran. It's done the same thing to Venezuela, where it uses this control over the monetary system for political reasons.

And now these people are saying, no, we want a world that's free of that kind of restraint. And do you think that the imposition of sanctions, the Joe Biden imposed sanctions, which way back in 1936, the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can do, Congress gave him authority to do it. Do you think that the imposition of these sanctions on Russia and on people that

do business with Russia, on Russian banks, for example, has largely been a significant impetus to make BRICS more attractive? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think I did a lot of reading in background accounts before this meeting in South Africa took place. And that issue always came up that, you know, how can we work in a system where somebody who makes the rules can interpret the rules it makes to steal our money. And, you know, it's a good point. Here's President Zelensky, in some respects, agreeing with you, Phil, but arguing that, oh, the Russians are circumventing the sanctions. Take a listen. Currently, we see a prolonged sanctions pause from our partners and Russia's overly active attempts to circumvent the sanctions.

It's crucial to add solutions to the free world, which should defend itself and have success in this. And even more so, it should avoid any attempts to use free world companies, technologies and products to wage war against freedom. Three priorities. Further sanctions against Russia's energy sector. Real restrictions on the supply of chips and microelectronics in general to terrorists, and further blocking of the Russian financial sector. This world sanctions offensive must resume. We better be careful what he asked for if he doesn't want microchips to go to terrorists. He runs a terrorist government that thrives by assassination. But I'll let you comment on it.

Well, I mean, of course, it's a ridiculous, highly politicized comment to express his disdain for the Russians. But the whole point is that when he's talking about Russia avoiding sanctions, the United States sanctioned uh russian energy products oil and gas and basically he's found other buyers russia has found other buyers i i don't see that as anything surprising or bizarre or some breach of international law or anything like that the united states has no uh intrinsic right to be able to tell people uh what to do with their money and how to live but it's just asserted that right uh unilaterally and uh so he's he's very wrong about what sanctions are all about and uh you know their sanctions also in place on

syria now on iran venezuela and in all cases, it's the people that wind up getting hurt. And when the government tries to do something to circumvent it, well, they're avoiding sanctions. Wow. I mean, you would think that the American government would understand that the Russians can trade and do business with whoever they want, whatever became of the natural gas that the Russians can trade and do business with whoever they want, whatever became of the natural gas that the Germans were supposed to be buying from the Russians before we destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline. I mean, Russia must have found another client for that. Yeah, Russia is working on doing that very thing. There's talk of a pipeline that would run from Russia down through some of its friendly states like Syria and Iran and be loaded there and sold to places like India, Japan. Countries that are nominally US allies or neutral have no shame about buying this product.

They understand perfectly well that what the United States does to Russia today or to China today or to Iran today, if they could turn around and do the same thing to India. There's talking about sanctions on these countries in Africa right now that are throwing out some of their post-colonial leadership. So this is a game that's played over and over again. Well, the neocons just want a finger in every pie, don't they? They want to control the world. And right from the beginning, this is the 25th anniversary of their plan for world domination. And it hinges on the United States outspending and outnumbering all of its adversaries in terms of the military. And of course, this is bankrupting the United States. And it basically is another thing that doesn't Endear any of these countries to us to

have uh how many there are 27 Russia American bases uh close to the Russian border I mean Russia doesn't have any here Russia only has one overseas base and that's in Syria. So, you know, these are the signals that make anti-Americanism becoming in favor yet again. Colonel McGregor, who will be on with us later today, sent me a piece this morning showing that the United States debt service, annual debt services, reached the annual defense budget. So they're both about $880 billion a year. It's the first time we've ever been in a situation that dangerous. And of course, the $880 billion on the defense budget for those 900 foreign military installations that no human being is familiar with all of them, is more, as we know, than the next 12 countries, which includes Russia

and China, their defense budgets combined. I don't know how this ends, to be honest with you. Maybe Donald Trump, if he becomes president again, could end this, although he loved spending on military matters. He seemed to feel that the showy demonstration of Marshall's superiority somehow would keep us safe, even though it's bankrupting us. Yeah, I think you'd have to say all of our recent presidents have bought into that um you know barack obama uh let's face it he talked a good talk when he was in egypt and he won the nobel peace prize but then what did he do he he overthrew a stable government in libya he attacked syria uh attacked Syria. You know, he created the policy of using drones to kill American citizens overseas, as well as other people who fit a profile.

What kind of nonsense is this? It's presidents doing whatever they think they can get away with, killing because they can. Harry Truman, and you and I are not fans of his at all, but in 1963 would lament what the CIA had become and would claim in the pages of The Washington Post, a piece that the editors eventually took down, that he never intended this, the CIA should be shut down. More for the next time. Chris is expressing his opinion that we're going on too long. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you very much, my friend. Well, thank you. All right. If you like what you saw, like, subscribe and tell a friend. Now, Chris, just calm down. Chris, take it easy. This afternoon, we have Scott Ritter at 3.30, Colonel McGregor at 4.30 and Bernie Kerik, the police commissioner of New York City on 9-11 at 5 o'clock, all times Eastern. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.