Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: Israel Provoking Wider War.

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Larry Johnson: Israel Provoking Wider War.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 Monday, April 8th, 2024. Larry Johnson joins us now for his regular Monday morning time with us. Larry, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thanks, Judge. for its targeting purposes on a software program, which is essentially artificial intelligence known in Israel as Lavender, but which essentially input the names of suspected Hamas members and assigned numbers to them from 100 down to zero, and that it was in fact a computer who decided what bombs to drop and who to kill and what type of ammunition to use and not a human being. Now, we are one step closer to the world

of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the movie Terminator, where these decisions are taken out of human hands. But the problem with AI across the board is it's garbage in, garbage out. So no matter, it can be the best software that once you've got it set up and operating, it can give you certain answers. But I did a test. I asked this one chat GP application that can produce stories. I said, please write me a story explaining how the Nazi ghetto in Warsaw is similar or different from the

Israeli ghetto in Gaza. And he comes back and goes, oh, can't do that. That's too sensitive a subject. Right away, right there, tells you exactly. The programmers put some constraints around it so that they're going to limit what they come out with.

So, I mean, it's just people that want to rely on that stuff are, you know, it's ironic. They call it artificial intelligence, and you're being genuinely stupid for relying on it. Well, however the choices are made who to kill, that does not absolve the human beings who operate this from moral and legal culpability for the decisions to kill us. And that's not going to say a computer decided to kill the seven aid workers and therefore we wash our hands of culpability? Yeah. Well, by divorcing yourself from having to make the actual decisions,

you eliminate, if you will, the morality of the human being. In other words, again, we saw this in World War II with the Einsatzgruppen that was going through Ukraine, where they were lining, you know, stripping people naked, putting them in ditches and shooting them. And what the German military leadership discovered was this was causing enormous psychological problems. So they had to come up with a way to execute, do mass executions without the people being directly involved. And that's really what it's evolved to with Netanyahu and them, where they can basically execute mass executions without actually having to feel personally

responsible for it, even though they absolutely are. Israel, you have argued, is trying to provoke a wider war in the Middle East and hence its demolition of the consulate adjacent to the embassy of Iran in Damascus. Isn't Israel risking exposing itself to catastrophic response given the number of long-range missiles and their location deep into the earth that Iran has. Yes, absolutely. But they're not thinking about this rationally. So, yeah, the news that's reported today is that a significant number, if not most, of the Israeli troops have now pulled out of Gaza, but they continue to launch bombs and cruise missile strikes drone strikes on sites within Rafa but I

you know I think the repositioning they're going they're going to invade southern Lebanon we're coming to the end of Ramadan and with the end of Ramadan I fully expect Israel to do that and they And they've made no secret of their desire to go in, and they cite widespread public support. But all this is taking place against the background of growing political unrest within Israel. Our old friend Benjamin, you know, Itamar Ben-Gavir is saying that unless Netanyahu launches this offensive into Rafah and devastates and kills the Palestinians, that his government no longer has a leg to stand on. Now, he's made these threats in the past and has never acted on them. But, you know, this may be the exception to that. But at the same time, it could be that the withdrawal of these Israeli

forces is to reposition them so that they can go into southern Lebanon. And if they do that, they're not, you know, Hamas is not a well-organized, well-disciplined military force. They're essentially a guerrilla force. That's not Hezbollah hezbollah is a genuine army and they've got the the chain of command and discipline and organization and skills that are going to confront israel with something it really hasn't faced uh since maybe this uh 73 war notwithstanding the catastrophic destruction of Gaza and the 33,000 deaths, has Israel defeated Hamas or has Hamas defeated Israel? Well, Israel certainly has not defeated Hamas. And a defeat of Hamas would mean that the leadership was decimated, its finances were in disarray, and it had nobody willing to pick up a weapon to fire at the Israelis.

So clearly, from that standpoint, Hamas is winning. But it's covered a terrible cost. But I think Hamas was willing to have that cost paid in terms of the lives of all of these Palestinian women, children, and elderly, because it has evoked some global outrage. But as we saw, what it took was ultimately killing the seven Caucasians, the Europeans, the Canadians, in order to generate some real outrage at the Israeli excess. And that pressure may be related to the Israeli decision to withdraw from Gaza today as well. Here's a clip.

You and I are not fans of his. He has a lot to answer for, Leon Panetta. But he does make some very interesting observations, basically saying, hey, Bibi, you can't destroy Hamas. Cut number five. Netanyahu keeps saying we're going to destroy Hamas. Look, you're not going to destroy Hamas. Hamas is going to be around. What you can destroy is the leadership that was involved by Hamas in the attack on October 7th. And I don't think he's made that clear,

that ultimately this is about killing the leadership of Hamas, not just wiping out Hamas. If we had a better sense of mission here, I think we'd have a better sense of how this war could come to an end. Yeah. You know, if you and Ray and Ritter and McGregor and Alistair have all said the same thing, Hamas

is an idea. You can't kill an idea. Well, yeah, and Panetta's comments are emblematic of what we've seen across the board with U.S. military leadership. It's this foolish notion that, boy, if we just kill the leadership, we're going to change the game.

You know, it's a little like the pro football. Let's fire the head coach. And boy, that will change everything for the team. Well, you either have the players or you don't. You know, that's number one. So and what happens a lot of times, if they think that just killing this top leadership is somehow going to make Hamas more are more aggressive and less patient and can actually create more violence, not less. How conflicted is Biden on this? Is he still straddling?

It appears to me to be still attempting to straddle the fence, admonishing Netanyahu, threatening him behind the scenes. Maybe this statement from Panetta was some sort of a message from his buddy, Joe Biden, I don't know. But on the other hand, supplying him with all the weapons and instruments of killing that he wants. Who the hell knows? Maybe this lavender AI was developed in the U.S. and we sent it to them. Well, Joe Biden certainly is not driving this train. And what he is doing is taking direction from the Sullivans and the Blinkens and others around him. And, you know, frankly, they've got him going in both directions. So you can at least have some empathy with him for not knowing where he is and what's up.

Because, you know, I mean, on the one hand, okay, we're going to send these bombs to Israel. Give them everything they want. Okay, now we're going to condemn Israel because they're being bad. Okay, they're bad, but we're giving them weapons. Okay. And then the Muslim and Arab communities in the United States who are American citizens, who are voters, they are sending some very strong messages. The White House had to cancel the Eid dinner, the dinner at one of the celebrations for the end of Ramadan. Yeah, people said, no no we're not going and the reason was we're not going to sit and eat and celebrate while our

Palestinian brothers and sisters are starving that's right we're not going to do that and so here's by you know so Biden is sending mess you know the the dual messages from both sides and then you're starting to see the fractures emerge with, you know, greater fractures within the Democrat Party with, you know, Nancy Pelosi now coming out and basically calling for an arms embargo. Here's an interesting piece put together by producers at ABC News, Martha, excuse me, yeah, ABC News, Martha Raddatz interrogating Kirby. I mean, Admiral Kirby's a fool. We know that. However, this is more interesting for the question than for his nonsensical answer, because the question includes a timeline of events and American comments in response,

but no actions in response. Number three, Chris. I want to show you a timeline, Admiral Kirby, and wonder why things might change this time. November 6th, death toll in Gaza passes 10,000. November 10th, Secretary Blinken, far too many Palestinians have been killed. December 12th, Biden says Israel is losing support to indiscriminate bombing. December 22nd, death toll in Gaza passes 20,000.

February 8th, President Biden calls a response in Gaza over the top. February 29th, death toll in Gaza passes 30,000. March 2nd, Vice President Harris said there must be an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks. April 1st, IDF strike kills seven World Central kitchen aid workers. So why do you think anything will change? I'm glad you brought that timeline up because it shows the degree, the growing degree of frustration that we've had with the way these operations are being prosecuted

and the way that the Israelis are acting on the ground in terms of civilian casualties. So we have been increasingly frustrated. And again, that was a core message that the president delivered to Prime Minister Netanyahu in their phone call this week, this past week, that if they've got to do more, they've got to make changes. Now, the prime minister assured the president that he would do that. We've seen some announcements in those early hours. That's welcome. We've got to see more. We've got to see it over time.

This is naivete on stilts, Larry. We're sending sterner letters, but hey, still more bombs, more missiles, more artillery shells. So, you know, this is like parenting 101. If you have a kid and you tell them not to do X, Y, and Z, and they do X, Y, and Z, and then you give them ice cream and cookies, well, what's the lesson that's learned? Same thing with dogs. So dogs and kids can figure this out.

Netanyahu's figured it out. It's Biden and his team that haven't figured it out. And that's because they're trying to have it both ways. They're trying to give Israel everything at once and trying to convince a bunch of, they're hoping, stupid voters that, boy, they're getting really tough on Israel and that just trust us.

We'll bring Israel to heel. You know, in Alistair's reporting, he reveals that not AI, but whoever's managing the AI, has decided to use the so-called dumb bombs because they cost less, since they don't have the radar feature in them, but they do more destruction. They do more killing. These people actually have an algorithm of how many civilians can be killed for one Hamas member and the number of civilian deaths permissible under their rules, not under morality or international law, but under their own rules, expands with the number that's on the forehead of the Hamas person. So if the forehead of the Hamas person is 100,

then there's a vast number of civilians that can be killed. This is reprehensible. This is a tyrant's dream, this lavender. Well, look, what the Israeli military operation in Gaza has exposed is the total incompetence of the Israeli military. Gosh, they can kill unarmed civilians. Heavens, they can bomb hospitals and schools that have no air defense and kill all those people. Yeah, anybody can do that. And when you compare that Israel is fighting in an area that's roughly the size of Avdiivka in Ukraine, and that the Russians have been fighting along a line that's a hundred times bigger than anything Israel is confronting,

and they're making progress. And here's Israel going up against unarmed population without artillery, without air defense, without tanks. And they're still, they've struggled. They've absolutely struggled to exert any control. The only thing they can do is a scorched earth policy of killing civilians and now trying to starve them to death. Transitioning over to Ukraine, I am still startled. You and I and Ray talked about this on Friday because I just finished the interview with Colonel Wilkerson right before we had the roundtable. I'm still startled by what Colonel Wilkerson said, and I would like to explore it with you a little bit. But first, let's listen to what he said about his belief that the Russians believe and that there is evidence to believe that the CIA was involved in the Crocus attack. Number one, Chris.

This looks a lot like what Nord Stream turned out to be, a U.S. operation. Only the CIA led it. Let's face it. We have done as much to create and to nurture ISIS as anything else on the face of the earth, whether it be Aba Musab al-Zarqawi or any of the instigators of the so-called ISIS consulate in the beginning. We've used ISIS. And when I say we, I mean that agency called the CIA, the same agency that does so many nefarious things in our name. And they have worked ISIS and worked operatives from ISIS in order to do other things. And I'm hearing and it makes a lot of sense to

me, and I'm watching the behavior and the signals coming from Moscow, which are usually very indicative of the truth when it's something like this. And I think that's what Putin believes. And I think the intelligence community in Russia, whether it's the GRU, the NKPD, the KSB, the FSB, or whatever, they believe it too. And that makes this Ukraine conflict a different conflict as of that killing of that many Russians that close to Putin and blame lying, at least in part, with the people who orchestrated it being the CIA. Hold your memory of what he said for a second. I want to play the last public statement from Victoria Nuland before she left office, warning about a nasty surprise for President Putin. Listen for her use of the word asymmetric. With the $60 billion supplemental that the administration has requested of Congress, we can ensure that Ukraine not only

survives, but she thrives. With this support in 2024, we can help ensure Ukraine can continue to fight, to build, to recover, and to reform. With this money, Ukraine will be able to fight back in the east, but it will also be able to accelerate the asymmetric warfare that has been most effective on the battlefield. And as I said in Kiev three weeks ago, this supplemental funding will ensure Putin faces some nasty surprises on the battlefield this year. All right, so you can see where I'm going. Is this woman no longer in the State Department hinting that the battlefield was the Crocus Concert Hall. Well, she certainly made that a possibility.

I think, you know, you can't rule out that she was actually that stupid as trying to tip the hand. Boy, we're really going to, you know, sock it to you, Russia. But this is another illustration of the incompetence of the entire Biden foreign policy team. They say things in public that then later can come back to really bite them in the rear end. And so with respect to what, you know, the other Larry was saying, it is clearly the United States had knowledge of this attack. Now, to the extent that does that mean that it directed it or that it helped organize it fact that for the last 10 years and before that, the CIA has been very active in Ukraine.

It's been very involved with working with its intelligence services and with its military and a variety of attacks against Russia. They have been directly involved with terrorist attacks. So what we're looking at here is that it's natural suspicion to say that, yeah, the U.S. was involved with this. Whether the U.S. was involved with the Crocus attack or not does not change the trajectory of the war and it has not altered Russia's plans to destroy the Ukrainian military and destroy NATO by proxy. Do you think that Newland and her neocon buddies, who, as we know, do not have a reverse gear in their lexicon,

who never admit publicly that they're wrong, recognize that Ukraine has been trounced on the battlefield, and have now engaged in or advised asymmetric warfare. And as you answer that, I know you were in analysis, not in operations, but you understand the mentality in operations. Is there a branch of the CIA that has no sense of humanity that would look the other way at the slaughter of 144 kids at a concert? Well, yeah, you get focused on the mission and don't think about the human cost. Because, you know, candidly, if you started thinking about the actual damage that you're inflicting on human beings, it would drive a person with a moral conscience mad.

This concept of asymmetric warfare, I mean, this is a tacit admission that Ukraine is losing because asymmetric warfare implies that the side that one side enjoys enormous advantage and the other side is at a disadvantage. Well, duh. I'm glad they've awakened to this fact, the fact that Ukraine does not have air power to speak of, that its air defenses have been shredded, that it cannot sustain an artillery battle with the Russians on any kind of level, that they are at least at a disadvantage with Russia firing five to eight times more artillery shells. And then apart from that, wearing out the barrels and the trained personnel. They keep losing men that are not easily replaced and there's no training pipeline for them. So it's boom, boom, boom, boom. One thing after another. Of course, it's an asymmetric battle. And that means Ukraine cannot win. So Cy Hersh has reported that Joe Biden himself

authorized the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. If this crocus attack was planned by MI6 and CIA, would it not have required approval at the top before they could use American assets to kill Russian civilians? Well, that's one possibility. But the other thing, this all could have been covered by an existing finding. In other words, the finding where the president is asked to sign off on, the goal of our operation is regime change in Moscow to eliminate Vladimir Putin. And to this end, you are authorizing us to take all necessary actions that will be required to accomplish that. You get something that broad. And so they'd be operating under that kind of umbrella where it would still give Biden. I mean, apart from his own mental problems right now, he would also then have some genuine plausible deniability. Of course, when he's saying, I can't remember, that you're probably right. I don't know.

It's just terrifying to me how all of this seems to be accelerating. You and your colleagues on this show and elsewhere have been warning against this, and now we seem to be seeing it right under our noses. And Putin's being very patient and very deliberate. I mean, Alistair argues that we in the West do not have the patience or understanding of the Russian mentality, that they have patience and understanding of the Western mentality, and their understanding of us is greater than our understanding of them. Do you buy that? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, just an illustration, I wrote about it last night, Western mentality and their understanding of us is greater than our understanding of them. Do you buy that? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, just an illustration. I wrote about it last night. You find in the West, they keep talking about Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian dictator. I said, really? He's an authoritarian strongman, huh? So how many political prisoners does Russia have? And, you know, the news reports about 657.

Well, compare that number to the almost 1300 that the Biden administration has arrested and charged for walking into the Capitol. That's just that one instance. And that doesn't get into the persecutions of Donald Trump and all of the people that work for him, such as going after his lawyer, John Eastman. And then what about the federal government interfering with social media and deliberately targeting conservative groups and the federal government cracking down on doctors and scientists who came out and correctly warned the dangers of the COVID vaccine. So all of a sudden, who are we to sit there and call Vladimir Putin an authoritarian strongman when we're the ones acting, you know, the Hulk? We're out of control in this country. You know, in Russia, if you go protest outside an abortion center, you don't get arrested. In the United States, they've got people who've been protesting outside

an abortion center who are then being incarcerated, punished. You tell me which is the authoritarian state. In the little town adjacent to where I live, there's Planned Parenthood, and a group from the Catholic Church, of which I'm a member, goes there on Saturday morning to say the rosary, and the town sends a cop. The cop is not there to protect the people saying the rosary. He's there to protect the people walking into the abortion clinic, as if the people with the rosary are He's there to protect the people walking into the abortion clinic as if the people with the rosary are going to harm those that are going into the abortion clinic. This is America today. Yeah. And that's what we don't understand Russia. I mean, Russia is not the Soviet Union. And yet we're not talking your average man and woman on the street. We're talking people who are senior positions at the Central Intelligence Agency,

at the Defense Intelligence Agency, at the Department of State, and at the Pentagon, who continue to harbor these images of current modern-day Russia as if it was the old Soviet Union. I mean, I know one of these recently retired State Department officials myself. She moved down here. She actually did a tour in Moscow back in the 1990s. And my God, listening to her,

there's no way to reason with her. This is what frightens me, that can't we sit down and have a, let's have an objective discussion. Okay, you want to say Vladimir Putin's an authoritarian strongman? a, let's have an objective discussion. Okay, you want to say Vladimir Putin's an authoritarian strongman? Okay, let's look at the evidence. How many people are getting jailed?

Or, you know, what kind of crackdowns on free speech and on civil liberties? And then all of a sudden we can come up to the conclusion, well, you know what? We live in a big glass house and we should be the last one throwing rocks at anybody. Nicely put. Thank you, Larry. Thanks for your insight.

Intelligence Roundtable is on Thursday afternoon this week. I look forward to seeing you, my friend. All the best. Oh, my. Good. Thanks, Judge. Great. A great interview with a fearless and courageous and very knowledgeable friend. Kyle Anselone from NAWard.com at two o'clock this afternoon, Eastern. See you then. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching.