Judging Freedom - Leaked Pentagon documents - Now What_ - w Phil Giraldi

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, April 10, 2023. It's about 335 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Phil Giraldi, who just came back from Europe, joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Welcome here. It may have been while you were gone, I don't know if you were already back, but twice last week, once on Tuesday and once on Good Friday afternoon, just three days ago, someone who apparently did have lawful access to top secret, no foreign, you can explain what that is in a minute, documents evaluating the relative strength of Russian forces versus the relative strength of Ukrainian forces, released these documents by posting them on an internet website.

Apparently they had been posted a while ago, but the press didn't get wind of it until Tuesday, and then again another batch on Friday. It would seem to me that this, the information in these documents, which you can explain better than I, which apparently evaluated the relative strength of Ukrainian forces versus Russian forces, is some of the highest protected top secrets that we have. If the documents were true, they also seemed to reveal that Secretary of State Blinken, Secretary of Defense Austin, and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley, this is almost shades of the Pentagon Papers, Phil, were not being true to the American

public. What are your thoughts? How could this have happened? Who could have leaked it? Who would have had these things? Well, part of the problem is we, the public, are not really seeing a lot of what the media is playing with on this and what the Pentagon has been describing. I don't know what you've been seeing, but these are photographs of documents that to me look kind of like PowerPoint briefings. So they cover a lot of turf. They have information on China. They have information on what's going on in Ukraine. And it's all kind of snapshot information. Numbers of casualties, weapons received, weapons needed, policies going forward in certain areas. areas and interestingly enough it has indications that the u.s has been spying on people like zelensky to make sure that uh what they're hearing from him and his advisors is is actually true so there are a lot of there are a lot of things that come up and the pentagon has confirmed that these documents are authentic there are photographs of documents uh The detail is not very good if you try to look at it

and figure it out yourself. And there's a lot of contradictory information coming out in terms of people inside the government and elsewhere about what they think it all means. What does top secret, no foreign mean? Well, top secret, of course, explains itself. It's the top basic security category. Top secret is usually defined as something that will do damage and indeed serious damage to American national security. No foreign means no foreigners. It's short for no foreigners, which means this is information considered to be so sensitive that it's not shared with foreign nations. And so when you see a no foreign document, that implies that the person who leaked it was an American official, because a foreign officer would not have had access to it. So somebody committed a felony in the interest

of exposing American duplicity to the public. Fair to say? In part, that would certainly be the case. I'm also suspecting that we might be seeing a Snowden-type case, where you have someone who is very personally concerned about U.S. policy and who is using this to basically discredit some of the foreign and military policies that are currently being pursued. I have that suspicion, and I know a lot of other people government, in the American government, ideologically or morally or legally or constitutionally, put in any adverb that is appropriate, opposed to American military involvement in the war in Ukraine? Well, I get that impression because apparently several of the documents refer to the fact that the judgment clearly coming from inside the Pentagon is that this war is going to drag on. There were several references to the fighting to continue at a high level all the way through 2023. And of course, we've also heard that there are people all the way up to the level of the Secretary of Defense who are concerned that this war might be unwinnable and it might be time to start thinking about negotiations.

Well, the Secretary of Defense is on record. Maybe this is frivolous in the world today, I don't know, I'll say it anyway. The Secretary of Defense is on record of having stated under oath to Senator Roger Wicker of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that he believes that Ukraine will win this war. But if you look at the materials that were leaked, it's clear that he knows, not believes, knows that Ukraine can't win. Should I be surprised at that? No, I think that's general operating procedure. He's going to say one thing that he has to say for his political masters in the White House, and what he actually believes is something quite different.

And that's what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that there is probably a strong undercurrent in the Pentagon and in CIA probably too. In fact, I know that. That this war is basically in its current makeup unwinnable in any real way. So one of the documents, it's hard to tell how many pages there are because you're right, it's not clear. It almost looks like someone took pictures, folded it, put them in a pocket, took them home, opened them up and took a picture again, and that's what was revealed. You can almost see the lines of the creases where something shows that they had been folded to pocket size. But one of the

documents shows in a given period, 71,500 Ukrainian military casualties, 16,000 Russian. 16 000 russian 71 000 to 16 000. these are deaths this is kill ratio now that's an extraordinary uh kill ratio which you never heard from the american government and which if lloyd austin knew about and he must have as the secretary of defense he could not have told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Ukraine's going to win with intellectual honesty. Yeah, absolutely. And there have been some claims that the numbers were somehow altered. Now, I don't even understand what that's supposed to mean. On one hand, they're saying that the documents are authentic. And then they're saying, oh, the numbers are altered. And then if you look at the documents insofar as we've been allowed to see them,

as I say, these look like PowerPoints or something similar to that. And how do you alter the number out of PowerPoint? All right. I don't get this. This is a lot of cover my ass going on. All right. So educate us a little bit. If the Central Intelligence Agency or their colleagues in the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, get raw data from somebody in the field, obviously that raw data, the document on which the raw data is printed is top secret, no foreign. Don't show it to any foreign agents, even those that are our allies. If you take the

data from that and put it up on a flat screen and then take a picture of the flat screen, is that picture also top secret, no foreign, even though what's on the flat screen is a summary made by someone's judgment call of what was on the raw data? Am I right? Well, you're right. As long as the document is labeled top and bottom, top secret, no foreign, it's top secret, no form. It's top secret, no form. And no matter what you do to manipulate it, it's still top secret, no form. Would the Ukraine intel be surprised to know that CIA is spying on President Zelensky and his senior advisors?

Well, they should not have been surprised to know that. The United States spies on all its allies. When I was in the CIA working in Europe, we spied on the Germans, we spied on the Italians, we spied on the Spaniards, we spied on the British, we spied on everybody. In the intelligence world, you don't really trust everyone 100%. Do we spy on the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency? Well, this document would seem to indicate that we do. I would assume we do. I would have always assumed we do. But the fact is they are citing a specific instance of Mossad encouraging its supporters and members to join the demonstrations against Netanyahu.

Again, again, no surprise there. While this is going on, the president of France flew yesterday and today, it's hard to say what day of the week it was because of the change in time zones, from Beijing to Paris. And while on his presidential jet held a small press conference at which he said the United States is not going to be, he didn't use this word, I'll use it, excuse me, Europe is not going to be the poodle to the United States anymore. They're not going to tell us what to do. Europe is a superpower. The U.S. is a superpower. China is and Russia is. We're not listening to the U.S. anymore. Surprised to hear that or about time? Well, I think that's indicative of a much broader shift that's going on. Macron foresees a Europe which is like a third power in the world, that it united with its military capability and economic capability would be a third power. And there was another interesting

thing he alluded to in his comments he he alluded to the fact that the united states dominates through the dollar now this is something that we are hearing from obviously chinese indians uh brazilians uh all of uh and and of course the russians all of whom are looking for a multipolar financial world in which the dollar will no longer be a dominant force. So Macron was coming out with that. So he's obviously kind of playing on the fringes of that concept. As he was leaving Beijing, I guess they let him get far away before this happened, several hundred Chinese military jets circled around Taiwan as if to send some kind of a message to Taiwan, not to President Macron, but to his buddy, Joe Biden. Does Biden get a message like this, or does this animate Biden, who we know wants to run for re-election as a wartime president, into stupidly thinking that we could fight two wars,

one in Ukraine and one in Taiwan? Well, I'm afraid he does stupidly take that. And of course, one of the things to bear in mind about a war against China, you are not fighting with a bunch of quite the same European allies who sit right on Russia's doorstep. You're fighting from bases that are located distance away, and China is fighting on interior lines, and we all know what that means. Here's Admiral Kirby, who was brought up during one of the White House press briefings to talk Kirby, why doesn't the president just call up President Xi of China and say, cut this out? Watch the question, hear the answer. Admiral Kirby To the tension between China and Taiwan, we know the president can pick up the phone any time and

call President Xi. We've been told this call is coming for months. Why know the president can pick up the phone anytime and call President Xi. We've been told that this call is coming for months. Why hasn't he just picked up the phone and called President Xi to say, knock it off? The president looks forward to having another conversation with President Xi, and we'll do that at the appropriate time. I certainly gear eyes to that. It's important that those lines of communication stay open. The tensions are certainly high right now. We'd like to see this relationship get onto a better footing. And when it's appropriate for the two leaders to talk, then that'll happen. That was, of course, Admiral Kirby in the White House press room,

even though it was a Fox reporter that asked the question. The courtesy for the clip goes to Forbes magazine, whose internet streaming service was the first to get it out there. You know, again, what the heck did Admiral Kirby say that is newsworthy? Nothing. It's newsworthy that he tries to answer without being newsworthy at all. Well, he also contradicted himself. He said that it's important to keep the channels open, and then he says we're not going to do anything.

Right, right. So what channels are being kept open? Let me ask you this. Would the CIA have known in advance and advised the president in advance that China was going to start circling Taiwan with a few hundred fighter jets? Well, that's a good question. I'm not sure what the technical capabilities are. That kind of operation would require some preparation, which would require SIGINT, ELINT, various kinds of electronic and verbal transmissions. I don't know to what extent

they have the capability to pick all that stuff up. I would suspect they do, but they might not have drawn the right conclusions. I think China was sending as much of a message, correct me if you think I'm wrong, to the United States as it was to Taiwan. Look what we can assemble over Taiwan in about 15 minutes. You're 10,000 miles away. How the hell do you think you can get this kind of firepower here in enough time to resist us? Yeah, absolutely. I think you're correct. But to me, the ultimate question is, what is our national interest in doing any of this stuff? Why are we thinking that it's a national interest what China's relationship with Taiwan is, which we have already conceded Taiwan to be a part of China? I mean, this is insanity. I guess Joe Biden's national interest is,

in his own mind, in getting reelected, even though he doesn't seem to care about who might die at his command in Ukraine and maybe in Taiwan. I hope to the mother of God I'm wrong. As a result of that wish, It's clear he wants to be a wartime president. It's clear that Admiral Kirby will speak out of both sides of his mouth. It's clear that former four-star general and now Secretary of Defense Austin will speak out of both sides of his mouth. We haven't heard from the Secretary of State since these leaks came out. I just don't know where we go from here. Since we saw you last, the president released $2.8 billion, with a B, more equipment to Ukraine. So we're now up to above $60 billion of the $113 billion blank check that Congress gave him. You were just in Europe.

Is there any finger on the pulse that you had while you were there about how Europeans hear about it? I know I was supposed to give a lecture at the University of Zurich Law School. Zurich, of course, is in Sweden, Excuse me, in Switzerland. Safely neutral, protected by the Alps, not involved in this at all. They keep postponing the lecture. It's not because of me. It's because people are afraid to come out at night. Yeah, well, you know, it was a mixed experience being in Eastern Europe for me over the last three weeks. What kind of surprised me was the fact, as I found, that there was a pretty high measure of support for fighting Russia. And the reason why that this, in my mind, this finally emerged was the fact that these are people who were liberated from communism

about 30 years ago so they remember what it was like and they are now prosperous and and relatively free and they really kind of think of russia as a as as a threat to go back to the old ways to the old systems and this is very deeply in their heads. And so I was quite surprised about that. They think that President Putin, who's more intellectually honest publicly than President Biden is, who recaptured Crimea, which was part of Russia going back to 1730, long before the colonies seceded from Great Britain, they think that he's more of a threat to them than Joe Biden causing World War III and sucking NATO into it. Yeah, that's the odd thing. I mean, to me, they're thinking in short terms and they're thinking in very narrow ways about this kind of thing. Nobody has any respect for Biden.

That's not the issue. But the question is that Putin is a kind of real player. And they do not want any kind of suggestion that they're heading back to where they were 30 years ago. And that's I argue with them. It's a wrong assumption on their part. And it's not even a practical assumption. But the fact is it's in their heads. Here's President Zelensky just over the weekend. You'll hear a translator and the translation is a little odd.

It's almost as if a computer is translating. If it's a person, it's a very, very cold and stultifying way to speak. But it's President Putin, excuse me, President Zelensky, you'll see him speaking his native tongue. You'll hear the translation and his goal will not surprise you, Phil. The world should know respect and order will return to international relations only when the Ukrainian flag returns to Crimea, when there is freedom there, just like everywhere else in Ukraine. Let's play it one more time, Gary. The world should know respect and order will return to international relations

only when the Ukrainian flag returns to Crimea, when there is freedom there, just like everywhere else in Ukraine. Sounds like a statement was written by Victoria Nuland. We will only have peace and order when the Ukrainian flag is flying over Crimea. Why would he be saying something as outrageous and militarily unattainable as that? Well, because he's trying to move the stakes forward and somehow create a commitment beyond what is already on the table to continue this war. And I think he's, of course, delusional, but clearly in the head of himself and his advisors, this is the way he's playing the game. And it certainly will not benefit any of his neighbors, and it will certainly not benefit the United States if this continues to go on. Phil Giraldi, always a pleasure. Thank you very

much. We'll have you back again soon. We missed you while you were away. Glad you had a great trip. If you like what you just saw and heard, my friends, like and subscribe. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.