Judging Freedom - Mossad and CIA: Eyes Open or Closed? w/Ray McGovern fmr CIA

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Mossad and CIA: Eyes Open or Closed? w/Ray McGovern fmr CIA#Israel #palestinian #hamas #UkraineSee 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, October 9th, 2023. Ray McGovern will be with us in just a moment. The Israelis have the best intelligence service in the world, the Mossad. How could they not have seen this coming? But first this. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Lear Capital. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital because it's the right thing to do because the government is regulating too much and printing too much money and reducing the value of everything you earn and everything you own. And the best hedge against this is gold and silver.

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And when you have this conversation with a Lear representative, you'll find out if you can qualify for a $15,000 gold bonus. So call Lear now, 800-511-4620 or learjudgenap.com. Ray McGovern, welcome back to the show, as always, on Monday morning. What is happening in Israel now as we speak? Judge, there has been a debacle with respect to intelligence, which was an utter failure in this case. Scott Ritter has a wonderful article in Consortium News today where he explains from firsthand experience how U.S. intelligence and Israeli intelligence, well, he doesn't use this word, but it's a self-licking ice cream cone. They were supremely confident that all their AI-directed analysis would show if there was some sort of attack like this.

They failed miserably. So much for AI. And with respect to the intelligence community, if whoever's in charge doesn't fire Averill Haynes, head of the National Intelligence Setup, and Bill Burns, head of the CIA, well, they'll never fire them because, well, they give the information to people like Jacob Sullivan, right? And Sullivan says, one week ago, you know, things are really quiet in the Middle East. They've been quieter than the last two decades. I have to spend very little time on the Middle East because nothing, you know, it's very,

very quiet. Wow. So it couldn't be worse with respect to how intelligence is just completely incapable of doing the job. And the job is really important because this is Israel's 9-11, you might say. All right. Before we get to other failures like the Iron Dome, and we have an Israeli American reporter commenting on the failure, the perception of the failures of the Iron Dome. How could Mossad, CIA, MI6, Bibi Netanyahu, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken slash Joe Biden not have known about this? Doesn't Mossad have agents on the ground?

Don't they have listening posts? Aren't they the most sophisticated and effective intelligence service in the world? Or could they have known about it? And they're looking for a plausible excuse to invade Gaza and be rid of Hamas once and for all. Judge, that's a tenable argument, the one you just deduced. Maybe they knew about it and stood back in the eventual hope that they could decimate Hamas and other resistance forces in Gaza. My own view is that that's a stretch. I think this is such an embarrassment to Israel, so many people killed, that I think it's rather a factor of Hamas's accomplished accomplished deception operation.

They learned from two years ago that Israel depends on AI and all kinds of other collection mechanisms to find out what's going on there in Gaza. And so, you know, what they did was operate very, very routinely so that no one would suspect what's coming down the pike. Now, it's a stretch still. I mean, Mossad is quite good, and I thought U.S. intelligence was quite good, too. I no longer think so, okay?

The problem is that, you know, this self-licking ice cream cone, with all the billions we invest in collecting information on things like that, relied too much on this fire hose collection of information and no human analysts to sit there and say, no, wait a second. Now, didn't this happen in 73? I mean, are we going to make the same mistakes as 50 years ago? The answer is, well, yes, they did. The answer is also, there was no human analyst involved in here. Now, I want to make one other point. If people depend on this degree to AI and automated systems and computers and so forth. What happens? What happens when there's a flare-up of indications of an ICBM attack on Russia or vice versa on the United States? My God, these are the same people.

Are they going to knee-jerkedly react and say, oh, this is it? Okay, folks, let it rip. Or are they going to have human people in between, like the Soviets or the Russians have had in the past? Wait a second, let's look at this a little bit more before we destroy the rest of the world. I don't know if we have the capability of doing that now. That really worries me. Dan Ellsberg, in his wonderful book, The Doomsday Machine, said this, where the humans can eliminate the danger of nuclear extinction, it remains to be seen. I choose to act as though it's possible. Well, let's hope it's possible. But the experience right now about Gaza shows that we're heavily dependent on things that can automate us out of existence.

Some of your and my mutual friends in the veteran intelligence personnel for peace, I forget exactly what it stands for, the VIPS group, have been telling me for years that the problem with intel today is that it gathers too much information and doesn't adequately and adequately sift through it to look for the real and present dangers. Does Mossad suffer from the same thing? And flip side to that, does Hamas have intel? And is its intel on the ground in Israel? Well, Hamas has outwitted Israel, let's face it. That's what the evidence shows me. With respect to the fire hose that I mentioned before,

all that information coming in, the challenge has always been, that has always last 20 years, okay, having additionally or equally viable and effective ways to analyze it, and you can't do that real well with computers, okay? So the processing of this information to deal with this fire hose, the technology has faltered. And here's a golden opportunity. Here's a very good example of that, what happened in Gaza. They have all these photos, but who's going to make some sense out of these photos? The photo interpretation used to be done by the CIA and it was somewhat independent. It now is subservient and subordinate to the Pentagon. President Biden knew about it and looked the other way would be simply reprehensible. I mean, there was a concert of hundreds and hundreds of young people there who were the initial target.

If they knew that that was happening, like FDR at Pearl Harbor looking the other way and allowing 3,000 Navy boys to drown to death in a ship where they were sleeping as the Japanese attacked it. If Bibi looked the other way, knowing these people were about to attack a concert of young people, I would think it would be unforgivable, no matter what the outcome of the war might produce. Well, Judge, when the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 170 others, that was unforgivable, too. Did we attack back? Did anybody get prosecuted? Did we do anything in return? LBJ called the retaliatory forces aircraft back from the Ticonderoga and other aircraft carriers in the area. He didn't want to, in his words, embarrass a good ally at this particular point in time. So yeah, unconscionable, but it's happened before. So what's the lesson we draw from this? Well, the Middle East has never been quieter.

You know, I spent very little time on it, and we don't have to worry about that anymore. That's what he said one week ago. So it kind of is a stretch for me to think, although it's a tenable argument, that this was allowed by Israel and by the United States in the hope that they could demolish Hamas definitively. Israel has what's known as the Iron Dome, arguably the most sophisticated missile defense system in the West. Here's an Israeli-American, cut three, Gary, here's an Israeli-American television journalist, I don't know the person, the young man's name, saying the Iron Dome wasn't even working. There is just a state of shock in

this country that they could have been caught so off guard. Something else we've been seeing on the road, the truck has moved away now, but we just saw a truck carrying a battery of Israeli Iron Dome missile interceptors. This is this highly sophisticated Israeli air defense system developed with support from the United States. It is the backbone of Israel's defenses. It is what Israel relies on to protect its civilians from this rocket fire from Gaza. But whatever happened in the early hours of this morning, the Iron Dome was not able to stop this barrage. The Israeli military says it was more than 2,000 rockets fired.

Courtesy of our friends at NBC News. Suspicious. I mean, is the Iron Dome foolproof? Was it turned off or was this small arms fire that the Iron Dome can't protect against. That's what I was thinking. Somebody forgot to put the switch to on. That's the more beneficial, the more benevolent conclusion here, that it works, but it wasn't turned on. It's possible. But all these air defense systems that the US has done. The Patriot didn't work in Ukraine. It was demolished as soon as it was installed. The Iron Dome, you know, these things are technologically very, very good on the drawing board, but when push comes to shove, they often don't work, even if they're turned on. Here's a relaxed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an outdoor courtyard telling the Israeli people that Israel is at war. We are at war, not an operation or in rounds, but at war.

This morning, Hamas launched the murderous surprise attack against the state of Israel and its citizens. We have been in this since the early morning hours. I convened the heads of the security, first of all, to clear out the communities that have been infiltrated by terrorists. This currently is being carried out. At the same time, I have ordered an extensive mobilization of reserves that we return fire of great magnitude. The enemy will pay an unprecedented price. That was Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday.

Also yesterday, before I give you a chance to jump in on this, is the Palestinian representative at the UN speaking in English. Last October, about a year ago, we stated before the Security Council, the Palestinian people will be free one day or another, one way or another. We chose the peaceful way, the one the international community advocates for. Do not let Israel prove us wrong for our sake and theirs. This is not a time to let Israel double down on its terrible choices. This is a time to tell Israel it needs to change course. That there is a time to tell Israel it needs to change course, that there is a path to peace where neither Palestinians nor Israelis are killed.

And it is the one they matrically opposed to the one Israel is embarked on. Israel keeps saying the blockade and repeated assaults on Gaza are to destroy Hamas military capabilities and ensure security. Clearly and expectedly, its blockade and assaults accomplished neither. The only thing they did accomplish was inflicting terrible suffering on an entire civilian population. Probably hear all the neocons this morning encouraging Joe Biden to send a fleet of naval ships there, maybe even troops on the ground. I mean, there's two and a half million people that live in Gaza. They can't really just invade the place and kill wantonly, can they? Yes, they can. They can't kill them all. But this is the largest concentration camp since World War II by far. I have two million people in there, most of them original refugees or descendants of refugees from when the State of Israel was

established in 1948. You know, I remember as a young man in the Bronx, there was great rejoicing. Man, we were so happy at the new state of Israel, and no one told us that there were already people there called the Palestinians. They've been there for decades and centuries. No one told us about that. Well, now we know about that. Now that number from 700,000 expelled from Israel in 1948, We know that half of them ended up in Gaza. They have grown now to two million. And it's, you know, mostly those are people that descended from those refugees. You know, to call this unprovoked, just as we call Russia's invasion of Ukraine unprovoked, just as we call Russia's invasion of Ukraine unprovoked. It's a big stretch. You know, you have to read the New York Times religiously to believe that. And ain't so. It's provoked. And there are people who have been warning the United States. Not only is this a danger to

Israel, it's a danger to the United States, because we know that the mastermind of 9-11 explains his motivation by saying, I was motivated by my deep hatred of U.S. policy favoring Israel. That's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his nephew said the same thing after he was convicted for prison for over 100 years for having tried to down the Twin Towers in 1993. His name was Ramzi Youssef. He happened to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew. So, you know, unless we address this, it's going to happen again. And it's going to happen not only to the Israelis.

It's going to happen to us. Let's get back to whether Intel was off guard. Kerry, cut number five. Here's Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday on Meet the Press declining to answer if the intelligence communities, U.S., Great Britain, Israel, were off guard. Do you acknowledge that both Israeli intelligence officials and U.S., Great Britain, Israel were off guard. Do you acknowledge that both Israeli intelligence officials and U.S. intelligence officials were caught off guard here? This is an attack that I don't think anyone saw coming in the immediate. So was it an intelligence failure, Mr. Secretary? Do you acknowledge it was an intelligence failure? We will have plenty of time to, the Israelis will have plenty of time to look into that.

All of us will have time to look into that. The focus now has to be on making sure that Israel has what it needs to deal with this attack. Will we ever know the truth, Ray? I mean, the intelligence community, it's bread and butter is lying. Will we ever know, was it an intelligence failure or did they know and look the other way? Well, in my view, we know now, Judge, it was a spectacular failure on the part of intelligence. Scott Ritter explains how this all came about in his article today in Consortium News. He knows better than anyone since he's dealt both with these Israeli folks and the Hoi Aristo that runs our policy toward Israel and Palestine. So

it's very clear what happened. Here's Blinken. You know, he destroyed the State Department's independent intelligence operation called Intelligence and Research. He and his forebears twisted that into an echo of what the policy is supposed to be. It used to be really good. And there are no independent intelligence agencies left around to protect us. And as I say, this worries me strategically with respect to nuclear possibilities, as well as, well, if you can say tactically, with respect to what happens in Gaza now. And God help us all. You know, the question is whether Iran will stand still for what the Israelis now will almost certainly do in Gaza. I don't know about that, but that's the big question.

This is a strategic problem here with respect to that part of the world. Will Israel attack Iran? I don't think they'll attack Iran because that would mean the end of Israel. I mean, Iran has that capability now. What they might do is, well, try to prevent Iran from helping Hamas, of course, and whether they can do that anymore without inciting a war with Iran remains to be seen. The other factor here is the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement, which Sullivan and Blinken and all those guys put so much value on. Well, it's gone. It's gone because the Saudis can't possibly do what they were intending to do at our behest in cultivating a closer relationship with Tel Aviv.

Ray McGovern, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much. We'll look forward to seeing you at the end of the week in the Intelligence Roundtable with Larry Johnson. I'm sure there'll be much more to explore by then. For Judging Freedom coming up later today, my dear friends, Larry Johnson. These are Eastern Times, East Coast, United States.

Larry Johnson at 3.30, Colonel McGregor at 4.30, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at five o'clock. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.