Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi (fmr. CIA) - Support for Ukraine is Collapsing.

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

#Politics #ukraine #israel Imagine a world where the underbelly of politics, fraught with secrets, alliances, and betrayals, comes to light. Welcome to our deep dive into the riveting political chessboard surrounding Ukraine, with insights from our guest, the astute Phil Giraldi. We unravel the murky motivations behind a CIA leak involving a jailed Ukrainian colonel and scrutinize its ripple effects on Ukraine's dwindling support. As we traverse the global political terrain, we’ll also probe the sudden shift in narrative from Ukraine's conflict to Middle-East tensions, steered by a U.S. ally.Pack your political compass as we journey into the tumultuous rule of President Zelensky in Ukraine. Marvel at Giraldi's sharp analysis of Zelensky's failed U.S. visit, the intelligence community's cynical assessment of his government's stability, and the chilling assassination of his chief of staff. We wade into the dark waters of canceled 2024 elections, Zelensky's desperate attempts to woo Washington, and the chilling possibility of CIA involvement in a potential assassination plot. This episode promises a thought-provoking discourse on the labyrinthine politics of Ukraine. Polish off your Cold War knowledge and join us for a rollercoaster ride through the twilight zone of geopolitics.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 Wednesday, November 15th, 2023. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure, my friend. I want to spend some time with you on the collapse in America and in the West of support for Ukraine, notwithstanding all the warnings that the neocons gave us of the catastrophe that would come about if Ukraine failed to repel the Russians. But before we do that, there's a couple of other things I want to ask you about. Over the weekend, the CIA leaked to the Washington Post this bizarre, almost ridiculous tale about a Ukrainian colonel in jail in Ukraine, having orchestrated and pulled off, there he is in a holding cell in a Kiev courtroom. He's apparently in jail for something having nothing to do with Nord Stream. He's in jail because of some allegations that when he tried to flip a Russian pilot to become a defector and work for the Kiev government, something went wrong and people died. I don't know the facts. And he since has denied involvement with Nord Stream. But the Washington

Post reported what the CIA, your former employer, wanted them to report, which is that this guy, whoever he is, orchestrated and pulled off the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. Does anybody take this stuff seriously? And since I know you're going to say no, why does the CIA leak this garbage? Well, I think it's all part of the fact that this war is not, lots of people are dying, but this war in a sense is a political war. And it's being fought for a lot of bad reasons. And there's a lot of intrigue going on

around what is taking place in it right now zolinski is probably the only senior member of the ukrainian government who really wants to continue the war such as it is uh and uh this is is part of a conspiracy. This colonel in question apparently has a relationship with Zaluzhny, who is the general in charge of the Ukrainian army, who is in a bad relationship with Zelensky. And so it's kind of to implicate him in a lot of ways as being the fool or the tool behind the pipeline bombing. But people who know the technologies involved and the skills involved are totally dubious about this. They say this whole thing, as imagined on this small vessel with a team of people who didn't know how to do this,

the deep sea diving aspects of it, the explosives aspects of it, they don't buy into it at all. They think, again, this is some kind of political game that's going on, and it's being done to support Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and he's turning on his own people. So the CIA doesn't care if it insults our intelligence. They didn't care when they leaked the story about six people on a sailboat like the Minnow and Gilligan's Island somehow having to pull it off. And they don't care if they insult our intelligence by leaking this. Do you think that this has to do with the dispute between General Zelensny and President Zelensky over the prosecution of the war. Zeluzny told The Economist magazine last weekend that the war was at a stalemate.

Zelensky erupted almost violently and publicly condemned the words of his commander in chief. Yeah, that's precisely the way I would put it. I think that obviously we have a realist in charge of the soldiers and he's watching them die in front of them. And we have a guy who, for political reasons and personal reasons, I suspect, too, wants to continue this war and is delusional about it. He had a very bad trip to Washington back in September, where it was pretty clear that the writing was, even in Washington, sort of coming on the wall in terms of, you know, what people were recognizing and how far the United States was willing to go to sustain this terrible narrative that's being played out. I want you to watch this clip, Sat No. 1, Chris, the one that ends with hogwash, and tell me what you think of it.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said just this morning that while Hamas has committed war crimes, the collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime. Can you definitively say right now that Israel is not breaking international law? Yes, I can say that what the commissioner said is hogwash. Doesn't really address the issue at all. And I suppose he's just like swatting a fly or dandruff off his shoulder and not taking seriously at all the fact that collective punishment is by definition a war crime. Yeah, that's precisely the issue. And every human rights organization in the world, just about, including the relevant United Nations bodies, have declared this to be a war crime. And they have also declared it to be a genocide because of the scale of it.

We have what, as of this morning, in excess of 12,000 dead Palestinians, of which maybe half are children. I mean, this is indefensible. If the Israelis felt they had to punish Hamas and go after Hamas, they should have punished Hamas and gone after Hamas instead of promiscuously bombing and shooting innocent civilians. This is totally unacceptable. And it's totally unacceptable that the United States government is in this up to its eyeballs is providing the funding for this war and it's providing the weapons uh that means our our beloved president Joe Biden is a war criminal and I would say most of the the cabinet that he relies on for opinion in this issue issue are also war criminals. Why has support for Ukraine been collapsing?

Well, that's a tricky question. I would say support for Ukraine is collapsing because it's unsustainable, and it always has been. But I would say there's a bigger issue that plays out in Washington, which is the fact now we have two wars going, and the other war is being played out by a, quote, ally who has a very lot of influence in Washington and has kind of shifted the narrative. narrative uh you don't see i was curious today i said i wonder if i'm going open the papers this morning and see any coverage on ukraine and i went through the washington post i went to the new york times there were a couple of benign pieces just kind of backgrounders but there was not really anything on substantive of was going on. But there were a host of articles on what is going on in Gaza and Israel. So it shows that the media, which is very quick to jump on the issues that it really cares about, like Israel, was ready to go.

So this is what the public is seeing. And this is what it's hearing from our beloved president and the crew around him uh that this is uh a just war another war in support of democracy you know all of the shibboleths that are played out very excellently by the white house but this is all nonsense uh uh you know israel is no is no democracy uh this war is all about uh 75 years of oppression of the palestinian people and there were other ways to approach a solution to it but we're seeing the bloody way and that seems to be what the white house wants back to um Back to Ukraine, what is bringing about the fall of Zelensky? Is it the Russian military? Is it the destruction of his own military?

Is it a recognition by his own people that they're just sending troops into a meat grinder, troops that are ill-prepared and ill-equipped? Is it all the way above or is it something else? Well, I think it's a mixture of all that. I mean, this is a war that manifestly is on the verge of being lost in a historic or tactical sense. And it's a hard thing to swallow. There was one of the quotations that I was fond of in the Time magazine article where a senior general said, yeah, the West can send us all the weapons they want, but we don't even have the soldiers to pick up the weapons and use them. There's been a huge erosion of manpower in Ukraine. There was over the weekend, there were some videos that I saw of men in their 60s being rounded up on the street by MPs or military police, I guess.

And they were being hauled off to be put in uniform and shoved into the front line with virtually no training. So this is what they're down to the um time magazine reporter whom president zielinski allowed to accompany him uh throughout his uh less than successful trip to the united states last fall and then who accompanied president zielinski back to back to Kiev and who interviewed the people around him, quoted one of them, you can see it there on the screen, quoted one of the people around him as saying he's delusional. We're out of options. We're not winning, but try telling him that. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the situation. And the journalist in this case, Simon Schuster, experienced overseas journalist, basically heard this not from one person who might have had a personal grudge against Zelensky, but from numerous people at the highest levels in the in the government and the military. So we have to take it that there is a definite

division going on in terms of Zelensky and a whole lot of other officials and military officers who don't see it his way. Do your CIA sources inform you of the lack of stability of the Zelensky government. I'll just give you a couple of observations. I already mentioned to you General Zelushny's statement, the wars that have staled me, President Zelensky's condemnation of it, the assassination of General Zelushny's chief of staff. He opened up what he was told was a birthday gift, and it turned out to be a live grenade and it killed him. And I think very tellingly, and you rarely see this in the American press, Phil, President Zelensky has canceled elections for 2024. So do those things together, plus what your intelligence sources can inform you of, give you reason to question the stability of the Zelensky government and maybe Zelensky himself?

Yeah, well, from what I'm hearing, the intelligence community, both the CIA and military intelligence and even State Department intelligence are all lined up in terms of saying that this is a losing game right now. And their only kind of disagreements are over how long Zelensky will continue to last and how he will pull the plug. Obviously, it's a well-known fact within the community that Zelensky has squirreled away a lot of money in the seven or so mansions that he has various places overseas. And he's not unique in this. We've had people telling us about, also recently, being more open about the corruption inside Ukraine. And we had one senior official telling Schuster that everybody is stealing everything. So this is where we're at. At one point, President Zelensky asked Prime Minister Netanyahu to receive him.

And Netanyahu said no. And then Netanyahu changed his mind. And now Zelensky is scheduled to go there. What on earth is that all about? Well, this is Zelensky's, and now he's decided that's a way to improve his image and to improve the willingness of Washington to go, you know, one step more or two steps more, or I think what he would like is to have this carry on into the spring, which would probably kill another half million Ukrainian soldiers. This is him.

He's talking about him. If he meets with Netanyahu, that is something that will play well in the White House. And Netanyahu, you will certainly send that signal. But my understanding as of today was that um he's supposed to be going on the visit but they then now hasn't given him a date yet uh so we'll see how that plays um if the cia thought that zielinski had to go would they arrange for his assassination? They might. It depends on how they felt the situation would have to be manipulated to get rid of him if they saw him as a detriment or as someone who

single-handedly would stop some kind of resolution in the fighting. They might do that, but they would more likely try to get one of the local government officials or generals who is hostile to him to figure out a way to arrange it. That would be the preferred solution. Here's President Zelenskyy yesterday in one of his addresses to the nation. The translation is into English, but it's done by a computer. Russian assaults are very intense, especially in Donetsk region. We have to realize that Putin has a very cynical and specific political goal right now, and he is willing to kill as many of his people as he needs to,

because he wants to show at least some tactical results in the first half of December. That's when he plans to announce his elections. Russia is already losing soldiers and equipment near Avdivka faster and on a larger scale than, for example, near Bakhmut. It is extremely difficult to withstand this onslaught. We continue to work with our partners, especially in the United States, to ensure that support for Ukraine is maintained at the level that is needed now. I am grateful to our partners for their understanding of Ukraine's needs. These days, the Ukrainian delegation is in Washington. Important meetings took place.

The US Secretary of State and his team, national security advisors to the President of the United States and the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, representatives of American civil society, and heads of international financial and development institutions. We are preparing for the next year. I'm preparing for the next year for Wall Street to lend money to the construction companies that will rebuild the damage the war has caused once Zelensky is gone. That's about the only truthful statement, I think, in what he just made. But what do you think, Phil?

Well, I was just kind of wondering about halfway through what he was drinking. As you pointed out just now, there may have been one truthful statement in that whole monologue. The Russians are not being defeated on the ground. Nobody's saying that but him. And this high-level presence in Washington, working with all the allies and everything like that, there certainly are Ukrainians here. But the fact is, it's not being reported much. And I haven't seen a whole lot in terms of offers of aid or other concessions coming out. This is not being reported either.

So I think this he's kind of expanding on what he thinks his appeal in Washington is right now. He's about as low as he can go. You know, the Russians and the Ukrainians had a deal. It would, of course, have resulted in Ukraine rejecting NATO or withdrawing its application for NATO. They had negotiated for the deal. This was right about at the start of hostilities, maybe even a little before, until Joe Biden sent Boris Johnson in there to say, oh, no, no, no, no, the UK and the US have your back. I if boris johnson if he has a head and a heart and a soul rejects or or regrets i should say what he did well i would say boris johnson based on his political career doesn't have much of either but the the fact is he's a kind of an opportunist

kind of a dimwit and uh but he was his job. He was the messenger boy being sent by the White House to get this thing going. And this was made very clear in some of the press coverage in the last couple of days, that we were the ones pushing the issue and Johnson was just the emissary, which is kind of interesting that means we provoke the war uh again is this something that uh joe biden is proud of um three quarters of a million people may be dead as a result of this um this is a tragedy all around and we have a government that increasingly keeps crying about its humanity while at the same time, you know, engaging in genocides and then in war generation. This is incredible. What is the off ramp for the neocons? I mean, I can hear Senator Lindsey Graham's voice in my ear, not literally, thank God, saying, you know, if we don't stop Putin here, he's going to go on to Poland and Romania.

The discredited, the well-discredited domino theory that the neocons love. You don't stop him and Baghdadi is going to go to Baltimore. That's basically their nonsense. But what out do they have? Forget about Ukraine. We have to save Israel. Forget about it. There's a million people dead.

There's 10 million people, well, half a million people dead. There's 10 million people displaced and 115 billion American taxpayer dollars down the drain. They want us to forget about it? Well, I think if you look at the kind of founding documents of the neocons back in the 1990s, you will discover that their basic principle is that the United States should be so powerful that it cannot be challenged in any part of the world that even vaguely matters. And that includes just about everywhere. And so that's the way they think. The issue is, and of course, that's the way they acted uh with the iraq war and afghanistan and and libya and syria and any any number of other places we might cite and the balkans um that's the way they acted

and they're not going to give up too easily but the fact is if the system is broken, as I suspect we can all agree it is in terms of Ukraine as a possible victor in this conflict, then at a certain point, you just have to give it up. But Israel, of course, is a much bigger priority for them. And so that's a game that's kind of playing out right now. One of our regular commenters who goes by the name of Pete Pete says, judge a lot more than 100 billion phony Pentagon accounting. Boy, is he right about that? Remember when the Pentagon said they they under evaluated whatever the hell we gave to Ukraine by six billion how could they make a mistake of such a colossal number try telling the IRS you forgot about six billion and see where that gets you well I mean it's funny that uh not funny but I mean the fact is that uh I've seen certainly some calculations as I'm sure you have also that uh all of these

ventures that have taken place since the war on terror began which is a neocon contrivance uh have cost five trillion dollars which has been piled on the national debt wow uh we don't pay for anything anymore. Yeah, well, Iraq and Afghanistan are $3 trillion. George W. borrowed all of that. All we do is now print money to pay the interest on the borrowed money. So Kevin DeMeritt, one of our economics guys who was on yesterday, said that interest rates just have to stay where they are. And in a year, the federal government's interest obligations, interest, it's debt service, $1 trillion a year. So whatever they collect in taxes, take $1 trillion, I'm talking about your pooch, not mine, trillion off. Or go and do something that the banks would never let you do for what you owe the banks,

which is borrow the trillion and add to the principal that you still owe. Yeah, well, that's it. That's it. This is the decline and fall of the American empire. It is. We're watching it play out from front row seats, and nobody in Washington seems to care. Right, right. The Republicans used to oppose this, but the war party is about 90% to 95% of the Republicans and about the same

percentage of the Democrats. Phil, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to having you back next week. Well, thank you. Okay. Judge Napolitano, for judging freedom, we have John Mearsheimer coming up before the week is out. Matthew Ho before the week is out. And of course, our intelligence roundtable. And if we can squeeze it in, ask the judge. And maybe a surprise.

I don't want to tell you who he is. He hasn't confirmed yet, but we've been lobbying him. And I think he's going to say yes. We'll see you tomorrow. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.