Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi: Intel and Truth in Brussels

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Phil Giraldi: Intel and Truth in BrusselsSee 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 Thursday, January 18th, 2024. Phil Giraldi, our dear friend, joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure, my friend. Thank you very much for coming back on the show with your unique analysis. You have written a heartbreaking piece, or it's about to be published, about Gonzalo Lira, the American citizen and how the embassy abandoned him in Kiev and how he was beaten and tortured and eventually died in a Kyiv hospital. But before we get there and before you fill us in on these most unpleasant but revealing details, just a couple of general big picture questions for you. Has Ukraine just about lost, Is it just about over? Well, I would say from what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, and particularly some of the people you had on the air that have been talking very specifically about the war, I would say that it's all over but the shouting.

You know, this is clearly a war that was created to a certain extent by the United States and Britain and some other NATO countries egging on the Ukrainians to take on the Russians and not to negotiate with Russia over the issues that were dividing the two countries. So this was a bad war right from the beginning. And there never was any real ability on the part of Ukraine to defeat Russia. So this has caused maybe half a million deaths of primarily Ukrainian soldiers for nothing. And essentially, this is something that will have to be negotiated in one way or another, either victor and defeated or however. And so, yeah, this has been a catastrophe from the beginning, and the fact that the US and Britain and NATO have been pushing this over a pile of dead Ukrainian bodies is a tragedy for everyone involved. Yeah,

I think it's basically over. But whatever is going to come out of it at the other end in territorial concessions will come out, and it will be probably the way it would have been negotiated two years ago. When a war reaches a point like this, a catastrophe for the American side, what role, if any, is the CIA playing? Are they still on the ground in Ukraine, for example? Are accurate reports making their way to the White House, or is the White House still getting the spin that CIA bosses think the White House wants to hear, about which you and McGovern and Johnson have warned us many, many times. Yeah, I think there's a lot of spin still in the system because a lot of people have equities in the way this goes and how long it drags on and so on and so forth. So insofar as the CIA, I would, from my own experience in the field with the CIA, not ever in a war situation, but in close to war or Cold War.

I would guess that CIA has probably a pretty heavy presence in Kiev right now, many of them under military cover or under State Department cover. And I would bet that most of the information they're getting, apart from technical information, is coming from their Ukrainian counterparts, who at this point are probably pretty desperate to make some friends to help them out in terms of what might be coming. So I would think that they're getting a lot of information from Ukrainian military officers and intelligence officers. And of course, this has to be looked at with some, you know, a critical eye, I would say, because there is a lot of self-interest in the pot. But that's the kind of turmoil I would imagine is going on now. And of course, you know that many senior military

officers in Ukraine are beginning to hint that Zelensky's time might be limited, meaning that a coup attempt could come up fairly soon to end all of this. So the reason I ask this, Phil, is because I wonder if the American leadership even knows what's going on. We're going to play a clip for you, which is number 13, Chris, which is Secretary Blinken at Davos. I think it was yesterday. And he starts up by saying Putin has failed. This is ridiculous. I'm really wondering, I'll let you comment on it after we watch this, is intelligence getting to them? Are they getting truthful information? But let's

hear what he has to say. It's absurd, but I want your thoughts on it. Number 13. Putin has already failed in what he set out to do. He set out to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, to subsume it into Russia. That has failed, and it cannot and will not succeed. Second, Ukraine has not only stood up to the aggression. Over the past year, it took back more than 50% of the territory that had been taken from it in February of 2022. The last year, the last part of the last year, has been challenging. But even then, something that got little notice, what Ukraine managed to do in the Black year, the last part of the last year, has been challenging. But even then, something that got little notice, what Ukraine managed to do in the Black Sea,

opening it up, pushing the Russian Navy back, and starting to get grain out to the world. It's been the breadbasket of the world. It's gone back to that as a result of actions it's taken. I mean, this is, if he truly believes what he said, he is utterly deluded by his own people. And if he doesn't believe what he said, then he's utterly lying to the world. He knows the forum that he's in there. I think he's smart enough to know that he's lying.

I mean, all of the facts that he just cited are not true. Russia, in the beginning of its military intervention, had no desire to take over a hostile country with 40 million people. It wanted to take over the areas that were being contested. And that was pretty much the objective of the campaign. So that's a lie. And it's a lie that the Baltic Sea, the Russian Navy has been pushed back and the Baltic Sea is now free to Ukraine. That's not quite true either.

And this lie that always keeps coming out about how they've regained 50% of the land, the territory that Russia in its offensive was able to take, that's just not true. If you look at a map, you can see that that is a complete lie. think there's something wrong with this guy. And there have been some strange words from former friends of mine who are State Department officers about how he's viewed from inside the State Department. And he's losing a lot of his credibility, even with his own people. Well, here's another example of this. Jeff, Professor Sachs was just outraged at this hand-wringing, meandering cut number. This is in the same forum. The questioner, in case you didn't recognize him, is Tom Friedman from The New York Times.

This is also at Gaza yesterday. Number 11, Chris. One of the things you hear so often from people, given the high civilian casualties in Gaza, is does the United States, do Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian and Muslim lives, Palestinian-Christian lives, given the incredible asymmetry in casualties? And I've been asked that. I want to give you a chance to respond to that. No. Period.

For me, I think for so many of us, what we're seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching. And the suffering we're seeing among innocent men, women, and children breaks my heart. The question is, what is to be done? We've made judgments about how we thought we could be most effective in trying to shape this in ways to get more humanitarian assistance to people, to get better protections and minimize civilian casualties.

And at every step along the way, not only have we impressed upon Israelis' responsibilities to do that, we've seen some progress in areas where absent our engagement, I don't believe it would have happened. One of our commenters writes in, how does he sleep at night? How does he live with himself? He could stop this stuff with his boss could with a phone call. I'll let you take it, Phil.

Yeah, well, that's again, a uh a kind of propagandistic vision of uh what is going on in gaza and and what gaza is all about and uh one can never doubt that the u.s secretary of state working for a president like joe biden is going to have to be protecting Israel every step of the way and trying to make the United States look like they're playing some kind of positive role. It just came over the wires a few minutes ago that Benjamin Netanyahu responded to a U.S. request that there be some kind of Palestinian state as part of the outcome when the fighting in Gaza is finally finished. And he's talking about basically creating something with what he considers to be the good Palestinians, the ones who are in Ramallah,

and getting rid of the Hamas people who are in Gaza. But Netanyahu came back and said, too bad. There is going to be no Palestinian state in the future of this region. And he concluded that we friends can sometimes disagree. So that's what we're going to be seeing here. And it's going to be a lot of verbiage coming out of people in the administration to defend Israel, to defend what comes out, and to try to make the administration look good going into elections with whatever comes out. So this is a total disaster in the making. There is no other way to describe it,

and there's no other way to describe the American role in all of this as anything other than monstrous. We have a cut for you, the heart of what Prime Minister Netanyahu said. You've summarized it and described it perfectly, Phil. However, he does use a line in there, you'll hear it, which if you said it and you were a Palestinian person on the Columbia University campus, you'd be kicked off. But now the Prime Minister of Israel is saying, number 17, Chris.

For 30 years, I am very consistent and I'm saying something very simple. This conflict is not on the lack of a state of Palestinian, but the existence of a state, the Jewish state. Every area that we evacuate, we receive terrible terror against that. It happened in South Lebanon, in Gaza, and also Judea and Samaria, which we did it. And therefore, I clarify that in other arrangements,

any other arrangement, in the future, the state of Israel have to control on the entire area from the river to the sea. This is what happens when you have sovereignty. This truth I say to our American friends. And I also stopped the attempt to impose on us a reality that will jeopardize us.

A prime minister in Israel has to be able to say no, even to the best of friends, to say no when you need to and to say yes when you can. If his best friend in the White House says no to him, the war is over. And you heard that phrase from the river to the sea. You can't say that on an American college campus today without being kicked off. I know this raised your blood pressure, but I wanted you to see it, and I'm anxious to hear your thoughts on it. Well, precisely. I mean, he's basically saying that if you reverse the coin and use that language and you're a Palestinian, you can be arrested in places like Germany. And certainly on a U.S. university campus, you will be disenfranchised and forced to leave. So, yeah, but it's OK for a Jew to say the Jewish state is going to have that entire territory. What about the 5

million Palestinians who live in that geographic area? Are they all going to be killed? Are they all just going to be pushed into the Mediterranean Sea or into Egypt, which Egypt would not be happy with. I mean, this is ridiculous. Israel has been the major recipient of U.S. aid among all countries, historically speaking, and that includes the Second World War and the Marshall Plan and everything like that. And Israel continues to get in excess of $10 billion every year from the United States. And as we've seen recently, Israel can start a war and kill people, and we will give them the weapons. So, I mean, come on, where are we at in all this? I mean, what is the benefit for Joe American in Iowa, who is sitting and watching this and getting this stuff down his throat about Israel being the great ally and the best friend of the United States,

which is all nonsense. And we keep riding this horse, and Congress keeps riding this horse. This is ridiculous. Let's get back to Ukraine and the tragedy of Gonzalo Lira, about which your piece that I don't think it's out yet, correct me if I'm wrong, describes his demise

so eloquently. He was an American. The embassy knew he was there. They didn't give a damn. Phil? Yeah, do you want me to speak now? Oh, yes, please.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, Gonzalo Lero is an American-born, Chilean-American ethnicity. He is a kind of quirky journalist. He's very popular on on internet sites he uh he's a kind of guy who goes places where others fear to tread uh he's he's basically been living in ukraine for the last couple years it has been rumored that he has a wife and children there that may be the reason he's there. But he's been recovering the war extensively online most of the time. And he's been very independent-minded in saying what he

thinks to be true. He's basically sympathetic to what the Russian arguments were for the intervention in the first place. And he finds the Zelensky regime to be bordering on a dictatorship. And this is increasingly so. So he's been very critical of it. And when he got too critical of it and was not careful enough, they arrested him. And he wound up in a top security prison run by the intelligence services, where he was presumably tortured, beaten, and received other gifts from them, and eventually came down with pneumonia. And he was not treated for it for three months. It basically wound up killing him, or there's an alternative story that he might have been for it for three months. It basically wound up killing him. Or there's an alternative story that he might have been killed by his jailers. So anyway, this guy was in contact with the U.S. Embassy.

He's a U.S. citizen. And he was explaining his troubles with them. And he was basically ignored. And my assumption on all of this is that somebody like Joe Biden or Secretary of State with a single phone call could have gotten this guy out of prison and they just would have deported him. But the fact is they let him die. State Department officials working at the embassy in Kiev were fully aware of his story and what was being done with him but apart from a couple of calls made by low-level officials uh nothing was done as far as i could tell so this guy wound up dead american citizen a primary job of embassies overseas is to protect

americans and he wound up dead because of the lack of any kind of inertia coming out of a U.S. embassy under the Biden administration. Again, I think this is disgraceful. Was he a CIA asset? I cannot answer that 100% because I'm not inside the system now, but I have never heard that suggested. Would the CIA have been in a position to spring him, or do they defer to the State Department? I mean, theoretically, Ukraine is an ally. The guy's an American citizen. Why did they allow him to be killed in jail, in a prison, and imprisoned for, what's the phrase, dissemination of materials

justifying Russian aggression. Stated differently, freedom of speech. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's it. I mean, the fact is that we have, what is the tab now for what we've given Ukraine in excess of $100 billion in equipment and money. And it would take a call, even from the ambassador probably in Ukraine, and this guy would have been freed. But instead, they preferred to see him die for whatever incredible reasons might be cooked up in the White House and State Department. But it's just, it's disgraceful that it went this route. Okay, this guy was a critic, but he was not hurting anybody. He was not, in fact, he was basically calling for people to stop killing each other. And so this is, it's just so surprising

and shocking. And there've been a number of people that you would be familiar with, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Dan McAdams at the Ron Paul Institute. They've all written pieces on this and they've all come to the same conclusion as I, that this is just a disgrace. It's a shameful incident. And there have been too many shameful incidents in recent history, I would say. Switching gears and also sticking with your column. By the way, is the column that I keep talking about, is the column out yet? No, it's going to be appearing at the UN's site. I'm going to submit it tomorrow morning and Ron UN's might very well post it tomorrow. Okay. So I'll keep you alerted to that and we'll be posting about it on my Facebook page.

Okay. There's another item in that column that intrigues me. Was Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad agent? Yes. I don't think there's any doubt about it. How can an American born in the United States be a spy for a foreign government? Well, a lot of Americans born in the United States have done so in the past. It's usually for money or access to power or access to things that clearly Epstein would have been interested in. He also, of course, had an ongoing relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is the daughter of a leading British Israeli spy.

There's another example of a British citizen who spied for Israel and was a leading spy. So Epstein, if you look at the guest list at his many mansions, you will see that senior Israeli government officials, including intelligence officials, were regular visitors. So I don't think there's any doubt that he was a Mossad agent or co-optee. He might be someone that just did it because he believed in doing it. Was a friend of Bill Clinton's. Did Bill Clinton know he was hanging out with a Mossad agent? Well, Bill Clinton should have known that, judging from what kind of company Epstein was keeping. But Bill is often very insensitive to things that he doesn't

want to know about. And he was on Epstein's plane apparently 27 times and was at his beach resort in Florida and in the Caribbean. But it's claimed that there is no definitive evidence linking Bill to any of the sexual peccadilloes that went on there. Last thing I wanted to ask you about was Bernie Sanders, not somebody that usually agrees with you and me and many people watching the program, offered legislation in the Senate which would have required as a condition of Israel's acceptance of all the money we're giving them, a report on human rights abuses in Gaza. It was tabled by a vote of 88 to 12. Of the 12, 11 were Democrats, the only Republican that voted to keep this alive, because he wanted to vote in favor of the legislation, was Senator Rand Paul.

I'm going to assume that you were not surprised that the war party, which is three quarters of the Senate, voted to kill this very reasonable piece of transparency. Yeah, what it sought to do was have the U.S. Embassy and the State Department issue a regular report on human rights violations by Israel. Now, this would be a normal procedure for any country that the U.S. is giving military aid to or giving money to in any form or another. And yet in this case, because it was Israel, it was, as you say, there was 11 and 1 were the only ones who voted for it, and there were more than 80 who voted against it. And it was tabled, and once it's's table, it sits there until it dies.

Talk about heartbreaking. Phil, thank you very much. Thanks for this piece, a great piece that UNZ, U-N-Z, site will have out hopefully tomorrow or Saturday. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your courage in discussing these things that are upsetting to the powers that be. I know that's never stopped you in the past, but keep it up, my friend. Well, thank you. And thank you for having me on. Of course. Of course.

Still to come, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 4 o'clock Eastern and at five o'clock Eastern, the inimitable Matt Blumenthal with some really strong stuff that he just said to a bunch of pro peace constitutional scholars in Washington, DC. We'll run the clip. You won't want to miss it. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Altyazı M.K.