Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi: Is Israel Friend or Foe to the US?

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Phil Giraldi: Is Israel Friend or Foe to the US?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, February 12, 12th, 2025, Phil Giraldi joins us now. In your long history in the military and in the Central Intelligence Agency, what is your view as to whether Israel is friend or foe? Well, I think it's something that falls in between uh that people who claim that israel is a friend are are basically lying completely a hundred percent israel has never done anything that has benefited the united states at least within my understanding of what israel and america's relationship has been but israel is not a foe in the sense that Israel is totally reliant on the United States' money and weapons and political cover for all of the mischief it gets into and all the things it does. And so it's not an enemy per se, but I would add that it has worked very hard to control the political system

in the United States from top to bottom. And we are seeing, particularly in the last couple of administrations, that they have been very successful at that. They have gotten the United States to be a participant in a a massive genocide like nothing that's been seen since the world war ii and they have also milked the our economy and uh taken our money taken our weapons to use to make us complicit in in all of the war crimes that it's carrying out so they don't want us as an enemy, but at the same time, they have done awful things to us.

Do they spy on us? Does the Mossad spy on the United States government? Have you ever heard of Jonathan Pollard? I'm going to ask you about Jonathan Pollard in a minute, but as a general matter, is Mossad listening to Donald Trump as we speak? Well, Mossad basically has been spying very effectively on the United States since going back to the 1980s, to my direct knowledge, there were a number of exposés back then, which didn't appear too much in the New York Times, where the Defense Department and others were documenting how Israel was spying. And it was spying very often using people,

American Jews in particular, that were in senior positions in the Pentagon and in the White House. And I could name some of them, but that would probably be impolite. But the fact is, this was going on and continues to go on. Why do we have Tom Massey saying that AIPAC and other Israel lobby groups have people sitting in with every congressman. I assume he was speaking of the Republicans, which he knew about. But I would bet it's every congressman. They have somebody in the staff with the congressman who no doubt is reporting to Mossad also. And these people are there to make sure that the congressmen are all

doing the right things for Israel. Do they have somebody in the White House reporting to Mossad about what Donald Trump and the people around him are doing? Well, I can't name anyone, but I would bet they do. I mean, you have people that have these long intimate histories with israel uh like uh um anthony blinken in the last administration and um and and links to mossad and to israeli intelligence i'm sure if we dig a little bit about some of these people that are in the current administration that are so in love with israel most of them christian zionists and they i would bet are you know they have a friend over at the israeli embassy and gee we have a cup of coffee every once in a while and chat about things yeah tell us about the USS Liberty. The USS Liberty was a United States Navy intelligence ship.

Now, an intelligence ship is very lightly armed. It has a lot of antennas because what it does is kind of sit offshore in international waters, generally speaking, and monitors radio transmissions and other communications that are taking place on shore. The USS Liberty was offshore in international waters during the Six-Day War in 1967. And when it was there, it was attacked by Israel. And the intention clearly was to sink it. In their attack, they killed 34 American sailors and technicians, and they wounded about 170 others. It was only due to heroic actions by the crew that the ship was saved. And the interesting part was that the USS Saratoga, which is an aircraft carrier, as soon as they heard that the ship was under attack,

they launched their planes and they were called back, gee, by Lyndon B. Johnson. The President of the United States of America called them back. Yeah, they called back. And then Johnson and the Secretary of Defense together arranged a cover-up. And there has never been a full revelation of what happened that day and who did it and how they did it, although we know from evidence of technical intercepts that the Israelis were calling the shots on the attack and they have never been held accountable for it. Why do you think they attacked an American ship and killed American sailors? There are a number of theories, and of course, we'll never know until the full investigation is ever revealed, if it ever is. But one theory was that they had in Sinai, the Israelis had surrounded a brigade of Egyptian soldiers. Now, we're talking about 5,000 soldiers or so, and they massacred them. They killed all of them. And this was all picked up by the USS Liberty on its communications

intercepts. So that's one theory. And there are other theories that they wanted to pretend to the United States that it was Russia, which had a military base near Cairo at that time, that it was Russia who had done it, because they wanted the United States to basically knock out Egypt's military capability and the Russians. So there are a number of theories. Tell us about Jonathan Pollard. Jonathan Pollard was a total POS, as the expression goes. He was a POS. Piece of shit.

Oh, sorry. And he was a technician, a Notre Dame graduate, although he was Jewish. And he was a technician, not a technician, but a civilian employee of the United States Navy. And he got involved with the intelligence side of the Navy, of that job. And from that time on, he was working for Israel. He basically has been accused by people who are in the know, who've seen all the files yet again, that he was the most damaging spy ever to spy against the United States. Because he not only stole things about, you know, what the U.S. government was doing, he stole a room full of information and also the information. This is this is the thing.

Sources and methods. In other words, how does the United States accomplish its guy spying technically through what cutouts, through what arrangements and stuff like he gave all that information to Israel and uh believe it or not some of it wound up in Russia because Russia was Israel was trying to trade with the Russians to get some of its people out of Russia and into Israel so they they had no qualms about giving this information to Russia under those circumstances. And they were also giving information to China in exchange for money. So Trump was the worst spy in American history.

He was finally caught. He was finally arrested, charged, and imprisoned. After, I believe, it was 20-something years, he got out of prison. Wait, wait, you say arrested, charged and in prison. He was convicted, was he not? Oh, convicted, I'm sorry if I misspoke. But the fact is he was finally released from prison on condition that he only stay in the United States. He not traveled to Israel because there was concern that there was still intelligence information inside his head that he might be willing to give to the Israelis and surely would have been.

But along came Donald Trump and Donald Trump released him from that restriction. The guy went over to Israel where he is now a hero and they have a city square in in uh jerusalem i believe uh named after him tell us about uh the tell us about pharah well pharah is the uh foreign agents uh reporting act that um basically was established, well, it was established in 1938 when there were allegedly German and Italian and Japanese agents working in the United States. They thought it was a good idea to make these people register as agents of those foreign governments. Now, FARA is interesting because it's used fairly frequently with the Russians and Chinese and other people. But the one group that is most active spying in the United States and basically corrupting our political system is the israel lobby and the israel lobby has never never been made to register none of its

organizations apac adl none of them and they these people meet regularly with the israeli embassy people uh which is also a no-no and they also interfere in our politics which is another no-no under farah and the Israelis have never been compelled to do this this is why has Farah maybe this is a naive question Phil why has Farah not been enforced against Israelis well that was going to be my next comment uh there exists in the U.S government something which people like me refer to as the Israeli exception. In other words, Israel can get away with things that nobody else can get away with, as you probably are very well aware.

They get away with the Leahy Act and a number of other laws that they're breaking all the time in terms of nuclear weapons. The Leahy Act and its companion legislation prohibit the sale or distribution of military arms to a country that practices apartheid, engages in war crimes, or has nuclear materials that are not authorized by the UN. Right, and they've gotten away with all of that, and they get away with that. They got away with it last week when the new president decided he was sending $9 billion of bombs

and other lethal equipment to Israel, and this was one of the first steps in office. Has the foreign policy of the United States with respect to Israel changed at all after January 20th? I think, if anything, it's gotten more dangerous. If we take the comments that have been made by Donald Trump in the last 10 days or so, particularly regarding the truce which he had arranged, the first phase of which runs out shortly. He's now threatening that if all the Israeli hostages are released, are not released by Saturday noon, Saturday of this week noon, there's going to be hell to pay in the Middle East. And I'm sure the hell to pay is not going to be on the part of Israel.

Even though, well, actually, let's run that clip, Chris. The one where he complains about being released in dribs and drabs, I think it's number seven. No, it's not number seven. See if you can find it across the clip where Trump says he wants everybody released. As far as I'm concerned, if all of the hostages aren't returned by saturday at 12 o'clock i think it's an appropriate time i would say cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out i'd say they ought to be returned by 12 o'clock on saturday and if they're not returned all of them not in drips and drabs not two and one and three and four and two.

Saturday at 12 o'clock, and after that, I would say all hell is going to break out. And I don't think they're going to do it. I think a lot of them are dead. I think a lot of the hostages are dead. I think it's a great human tragedy what's happened. But the two and one and three and four and two, just to paraphrase him, is in the agreement that his emissary personally crafted and for which he, before he was president of the United States, and probably correctly so, claimed credit. Now, of course, he wants to repudiate that just off the top of his head, coming up with, well, why aren't they all released at noon on Saturday?

He must know that that is an impossibility. Yeah, in fact, I'm convinced this was a probability right from the start. You might remember I wrote an article back when this was all taking shape, and I said the interesting part would be to know the side guarantees and assurances that Steve Witkoff, the negotiator, gave to Netanyahu. And one of the side issues that I and a number of others were convinced was in the package was that if Israel could contrive at coming up with a reason, any reason would do, and decided to reopen hostilities, the United States would step aside. So I think that's what we're seeing here. And, you know, this is just, again, one rule for Israel, one rule for everybody else. And the tragedy is the rule for everybody else of the guy who was running for office saying he wanted to make America great again, is that the only thing he's succeeding is doing is making Benjamin Netanyahu very happy because he's now going to be able to kill all the Arabs. The Attorney General of the United States recently issued her own directive to the Department of Justice,

establishing some sort of a task force to look at speech on college campuses critical of Zionism or supportive of the two-state solution by students who are foreign students. The implication is that if their speech does not please the administration or please the people that donate to the school, they could be deported. Have you ever heard of anything like this? No, and my understanding is from people who have dealt with those kinds of issues in the past is that there's

no legal basis for uh deporting someone because they have uh exercised free speech in the united states to say something well you're 100 you're 100 correct the supreme court has been crystal clear that the first amendment protections extend to all persons in the United States, not just American citizens. Right. So they could no more deport those people than they could deport you or I or the millions of people that are watching us. This Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is seeking to criminalize as hate crime any criticisms of Israel. So we're moving in that direction. And there are also more than 30 states that have something written into their bylaws, which makes people like me or you. I don't know what it's like in New Jersey or in Virginia exactly,

but the fact is to get, in many cases, a government service that is supposed to go to every citizen of that state, you have to sign a paper that says that you are not in favor of or supportive of any boycott groups or approval of boycott against the State of Israel. That's how ridiculous it's gotten. And again, this is one rule for Israel and no similar rule for anybody else. This only applies to Israel. What is Zionism? Zionism is the militarized um form of judaism and i would i would not even say that because as you well know and i do there are many fine jews out there that are very strongly working in fact on your programs uh against what is going on in Gaza.

So Code Pink is another group of Jewish, mostly Jewish, that works very hard. They've been out demonstrating while Netanyahu was here last week. So there are a lot of these good people. But the idea of Zionism is that this is a Jewish state. That's the Jewish part of it. That's the justification of it. But the fact is, it's a milit from what the Israelis have been doing, this is a state that people are coming out lately saying this is an awful lot like maybe Nazi Germany.

How would we put a stop to this, aside from having a president with a backbone and devoted to the United States of America and not to another country? Well, the way to put the quickest stop to it would be to stop the huge political donations that come from a bunch of Jewish billionaires that support these groups that are interfering with our politics and basically supporting everything Israel does. And we stop this flow of money, and it would be a great thing to do for the United

States. But of course, that's something that we are told is legal, that the Supreme Court legalized this, and the rest of us are just going to have to put up with it. So money is going to buy the politics. Money buys the politicians. Money does everything. I mean, it's a tragedy of our system. It's always been a tragedy of every political system where money basically was used by people to buy favors and to support their interests. And we've got it right here and we've got it big time. And it's big time all coming from the Israel lobby. Do you think that Donald Trump controls Netanyahu or Netanyahu controls him?

I think it's more that Netanyahu controls him? I think it's more that Netanyahu controls him, but they're operating through the Israel lobby and through the money and through the support that's brought in that fashion. Trump may not have won the last election without the, I've seen estimated of something approaching a billion dollars that came from various Israel lobby sources. Well, I wanted to get all of these facts out, Phil. I know some of this we've hashed over before, but you have a fabulous piece out there which purports to be, or what you would advise would be, an executive order signed by the president attempting to undo all of these injustices. And I appreciate your going, I actually went through the executive order in my

the proposed executive order in my questions to you. Very helpful, Phil. Thanks very much. Where's the dog? Where's Rupert? Did he leave? All right. I don't see him. We've cropped. Oh, now I see him by the door. Okay. The cat's there too. I thought that they were so upset at what we were discussing that they went elsewhere in the house. All the best to you, Phil. We'll see you again next week. Thank you, my friend. Thank you. Bye-bye. Coming up at four o'clock Eastern, midnight in Moscow, Pepe Escobar, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.