Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi: Scott Ritter and Freedom

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Phil Giraldi: Scott Ritter and FreedomSee 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, June 12th, 2024. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, a pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome back to the show. Were you surprised at what the feds did to our friend and colleague Scott Ritter at JFK International Airport in New York last week? Yeah, I'd have to say I was surprised just because it was so theatrical the way it was carried out to grab this guy just as he was about to board the plane and had cleared it, cleared call them out of the line and say that the State Department has ordered us to confiscate your passport and ask you to leave the airport. And why did they do it that way? Obviously, this is more in the nature of sending a message to people like all of us who are dissidents in terms of what the federal government's foreign policy looks like. And to say, you know, this could happen to any of you.

That's what's really kind of odd about this. I hope and believe that Scott will be able to get a lawyer and the lawyer will be able to find out what the pretext was for doing this and get the passport back. But Scott will have to always be looking over his shoulder every time he is traveling anywhere now. And maybe that's the real intention of doing this. Well, they picked the wrong guy if they think they can intimidate him into silence or tempering his criticism of the government. I mean, he is courage personified. But apparently this happened to him once before, not in the same way. They didn't take the passport. But he was once, I believe, grilled and threatened by FBI agents if he didn't stop with a documentary film. He didn't stop with the film.

He went forward and made it and produced it, and eventually the feds backed down. Does the government, I guess we're going back to Hoover now, does the government, the American government, have a long history of quietly, silently threatening the people who challenge it publicly? Well, it is my understanding and from my own experience that they indeed do. When I started writing articles that were about foreign policy, that were critical of foreign policy, starting with George W. Bush and the war on terror, I was subjected to frequent visits by FBI officers who would ask me questions about where did you get your information? What are your sources? So on and so forth. And they sort of carried it out as if it were routine. And yet, I had not broken any laws as far as I knew or as far as they knew. And the information that they objected to was mostly like what Scott does. Scott has admittedly sources, but his sources tell him things that he then confirms.

And the information that I've seen Scott always come out with has been reliable. And I like to think that what I was coming out with was reliable. But this is a harassment type by government that really is intended to intimidate you and to make you not question what the government is doing. But of course i i hope in many cases it actually encourages us uh to to push back against them because this is this is not uh if we're not doing anything illegal it's free speech if i if i come uh upon information from talking to some other government official as long as it's not very definitely classified information we can exchange views and we can talk about issues like what's going on in the Middle East and what's going on in Ukraine. But the government would prefer that we not do that.

You're 100 percent correct on the law. You're 100 percent correct on the natural law. You're 100 percent correct on the Constitution. Do you think the government fears our friends and colleagues, you, McGovern, McGregor, Ritter, Johnson, Sachs, Mearsheimer, Blumenthal, Matei, the folks that are on this show regularly trying to perform a public service to reveal to the viewers and listeners what mainstream media will not let guys like and gals like the names that I just repeated appear on their shows and say? Does the government fear us? To an extent it does. Fear maybe is too strong a word since they hold all the tools of suppression

and we don't have any. But I think the fact is that particularly the Biden administration, which is so pathetic and weak and lies so much, the message is getting through to the public and i think the more people like us and like your program uh are out there uh more people are going to be questioning what's going on and saying and asking what are we doing here what are we doing in these places uh just this past weekend uh on uh i believe was was on Saturday, there was a demonstration around the White House of people objecting to what we're doing in supporting the genocide being carried out by the Israelis. There were 100,000 people there. And there were a lot of enthusiastic people who will go home and give the message and talk to their neighbors, talk to their friends. And this thing is growing. And so, you know, they're afraid that

the lies that they've been dishing out and the repression that they've been doing and the attacks on free speech. I mean, these are all about attacks on free speech. Well, we saw. People are going to get nervous. We saw vicious attacks on free speech this spring on college campuses from Princeton to Columbia to UCLA. And if there's any lesson to be drawn from it, it's that there was no violence until the police arrived and there was no reason to call the police except when some of these students took over offices

and wouldn't let professors and administrators get in their offices. That's a crime, that I understand. But in terms of these tents and these placards and these demonstrations and the chanting and turning their backs on speakers. That stuff is as American as apple pie and as traditional as James Madison. It's just reprehensible that the police were used to attack that. What does the government mean when it calls people, I never heard this phrase before until you told me. Info terrorists. What is in the government's mind an info terrorist? Well, it's what they're afraid of. It's people who provide information

that is counter to the narrative that the government is pushing are definable now as terrorists because this is a convenient way to demonize people who are in opposition to what you're trying to do. And this is exactly what it is. And they always, you know, it seems now that the general rule is you have to link any activity to terrorism because that in a way criminalizes it, doesn't it? And that's what they want to do.

When the FBI approached you about your sources for your articles and your speeches and your commentary, did they have a warrant? Did they announce ahead of time? Did they write you a letter? Was your lawyer there to just show up at your front door and say, hey, we're FBI, we want to talk to you? Well, the first couple of times they did it, they called me up in advance and said they'd like to come up and talk to me about my recent trip. And I said, sure. I figured, well, you know you know the old line i have nothing to hide and and so i would uh speak quite honestly about them basically to say that not that these trips were innocuous but that there was nothing threatening in in what was going on when people are pushing against a policy that's good Americanism, free speech and freedom of association.

And I would push that line with these guys. And these guys were usually young men, sometimes a young woman in their 20s. And we would have able chats. But the one time that I wrote about in my article was rather interesting. I'd come back from Iran, where I had been at a conference, and they asked me about it. They said, were there Iranian intelligence officers there? And I said, of course they were. And I said, every international conference that's held in the United States has CIA officers there too. This is normal practice for intelligence organizations. And they took that as a hook to say, oh, wow,

these NGOs are tied in with the bad parts of the Iranian government, which was all a lie. Who is Siegel Mandelker? And what was or has been, I guess it's a man, Mr. Mandelker's involvement in any of this? Well, actually, Mandelker is a woman. Oh, okay. I thought it was a man's name, right? Mrs. or Ms. Mandelker.

Sorry. First name is S-E-G- man's name, right? Mrs. or Ms. Mandelker. Sorry. First name is S-E-G-A-L, right? Yes. Okay. Yes. But anyway, she was, she's no longer there. She was in the Treasury Department. She was the person that was handing out sanctions and punishments for various people for various things. And one of the things that she was responsible for towards the end of her tenure was warning Americans who were going to places like Russia and Iran that they were potentially in violation of sanctions. And the sanction that they cite always is the fact that you're not supposed to be giving any aid or comfort or support to terrorist groups. So again, we have terrorism surfacing. So they would label all these groups as terrorists or terrorist

connected. And then they would come back to you and say well you can't talk to them because you're aiding terrorists so it's like this was a classic catch-22 that was contrived by miss mandelker who is incidentally an israeli uh and uh and israeli who was the deputy secretary of treasury yes i i i have in the past speculated how she got a clearance, but I've been wondering about, you know, lots of people in the Biden administration about that, too. But anyway, yeah, yeah, she got a clearance. She was Israeli born, Israeli, I presume, served in the Israeli military. And she was given this senior job in looking for bad guys like me. And this was given this senior job in in looking for bad guys like me uh and and uh this was given to her uh one wonders huh yeah phil a lot of viewers are commenting on your shirt and a lot of viewers

are wondering if they can get one now this commemorates the USS Liberty, which is one of the great tragedies in American history, a tragedy of Israeli murder and a tragedy of an American president who didn't have the courage to do anything about it. Were you recently at a gathering to commemorate the good luck of the survivors of the USS Liberty. Yeah, the Liberty survivors have an annual reunion, and I've been to a few of them. I was at one this Saturday, which was held at Arlington, and had a side visit to the graves at Arlington National Cemetery as part of it. And there were speakers and we had a dinner and we all mixed together and talked. And they were selling these shirts at the gathering. This was the 57th reunion of the Liberty survivors. Would you just refresh the audience's memory

of what happened? What was the USS Liberty and what happened to it and what did LBJ do in response? Sure, I'd be glad to. The USS Liberty was an intelligence ship. That means it had antennas and dishes on top of it to intercept radio and other communications as a form of intelligence gathering. It was in the eastern Mediterranean when, in 1967, Israel attacked its neighbors. And it was monitoring, it was in international waters, monitoring the transmissions of all the various combatants involved, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Syrians, and the Israelis. The Israelis presumably wanted to silence the ship, so they attacked it with airplanes and with torpedo boats,

and they intended to sink it and kill all 300 crewmen. In the end, what they succeeded in doing was killing 34 American crewmen, wounding 170 more, and by brave action by the crewmen they managed to keep the ship from sinking I thought Israel was our greatest ally in the Middle East the members of Congress say that to this day the greatest highlight they would not kill 34 American sailors it must have been some mistake uh you know contrived somehow by the egyptians or the russians yeah that's all bull uh there's plenty of evidence to show that and including recordings of pilots talking to each other uh to show that this was a deliberate attack by the israelis intending to sink the ship there

was an aircraft carrier a u.s aircraft carrier not carrier not too far over towards Malta, and it immediately, when it got the distress message from the Liberty, it launched its planes to come to its support. So what happened? Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States, and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, immediately called the planes back and began a cover-up. And this cover-up has continued to this day where there has never been an investigation, a serious investigation of what happened or any blame attached to the Israelis. And I would cite, for example, the case of Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, when he was a congressman, there were a number of survivors from the Liberty in his district who tried to connect with him and go and talk to him. And DeSantis claims to be a Navy veteran, and he refused to meet with them so this is how deep this runs and how deep the terrible corruption that israel has delivered on our system and nobody wants to talk about it it won't appear

in the new york times that's for sure who was the well would this have been ordered by the israeli prime minister and so, who was prime minister in 1967? Are you talking about Menachem Begin or Golda Meir? No, no, it's after that, but I would think in 67. It could have been Begin. I don't really remember who was prime minister. Something of this magnitude, a deliberate attack on and murder of American military personnel in international waters have happened without the approval of the prime minister of Israel? I'm sure it did not happen without that. And it's, you know, it's just, it's amazing. It's like there have been so many instances

of Americans killed by Israeli security forces and the United States government does nothing. It says, oh, the Israelis are quite capable of investigating these things. Sure, sure. My, staying on the subject of the Israelis, but segwaying out of this story of violence and murder. My longtime friend, Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky, recently told my other longtime friend, Tucker Carlson, that every member of Congress, except those who have expressly rejected it, he among them, has a minder assigned to them from AIPAC. And this minder reminds them of what AIPAC wants voted on and how AIPAC expects them to behave and how much money AIPAC can deliver to their campaigns. This was in a Tucker Carlson broadcast just a week ago.

I had never heard of this. Had you? Yeah. In a sense, I had heard of this. I had heard that staffers in Congress were heavily infiltrated by people who were considered to be reliable on the subject of Israel. I've heard that years ago when I was still basically in government and the agency. And anyway, I've done some chatting with former friends since that report came out. And interestingly enough, they had all kind of heard the same thing. And a couple of them had very interesting information they said basically what this consists of is the staffers who are junior staffers are generally drawn from a list of uh people that are being promoted by aipac and the anti-defamation league and these people are the ones that are required to be junior staffers

in the office and generally, and keep an eye on what is being done vis-a-vis Israel in case there's any instance of a congressman daring to promote or to support or to even talk about any policies that Israel would object to. So this is incredible news. Wow. In your years as a CIA agent or after you retired from the agency, did any foreign intelligence agents ever attempt to recruit you? Well, I mean, the only instance would have been in that one trip to Iran where I clearly did encounter some intelligence officers. And it was kind of a funny story. I encountered probably one of them pretending to be a journalist, one of them pretending to be a foreign ministry employee, and then two of them who actually admitted what they were. And they all kind of

said that, you know, gee, you know, they like to have friends in the West and other places, and money is no object, and we can always meet in Amsterdam. And the interesting part was all three of them said, oh, we can always meet in Amsterdam. So when I was talking to these FBI guys, I said to them, hey, maybe you guys should pay some attention to what's going on in Amsterdam. Did they know that you knew that they were foreign agents with some sort of going through some sort of a masquerade pretending to be innocent journalists or business people sure because that's exactly what i did at cia and that's exactly what cia and other intelligence officers do and you're you're quite sensitive to it when it happens when when you encounter somebody who's also trolling, as the expression is. That's what this was.

This was trolling. Chris informs me, I never heard of this person, that the prime minister of Israel was Levi Eshkol from 1963 until 1969. Yeah, that sounds right. He is the one, not well known to history, born Levi Yitzhak Shkolnik, but changed his name to Levi Eshkol, who would have authorized that attack. Why would LBJ and McNamara have orchestrated a cover-up of the attack on the Liberty? What was LBJ worried about in 1967 other than Vietnam? Well, I can give you two explanations.

One, maybe LBJ was feeling guilty about having killed JFK and colluded at it. That might be one thing and they're you know but basically uh lbj if you look at his history and his biography uh he was owned by wealthy jews in texas wow so in order to maintain that uh relationship he put the kibosh in this. Fascinating, fascinating stuff, Phil. What are your thoughts on this proposal, this peace proposal that the Biden administration says came from Israel? Netanyahu was demurring about it because if he goes along with this, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir will leave the government and he'll have to run for re-election at a terrible time in Israel. And the Americans insist that it was the Israeli proposal and Hamas says, yes, but we need more guarantees in the future. Cy Hersh says, this is a political

hogwash. The Biden administration made it up and just threw it out there. I think the consensus is that it was made up by the Biden administration to look like they were doing something. And Netanyahu has made it very clear that he intends to keep attacking Gaza until the bad guys are dead. And he's made that very clear and if he even agrees to this uh this this temporary crew uh you know cease fire uh he's only gonna go back as soon as he gets his hostages and and go back on the attack that's uh you know he's he's got no since biden will do nothing to stop netanyahu, and Biden is the key here, he can stop this war. He can stop what Netanyahu is doing, but he has no will to do that. He's spineless and he's brainless. And the fact is that this is something that you can agree with something with Netanyahu, and tomorrow he changes the rules.

And if you can't sanction him in any way, you ought to look. I'm going to play two clips for you, nine and ten, Chris. One is Admiral Kirby, who of course has no credibility, saying three times in about 30 seconds, it's an Israeli proposal. And the other is Secretary Blinken yesterday saying that the night before, Blinken has even less credibility than Kirby, if that's imaginable, the night before Prime Minister Netanyahu reaffirmed his support for this proposal. Here we go. That proposal, an Israeli proposal, has been given to Hamas. It was done on Thursday night, our time. We're waiting for an official response from Hamas. It was done on Thursday night, our time.

We're waiting for an official response from Hamas. We would note that publicly, Hamas officials came out and welcomed this proposal. This was an Israeli proposal. We have every expectations that if Hamas agrees to the proposal, as was transmitted to them, an Israeli proposal, that Israel would say yes. proposal, but it really is down to one person at this point. We'll see what comes from them and from him. Are either of those statements believable, Phil? No. And he's again, I noticed Blinken in particular, again, is putting the onus on Hamas, saying that Hamas has to agree to these things because it's an Israeli proposal. But, you know, that's all nonsense. Israel controls the situation on the ground.

And Biden has no leverage that he's willing to use to force them to make a reasonable decision. So, you know, why should we expect that this morning the israelis blamed an al jazeera journalist for participating in the kidnapping uh on october 7th and restraint of the hostages thereafter is there any credibility to that? No. I mean, at this point, any lie that they tell is equally credible, meaning not credible at all. They produce no evidence to support it. They're just looking for, I think, a means to kick Al Jazeera out of Israel, which they've done already.

Phil, thanks very much for your time today. Great to have you on as always. Thanks for those personal stories about your involvement with foreign agents and with the FBI. I know the audience is fascinated by it. However, I've seen at least 10 members of the audience saying, where's Rupert? He's behind me by the door. Oh, there he is. Okay. It wasn't even moving. Okay. There he is. He's looking this way. Maybe he heard me say his name because he turned and looked at the camera. And for those who are interested, you can buy Liberty shirts online. Great. If you do a Google search, you'll find where they're sold great thank you phil all the best to you

my friend we'll see you again very much okay great conversation with a great man um tomorrow at nine in the morning eastern time the great professor john meers. At three in the afternoon, someone I have longed to interview, and we finally have a commitment from him to come on the show, the great peace advocate and international journalist, Pepe Escobar. And at four o'clock, the one, the only, the inimitable Max Blumenthal himself. A long and happy day. Tomorrow, I hope you'll be with us. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.