Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi: Will Netanyahu Be Held Accountable?

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Phil Giraldi: Will Netanyahu Be Held Accountable?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, December 4th, 2024. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, a pleasure, my dear friend. I do want to spend some time talking to you about when is a ceasefire not a ceasefire. But before we get there, I'd like to pick your brain about what American intelligence knew about this attempted coup in South Korea. Would American intelligence have known what the president of South Korea, who barely won election and who was enormously unpopular, was up to when he declared martial law? And would the South Korean authorities have informed whoever is the commander of our 28,000 troops there that this was about to go on? Well, I would rather suspect that the actual announcement of the declaration of martial law probably could have been done, you know, in five minutes uh and uh but i at the same time uh would suspect that the u.s which of course

controls security in most of its aspects in south korea uh would have had some inkling that this thing was maybe being printed up in a back room or something like that so i'm not i'm not convinced that the the u.s was actually so deep into this that they knew what was coming and how it was coming and so on and so forth uh but certainly as soon as it happened uh everything would have kicked into place in terms of what is the response what is the reaction uh what is the meaning of the the fact that this guy is winging it, essentially, and he is opposed by virtually, well, certainly a majority in the actual, what basically functions as the government in South Korea.

So they wouldn't have known all the details, but they would have been aware that something was going on do you agree with others who have appeared on this program uh that the united states virtually runs the security apparatus uh of south korea almost as if you whoever is the commander i would imagine it's a three-star of our 28,000 troops there, is effectively the military commander of South Korea, which they call the Republic of Korea. Yeah. In fact, I've been to Korea, and I have talked to people there, and uh and we discussed the security situation some years ago but that that is precisely the situation the united states because of the the terms of the agreement that created the armistice that ended the korean war uh has enormous status in korea. And as you say, 23,000, I think back when I visited, the number was

something like 32,000. So there's a large presence and there has always been this presence and the U.S. is in a very dominant position. But that's not to say that the U.S. called the shots on, let's try to initiate martial law and then let's see what we can do about it to overthrow it. I mean, Colonel McGregor informed us of a conversation he had with President Trump during the president's first term, the last two years of which Colonel McGregor was a senior advisor in the Pentagon. And President Trump said to him, how long have American troops been in South Korea? The response, over 70 years, and Trump seemed startled by that. But that has been the regular, consistent, systematic pattern of every president since Harry Truman. Isn't that the case?

Yeah, that would be correct. But I would also point out that it's quite amazing that Donald Trump was president of the United States and was not aware of that. And this is a major strategic commitment that we have in the world. And God, I mean, does Joe Biden know anything about it? I mean, this is something- You know, Phil, I don't think that... And Trump should have known it, and American presidents should know this, but we haven't seen any response in the six hours

between the announcement of this declaration of martial law, the unanimous vote by the legislature to nullify it, and the rescission of the announcement. Nothing from the U.S. ambassador, nothing from the U.S. military, nothing from the Pentagon, nothing from the State Department, which to me is a head-scratcher. I have to ask you this. Did they want this thing to succeed? Do they want a dictatorship there as opposed to an eastern version of democracy. Well, it could be because we're talking about Joe Biden here, and he's in Angola right now, isn't he?

Yes. Yeah. So maybe the communications are a bit slow. I mean, do things happen to people when these announcements are made? Have opposition leaders disappeared or people jailed? Or was this just a reckless, crazy announcement about which he had second thoughts and he rescinded six hours later? Well, you know, the funny thing is, as I know we've all observed on your program, the media is largely to blame for this, where people don't see these stories and don't know these stories.

There's things going on right now in Sudan and other places where if you're so underreported that it's absolutely astonishing. And maybe the media is just trying to catch up because they haven't been following anything in Korea. It's very strange. The American, if you go around on Facebook and you see some of the comments, you'll see a lot of comments from people saying how poorly informed in their judgment the American people are by both the government and by the media. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. Phil, the American public is more interested in Taylor Swift than they are in takeovers of foreign governments. Well, we have to know who the top entertainer of the 21st century is. Yes, we do. That was the headline today. I think we now know, however, that the reports of North Korean troops in Ukraine fighting Ukrainian troops were false and deceptive and fraudulent.

It may have been perpetrated by the same crowd that tried to pull off this coup. Yeah, I mean, that is a very interesting connection. And sometimes these connections are not very clear until you sit back all of a sudden, you're thinking about it and say, well, how did these two stories surface at more or less the same time? What is this possible connection? And this might be one of those cases. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. But let me get back to where I started. Would CIA and therefore MI6 and therefore Mossad have known that this was going to come down before it came down? i think in general terms yeah i don't think it would have been there would have been any way to bureaucrat bureaucratically speaking conceal it and i think some of these people would have picked up on it i knew the uh uh cia chief of station in korea and uh this guy was so wired in i mean this

is some years ago but this guy was so wired into everything that was going on in Korea that a mouse could walk across the floor and not be noticed. I mean, it was just incredible. People were coming in and out of the room as he and I were having a conversation. And it was just it was like a constant stream of information coming in. From his agents and their cohorts in the field? His staff. And his staff, of course, would have been in contact with counterparts in the Korean bureaucracy. Were you ever assigned in your years in the CIA to South Korea? No, I was only there once, and that was a temporary duty assignment. Switching gears, why do you think that Benjamin Netanyahu entered into an agreement for what is called a ceasefire with Hezbollah?

Well, it's because the American interlocutors told him, look, we're going to work up a deal for you that's really good for you, because we realize you're under some stress here in the fighting with Hezbollah, and your generals are starting to complain. But this is what we'll do. We'll fake up a ceasefire, and only you are the ones who will have to observe it. Within 24 hours of the ceasefire being agreed to, the Israelis were already attacking Lebanon again, and they've been attacking Lebanon ever since and every day. And so this was a fake ceasefire engineered by Amos Hochstein, the interlocutor, and no doubt the Biden administration in Washington, to give Israel yet another break, shall we say, and allow them to have the Trump hand, as it were, in terms of what was going on there. I mean, in your mind, is there just a bizarre coincidence

between the public announcement of this ceasefire and the commencement of extraordinary hostilities in Syria? I think they're both connected. I think there are all kinds of potential connections here, and I must admit I'm still working my way through it in my head as to what some of these connections are i've been following the developments in syria for quite a long time uh i was following developments in syria when i was based in istanbul because you you might recall that the uh major terrorist threat to the turks was the pkk and that was kurdish and the kurds were based in

northern syria and these same kurds are now involved in various ways with the various militias that the united states and others are playing around with to try to bring down the government in damascus so there's a lot of funny connections here and i'm not quite sure how it all comes together and then of course there are um there's always the money issue and there there are major economic issues too we're talking about potential pipelines we're talking about exports and of petroleum and that sort of thing and there are so many options that are on the table that there are people who win and people who lose depending on which way it goes.

Here's a report from CNN. As tit-for-tat strikes strain a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah less than a week since it went into effect, Israel's defense minister on Tuesday threatened to directly target the Lebanese state, the Lebanese government, should the agreement fall apart. They have violated it 126 times in 10 days. Right. And it was the way the so-called ceasefire was set up, the Lebanese

army, now this is not Hezbollah, but the army, was sort of the beat of the interlocutor to make sure there wouldn't be any incidents between the two. But the Israelis basically opened fire almost immediately. On the army? Army, army. Wow. How much destruction have the Israelis done to the civilian population, to the number of forcing people to be displaced and destroying their homes? Well, I've seen various estimates, and of course the numbers are always in tens of thousands about people who've moved rather than be killed by an American bomb dropped by an Israeli jet. But what apparently has triggered some of the recent fighting is the Israelis have interpreted this ceasefire to be a buffer zone, that the Lebanese who lived in that area and moved out to get away from the fighting have been trying to move back, and the Israelis are claiming they're

terrorists and opening fire on them. So this is, again, part of the trick being played on this ceasefire engineered by the United States and Israel. Is there a side agreement between the Israelis and the United States to supplement, complement, nullify, expand, interpret, choose your verb, the main ceasefire agreement? Yeah, the United States has basically left it up to Israel to be the determinant of what is being violated and not violated, and the United States has indicated uh that it would basically uh support them uh so this is a if you want to call this a ceasefire it was a very one-sided creation

tell me who you think said this i know this is like a pop quiz but i think you'll know the answer. Those responsible for capturing hostages will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America. Yeah, well, I think that might just be Donald Trump. And this is a man that allegedly is interested in peace. What is it, one piece at a time, as the old metaphor goes? You know, who is he going to kill next or who are they going to kill next? Obviously, the U.S. is involved in the Syrian fighting. We have our military base there at Al-Tanif. And there was a report that came through today, which you might have seen, that U.S. airplanes from that base attacked a group of, how did they put it? Let me see.

They were Iranian-linked militants. Now, how they knew this from 20,000 feet up? What is an Iranian-linked militant? And you're right, from 20,000 feet up. Who did they kill? They killed all of them. Right, right. It was U.S. planes fighting. Phil, for the president-elect of the United States to make a statement as extreme as this, harder than anybody has ever been hit, was he talking about an atomic bomb that he forgot about Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Well, that would be what would be suggested. Or again, this is just a question of sheer ignorance in terms of, you know, the mouth moving before the brain connects. I don't know.

And you and I, I believe, and a number of other people have been waiting to hear some stuff from Donald Trump, not from Gokha or these other people that are speaking for him about what he really thinks and what he really intends to do. I'd like to know what that is. Well, apparently that conversation was recently had at a dinner party at Mar-a-Lago. Chris, do we have that photograph? Yep. There you go. Now that, of course, is the president-elect of the United States, Israel's principal sponsor in the United States Senate, Lindsey Graham, Mrs. Sarah Netanyahu, and the son of Sarah and Bibi I think I'm pronouncing the name properly Yair Netanyahu

in Donald Trump's house at a banquet for Mrs. Netanyahu this was a couple days ago and we had Mr. Lindsay flying over to Israel as he often does and he came back with the Netanyahu family to wine and dine at Mar-a-Lago with the president-to-be.

So this is rather interesting, I think. Well, Phil, it was shortly after that picture was taken that the president-elect made that extraordinary comment that I just read, and I read it precisely. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America. Okay, I get it. Sometimes people speak in hyperbole, but for the president to speak that way, knowledgeable of what weapons the U.S. has and has used in the past? Does he really think that the 2,000-pound bombs that were dropped on refugee tents did not cause enough destruction? Well, maybe not. And I would rather suspect that the four of them in that picture probably had a private meeting before the lunch or the dinner took place

and they probably discussed some of these things so that's uh again you know what's going on here uh is america going to get involved deeper after january 20th in terms of what's going on the horrors that are going on in the Middle East is that where we're going uh are we going to be deeper in Syria uh and eventually is this all going to lead to Iran you know what are a thousand American troops doing in Syria well they're stealing oil and that's uh that was a Conoco site. That was an oil site. And that oil lines up in Israel. They're also with their militias. You'll see they have these Kurdish militias and they have other militias

that they've been training and arming to serve as a problem for the Bashar al-Assad government in Damascus. And so they've been doing that too. And they have occupied a fully one-third of Syria, which consists of both the oil and also the most fertile agricultural land in Syria. Syrians are having serious problems in feeding themselves. Has the Israeli leadership, however reluctantly, recognized that it lacks an effective

military means to achieve its goals? The settlers still haven't returned, nor has Hamas been destroyed, nor have the hostages even been found, much less released. out on two issues. One more recently, yesterday, said that yes, Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians. And this did not mean that he disapproved of it, but he was just saying that was the fact. And there was another general a couple weeks ago who said, you know, the problem with Netanyahu and his policies is that he doesn't have a policy. He doesn't have a plan for where this is all going. It's just something to keep the wheels spinning, to keep him out of jail because of the corruption charges against him. And it's also, he eventually thinks that all of this will be spinning his way. I don't know whether he believes that will happen with Trump, because certainly Joe Biden gave him everything he wanted.

Will Trump be giving him more in terms of what you were just citing, in terms of weapons that the worst that we can come up with? This is this is horrific. One of the generals of whom you spoke, I think we're talking about the same person, is the former IDF chief and the former defense minister, Moshe Yalon, has actually accused Netanyahu of war crimes. Is there a crack in the elites in Israel or is Moshe Ya'alon an outlier?

Well, he's probably to a certain extent an outlier in the sense that the war is still very popular among the Israeli people. But there are other voices. I don't know to what extent you ever look at articles that appear like in harets which is Israel's uh left-wing newspaper progressive newspaper and it has articles all the time saying that you know um they believe that uh what Trump what what Netanyahu is doing will destroy Israel rather than save it or turn it into the mega power of the Middle East, which may be Netanyahu's intention. About two hours ago, the French government fell. It's just a vote of no confidence. It's the shortest government in duration of being in power since World War II. Would U.S. intel have been involved in this,

or is it just domestic French politics? Well, let me put it this way. U.S. intel in places like France, which are allies that sometimes pursue policies that the United States government would not necessarily approve of, they are prime targets for CIA recruitment. This is something I'm familiar with, having lived in Italy and worked in Italy and in Germany. We do it to our allies because we want to make sure our allies are doing what we want. So I would not be surprised at all, given the relative instability of France of late, whether we were in this to a certain extent up to our eyeballs. There are riots in the streets in Georgia, not the American state of Georgia, but the country of Georgia. It almost looks like 2014 all over again. Am I jumping to conclusions? Yeah, I think that the problem is when you destabilize a number of countries in a region or even one or two key countries, say in Europe,

it has a ripple effect. And a lot of these things that are going on now are, as I was saying before, are obscurely connected, but you have to look for the links. You have to look for what's there and find out what is triggering what in this other place. And that's where you have to decide, is this worth doing? And that's where you have to, if you're running a country that is respectable, that's where you go to diplomacy. And that's where you go to other means of persuasion. But there's been just too much going crazy over the last eight years, certainly. In fact, I would go back of the new American ambassador to France. That's right.

Jared Kushner's father, pardoned by Donald Trump. Who's also a felon, of course. Yes, yes. You can't make this stuff up. My dear friend, it's always a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you very much for your time. Please come back and join us again next week. Okay, well, thank you for having me on.

Yes, and bring Rupert with you when you come back. Thank you. He was behind me. Okay. I saw the cat. By the door. All right, there he is. I saw the cat. I didn't see Rupert. Thank you, Phil. All right. Thank you. Coming up today at four o'clock,

Aaron Maté, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!