Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: CIA/MI6 in Gaza and Ukraine

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Ray McGovern: CIA/MI6 in Gaza and UkraineSee 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 Monday, September 9th, 2024. Ray McGovern is here. Why would the head of MI6 and CIA be seen together in public and answering questions in front of an audience? And why are they more concerned with the narrative of the war in Ukraine than the actual war in Ukraine? But first this. A divisive presidential election is upon us, and the winner is gold. Let me tell you what I mean. Since 2016, our national debt has grown a staggering 70% and gold has increased by 60%.

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learjudgenap.com. Protect your savings and retirement before it's too late. 800-511-4620. Learjudgenap.com. Remember, hope is not a strategy, but gold is. Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend. I am fascinated with the heads of CIA and MI6 speaking publicly and answering questions in London at a conference established by the Financial Times, a newspaper you and I read regularly. But before we get there, let's start as we usually do with the latest in Israel and the latest in Ukraine. In Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced publicly that he has given the order to invade Lebanon. So a couple of questions. How reckless is this? Would there have been CIA and MI6 input in this? Would there have been American DOD input into this before he made this announcement? Well, Judge, if memory serves, this is about the third time he said he had given that order.

Right. I don't know how seriously to take it, right? What I do know is that his political and his personal life is at stake here. The Israelis are increasingly prone to see that in Netanyahu. And whether he goes ahead and invades Lebanon, I just don't know. Now, you make a good point. What has the Department of Defense told him about this? Well, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was there last week, or 10 days ago. What did he say to his fellow military there in Tel Aviv or West Jerusalem?

I dare say he must have cautioned about a wider war, but it's not clear that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has much input. He reports to Austin, the Secretary of Defense, and Blinken and Sullivan are running their show. So I just don't know what to think. All I do know is that the Israelis want to provoke Iran into doing something drastic enough to get the U.S. in militarily on Israel's side. Whether they succeed in that really depends on how perspicacious the Iranians are. They're pretty darn sensible. I don't think they're going to rise to that bait. And I think that Netanyahu may not be able to achieve this, partly because his

military really don't want to do that either. Last thing, of course, is that all it would take is a call from Biden or Blinken or Sullivan or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying, look, don't do it. If you think that you can mousetrap us into active military involvement there, forget about it. Think again. Alistair Crook indicated on this program earlier today that the commander of American troops in Europe, not General Cavalli, who is the commander of all NATO troops in Europe, but the general who commands American military in Europe was physically present in Tel Aviv over the weekend. Alistair also indicates that the DoD has either stated or leaked that its two aircraft carriers can't stay there, quote, forever. How do you read, if those two statements are correct, how do you read them? Well, the rosy view would be that our military is talking some sense into

the Israelis. And I would favor that view. I mean, warning or leaking the news that these two sitting ducks out there in that area may be not able to stay there forever. I would think that's another indication that the military knows which end is up here. And there's a chance that they could prevail against Austin himself, Secretary of Defense, and surely against Blinken and Sullivan, lest they do something really stupid before the election. Switching over to Ukraine, Colonel McGregor reports that the death toll in the attack on the military training academy in Poltava, Ukraine, as of this morning, was 720. Now, that to me seems like an extraordinary number for one attack. And of course, one wonders who was killed there besides these cadets and their Ukrainian and their Swedish and their Polish instructors. Does that number of dead tell you anything about the severity of the attack,

the message it's sending, or the Russian progression westward? Well, it does, Judge. The Ukrainians at last count were admitting to 51 dead and hundreds injured. So this number is quite extraordinary. It's possible because it was sitting up there with all these trainees out in the open and many of them still in the barracks. So it's possible. That's a very big number.

That's almost as many Swedes as lost to Peter the Great in 1709 at the Battle of Poltava, which changed the course of European history, giving the Russians a leg up and having them defeat Sweden. So you think that the Swedes ever learned these things? Anyhow, there were Swedish instructors there. We know that from emails exchanged with their relatives and so forth. So this is a dastardly thing. But more important is the fact that the battle is pretty much nearing an end in that part of Donbass.

Pokrovsk, the citadel, if that falls, the way is clear all the way to the Dnieper River. As a matter of fact, there are Russian troops on the west bank of the Dnieper River, down south in Kherson. Nobody knows what they're doing there. But it's very clear that they have the initiative here. They're not going to stop. The question is whether they will stop out of courtesy or out of some other reason

before we elect our next president on November 5th. I know in the intelligence community, you folks are interested in ISR, Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance. How good is NATO at ISR? And wouldn't NATO have known that all their trainers and all these young cadets were sitting ducks? Well, you know, NATO is not all that bright. I mean, look at Stoltenberg and look at the people working from Stoltenberg, Secretary General. Last mention of him by Puccini said, you know, I dealt with him when he was Prime Minister of Norway, and there was not a sign of dementia back then. These people are not the sturdiest groups. They're not the sharpest knives in the draw. And so it's quite possible that even

though their intelligence surveillance and monitoring is excellent, especially U.S., of course, there's no logic to the fact that they had all these people there really out in the open, many of them. And of course, that part of Ukraine is full of Russian spies, for God's sake. I mean, they're the ones that count the refrigerator trucks going to the Borg, okay? They're probably the ones who came up with that figure that Colonel McGregor is using. So yeah, the capability is there. The ability to interpret it or to put it into kind of cogent defensive action is not there. And that's going to continue in Pokrovsk.

After all, there are no reserve troops to relieve those that are trying to defend Pokrovsk. A key juncture, okay? They're all being killed up in Kursk, where they were sent on this fool's errand.

So, you know, the narrative, oh, the narrative is getting better here. But the logic, there was no military logic in sending these troops, armed and well-trained as they were, into Kursk because they're going to get killed or they're going to get driven back across the border. Let me get back to Poltava one last time. Would intel, using ISR, have known that these missiles were coming or are these missiles the ones that move so fast and are so strong that nobody can stop them once they're launched? Well, they were short, not short range, but they weren't the kinds of missiles you have a lot of lead time on. They should have recognized the vulnerability of this site and not let it be susceptible to this kind of thing. But I don't think they had time to warn these people.

I think the sirens didn't go off until two minutes before, and that's an indication to me at least that these were perhaps not hypersonic, but very fast, maybe more than just speed of sound missiles. They're Iskander missiles, I believe, two of them. Chris, play. I'm going to call in a second for a cut number nine. This is the director of MI6 and the director of CIA in a very unusual environment for them.

This is a little clip of what they said. I'm going to ask you, what is this all about? Number nine. Typically audacious and bold on the part of the Ukrainians to try and change the game in a way. And I think they have, to a degree, changed the narrative around this. The Kursk offensive is a significant tactical achievement. It's not only been a boost in Ukrainian morale,

it has exposed some of the vulnerabilities of Putin's Russia and of his military. Why were these two, who, along with their predecessors, going back to the end of World War II, were never seen together in public, together in public in front of an audience that could question them. Well, first of all, let me correct what Bill Burns just said. Please. Back in July, I think it was July 7th of last year, so that'd be 14 months

ago, he published an article, an op-ed in the Washington Post, and he gave it to the president saying Putin has lost already in Ukraine. His military have been exposed as inefficient to the whole world, okay? Six days later, President Biden said the same thing in Helsinki. Putin has already lost this war. So here you go.

Here's Bill Burns. He's not an intelligence officer. He's a propagandist, and that's exactly what he's doing here. In answer to your question, yeah, the narrative changed for maybe two, three weeks, four weeks, maybe. But what was the logic of this military operation? There wasn't any. Even one of Petraeus's, General Petraeus's disciples, a fellow named Lieutenant Colonel

Nagel, he said right at the outset, oh, the narrative is changing, but there's no logic to this thing. Let's see how it works out, you know. So what happened here is if they had a chance, if they thought they had a chance, the Ukrainians, to seize that nuclear power station up there, well, that was delusional. They could never do that, but maybe that was one objective. The other objective was to, guess what, change the narrative.

And now the narrative has changed until about now when those people are being driven out or killed, of course, and you wonder why they're getting together. So your question about appearing in public. Well, this is the new look. MI6, the equivalent of CIA, and the CIA director getting together, talking about the narrative, not talking about what's changing on the ground. And you know what? You wonder what they were saying to each other in private. Here's the situation. The Russians are winning, okay? I hate to break that to Americans, but the Russians are winning in Ukraine. They're

going to take this key part of Ukraine called Pokrovsk, okay? And then they have free reign to go to the Dnieper River. Now, what does that mean? Well, that means that something has to happen between now and the election in the United States on the 5th of November. What's that going to, who's going to do that? MI6 and the CIA. What are they going to do? I don't know, but there's an even chance that something spectacular is going to happen to change the narrative before the election on November 5th. And there's precedent for this. You know, most people don't remember just 22 years ago, the head of MI6, Sir Richard

Dearlove and George Tenet, CIA director, met at CIA headquarters on the 20th of July 2002. Okay? This is July 2002. Everyone was saying, well, does Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction? Well, they met there because Tony Blair, who had been talking to Bush and saying, you know, we're going to do this, they had agreed to do this, right, this war, but he wasn't quite sure that Bush was really with it. So he sent his MI6 guy, Dear Love, to talk with George Tenet because George Tenet was known to know exactly what Bush was thinking. So they met on a Saturday, the 30th, the 20th of July, 2002, and the outcome was revealed years

later. Now, I make the point here, Dan Ellsberg would always want me to say, that was too late. If you're going to leak something like that, you leak it so you can stop something. What was leaked years later? Yeah, what was leaked was the Downing Street memorandum. Now, here's the situation. Dear Love goes to Washington

and talks with Tenet on the 20th of July, 2002. On the 23rd, so my math is right, it's three days later, right? There's a big meeting of very high officials at Downing Street, Blair in charge, okay? So what does Dear Love do? He briefs them and he says, now, there's going to be a war. Bush has decided to be a war.

That's what Tenet tells me. And the intelligence and the facts are going to be fixed around the policy. That's a direct quote, okay? And then Straw, the foreign minister, Jack Straw said, well, you know, this is going to be an uphill battle because Saddam Hussein is not threatening his neighbors. And besides, he doesn't have as many WMD as Libya or North Korea or other. So, you know, we're going to have this going to be tough to sell. And and dear love comes back and says, look, this is the way it is. It will be justified by the conjunction of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. In other words, we'll say there are weapons of mass destruction there.

They're going to be given to terrorists. We're going to go ahead with this. Now, that was July, July 2002. It wasn't until a month or two later that Bob Graham, head of the Senate, was asking, hey, can we have an estimate on this? Looks like you guys want to do a war. Can we have a national intelligence estimate on this? And George Sanders said, no, no, we're too busy.

So Dick Durbin from Illinois, he says, look, Bob, just tell them no intelligence estimate, no war, no permission for war. And so that's what Bob Graham did. That's why you've got the fraudulent intelligence estimate of October 1st, 2002, which said, you know, all these things and were the basis of Colin Powell's fraudulent remarks.

So that's how you get to say, you decide in the spring with Tony Blair. Then you get your intelligence, your agencies together, and then they justify it by the conjunction. But have these intelligence agencies ever been engaged in public propaganda the way they are today. Example, the head of MI6 two days ago, Chris, cut number 10. And it's important to remember how this started in this phase with Putin mounting a war of aggression in February 2022. And two and a half years later, that failed. It continues to fail. The Ukrainians will continue to fight. We will continue to help them to fight. And it's difficult. This is utter rubbish that Putin has failed. We've put together, Chris has put together

a montage of American officials, Biden, Blinken, Austin, Sullivan, saying Putin has failed, Putin has failed, Putin has failed. Ukraine's about to collapse. How can MI6 stand in front of an international audience on international television next to the head of CIA and tell a lie like that, that Putin has failed. Well, he's instructed to do that. It's part of the imperial outreach. The intelligence services do what they're told, and they get away with it.

Now, what happened to Sir Richard Dearlove? He became head of one of the most prominent colleges at Cambridge, right? What happened to Jack Straw, foreign minister? Same thing. They get, what do they call them? They get to be sirs. They're benighted before the war, and then they get knighted after the war for services performed. It's totally corrupt, Judge. And my concern, as you well know,

is what happens during these next two months, because the narrative, they can maybe change that, but they can't change the situation on the ground. And as we've said, this could be a definitive defeat before the election. What are Blinken and Sullivan going to try to do with the help of MI6 and CIA to prevent that? I don't know, but I have some ideas. What are your ideas? Well, false flag attacks come first and foremost. The Ukrainians have three nuclear power plants. They could be attacked with disastrous consequences and blamed on the Russians, of course. There are lots of things that can enhance the narrative on the ground. They're all faux things. They're all fraudulent things, but they can be done. And let's face it, Sullivan, Blinken, Biden, they're all in danger of losing the war, losing the election.

And if this other fellow comes through, losing their freedom. Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend. Very much appreciated. Appreciate your insight, your knowledge of history and of the facts on the ground. And we'll see you with Larry Johnson at the end of the week. Thanks, Judge. All the best. Coming up later today, the aforementioned Larry Johnson at 11 this morning at 12 noon Eastern,

Anya Parampol at 2 o'clock this afternoon, the one, the only, the great Ralph Nader. At 3 o'clock this afternoon, my longtime friend and gifted understander of economic forces, Charlie Gasparino. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

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