Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern : Iran and a Pretext for War

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Ray McGovern : Iran and a Pretext for WarSee 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, July 29th, 2024. Ray McGovern will be with us in just a moment. Let's see what things have been happening lately. Chinese and Russian jets over Alaska, Russian naval ships arriving at Cuba, a pretext for war over Iran. But first this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value 23%. So $100 invested in gold a year ago is now worth $123. You have $100 in the bank,

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Learn about how to transfer this to an IRA. Protect your savings. 800-511-4620, learjudgenap.com. Tell them the judge sent you. Ray McGovern, a pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Judge. There's a lot of interesting topics that I want to discuss with you, but let me start with breaking news, which is a comment from President Erdogan of Turkey just a few hours ago that Turkey may need to enter Israel. We'll play the tape and I'll ask you what you think about it. Sure.

What was our import-export ratio in the defense industry? Where have we come to? But my dear brothers and sisters, let none of these fool us or should deceive us. We must be very strong so that this Israel cannot do these ridiculous things to Palestine. Just as we entered Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we will do the same to them. There is no reason for us not to. We only have to be strong so that we can take these steps. How serious a threat is this that the Turkish armed forces would, to use this phrase, enter Israel because there is no reason not to?

It's not serious unless. And unless, of course, is if there becomes an all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel in the north of Israel as well as the Gaza escapade. If that happens, all bets are off. Turkey will have to maybe do more than rhetoric. So far, though, Erdogan is really good at rhetoric. When he talks about insuring Karabakh or insuring Libya, well, that was not much. He supported the current unstable government of Libya, Karabakh, it's not quite clear what he did. But if he's suggesting he's going to send troops into Israel, not yet. I would not take it seriously. Is he something that the Israelis should be worried about if they contemplate a major

conflagration against Hezbollah, or is he the last of their worries? He's not the last. There are economic ties. If I recall correctly, there's the provision of oil and other fuels, and there's an active trade between Turkey and Israel. So Israel's economy is falling apart. Anyway, this will be part of their calculation. They wouldn't want this.

But God knows what Netanyahu, now that he's been authorized by the Israeli cabinet to do his own retaliation, so to speak, against that firing against the Druze up there on the Golan. Now that he's been authorized to do that together with Army Chief Galan, God knows what's going to happen. And that's, of course, the big question right now. Before we get to who attacked the Druze and what is likely to happen, what is your take on the Chinese and Russians flying jets close to Alaska? And would American intel have known they were coming before they got there? The answer to the last one is yes, certainly. There's lots of radar and other coverage of that part of the world.

This is the first time they've done this as a joint operation. My God, Russia, Chinese joint operation. TU-95, great big bombers and escorts, Chinese. Not too many. I think there were four aircraft. And they didn't enter into Alaska airspace, of course. But they hadn't done that before. They hadn't really done something like that for many, many years. And Putin yesterday at Navy Day called attention to the fact that the Americans

are really, really, really complaining about this. Well, the Americans have been doing that to Soviet airspace or Russian airspace regularly, not entering it or sometimes entering it, but being chased away for years and years. Putin said, this stopped. You know, we fell apart. And, you know, it was clear we didn't have any real big grudge against the U.S., but they didn't stop. And so, yeah, this is new. And besides that, note that on Navy Day, says Putin,

Chinese ships are participating for the first time up there in St. Petersburg. Not only that, but we have a warship from India and one from Algeria. And there are 30 other nations represented here for celebrating Russian Navy Day. It's quite a change in attitude, and Putin is trying to stick it to us. He also mentions one other thing, one really remarkable thing about these offensive strike missiles. We call them long-range missiles that the Germans have acquiesced in are putting in Germany, starting in 2006 on a trial basis. He had some really interesting words to say on that. We'll get into that later if you wish. He's not very happy about it. Here's exactly what he said. Cut number one. The situation recalls the events of the Cold War era. If the U.S. implements such plans, we will consider ourselves free from the previously imposed one-sided moratorium on the deployment of medium and shorter range strike systems. We will take mirror measures for their deployment.

We will take mirror measures for their deployment. What does that mean? Well, it simply means that they'll not just sit for tat. But, Judge, I've been looking really closely at the language used here. And you recall it says medium and shorter range missiles. Well, the U.S. and Germany have agreed to put long range missiles in Germany. What's that all about? I'll tell you what I think that's all about. Long range missiles are entirely unnecessary for the US. We have a strategic duel that don't quit. There's a balance. How about Germany? Oh, you put these missiles in

Germany, and what is Putin threatening to do? Not to hit the U.S. with long-range missiles, but Germany with medium and shorter-range missiles. So I don't know what Scholz in Germany is smoking. But when he said the U.S. decided to do this and we agreed, that just shows once again the servility with which the German government looks on the United States and whatever it wants to do. That's OK. Even though the real target here, as Putin made clear yesterday, is Germany, is where these bases will be and where these missiles will be fired from. All right. Last question on all of this. Why more Russian naval ships in Havana Harbor? Well, you know, the last time around, about a month ago, you could explain it by, well, it was pre-planned. Well, I don't know if this was pre-planned or not, but pre-planned or not pre-planned, it sends a really, really graphic signal, doesn't it?

I mean, look what happened in 1962 when Russian ships went into Cuba. There was a strategic challenge, which John Kennedy arose to. Now, I'm not saying that they're going to put missiles in Cuba. They're not. But they're demonstrating their ability to operate in our territory here, Monroe Doctrine be damned. And worse still, the Venezuelan election yesterday turned out that Maduro's people won. That's a big win for the Russians as well, and a big win for the Venezuelans, in my view. What's your take on all of this extraordinary military activity. Is Putin trying to send a message to the ailing Joe Biden

and ascendant Kamala Harris? I think it's more to Blinken and Sullivan. They don't seem to be fully with it, actually. They still don't seem to realize that they can't play Russia off against China or China off against Russia, as they've been telling the president for the last three years. They don't seem to realize that this is playing with fire. And what Putin is doing is doing every demonstrative act that he can, whether it's near Alaska or it's down in Cuba, whether it's in St. Petersburg for the Navy Day celebration. He's trying to do it. Now, my fear is that Putin will have to decide that he's still not getting through to these guys and that they have real incentive to cause some problems before the election, maybe start a little war here or there. And so the next step that the Russians have to do would be more explosive in the figurative

as well as the real sense of that word. Wow. Let's transition to Israel and Gaza and Israel and Hezbollah. Let's start with Gaza. I understand that the latest terror to strike the Palestinian people is polio. Polio. that some of the right-wing members of Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet have encouraged the spread of polio as a way to degrade the population and bring about what Netanyahu told the Congress he wanted, total victory.

Am I overreading this? No, that's what they're saying, my God. And that's what they're saying, my God. And that's what they're doing. Polio has been detected in all kinds of sewage and all kinds of other stuff that has been the result of the bombing in Gaza. It's the first time this polio virus has appeared since it was eradicated two decades ago, okay? And that virus could go back to Israel as well. Meanwhile, there's all kinds of respiratory infections. Half of the Gazan people have upper respiratory infections.

There are signs of jaundice and hepatitis. They're looking for plague. Now, you mentioned this advisor to the Netanyahu government. He was a past national security advisor, okay? And he's a general. And what he said was, you know, this helps. You know, this is one where we get rid of those Hamas, meaning Palestinian people, and then this saves casualties from the idea from our army, they won't have to face as many people. And so this is one way of doing it.

In other words, make sure that they don't have any hospitals to go to, or when they hurt themselves, when they get a, when they step on a nail, for God's sake, there's no antibiotic to prevent it from becoming gangrene or becoming locked jaw or whatever. So this is part of it. The other part, Judge, is that it's become very clear that there are no shipments of any volume going into Israel to prevent hunger. So you've got disease and you've got famine, human-induced famine. The head of the Israeli army says right after October 7th that we're going to prevent water,

we're going to prevent food, we're going to prevent fuel, we're going to prevent medicine from going in there. That, my friends, is genocide. And that's what's going on. So anybody has any doubt about what the Israelis are trying to do? They're trying to either kill or expel or do away in some way with all the Palestinians. And they've already got, according to the Lancet up there in Britain, about 200,000 dead because of these, not only because of the bombing, not only because they're trapped under these buildings, but because of disease now and continuing hunger.

And Biden can do all he wants and say, you know, I've tried to do this. I tried to get, but there are no trucks going in worth mentioning with food, medicine, supplies, or anything else that the Gazans need. And, you know, that's genocide pure and simple. It's not only the arms we're providing to Israel. It's all these other things that we shut our eyes to and say, okay, Netanyahu, you're real popular here in Congress.

You could do whatever you want. Who attacked the Druze teenagers in the Golan Heights as they were playing soccer over the weekend? I was very suspicious at first, Judge. I looked for a false flag attack. You know, if the Israelis want to go off against Hezbollah at big time, then they would need something like that. But the reportage that I've seen indicates that it was a Hezbollah missile that struck there. Now, the question is whether that was intentional. It looks very much as though it was not intentional. There are Israeli outposts on the two mountains.

They're really big hills in the area. This one went astray. Why would Hezbollah want to target kids playing soccer? So my analysis is that it went astray. It was not intentional. And curiously enough, the Hezbollah people are saying pretty much that. And they're conferring with the Iranians because they need to do that in case the Israelis take retaliatory steps that could start a wider war. That's where Erdogan comes in as well.

Now, you know, the irony of this thing, the dissimilarity, 12 Jews kids. Well, first of all, this is not really properly internationally recognized as Israel, okay? This is part of Syria under international law. I've been up there. The Golan commands a view down in Damascus, for God's sake. It almost seemed Damascus. It's very high ground, very strategic territory. So President Trump said, okay, let's let that be part of Israel.

Now, we recognize it's part of Israel. It's not part of Israel. Does that matter? Yeah, the Druze don't like the Israelis. But the Israelis are trying to use this in a way that could really, really redound to a wider war against Hezbollah. I don't know if they'll do that or not. There are lots of people in the Israeli army that says, you know, let's just take it on too much.

And as I've said before, Netanyahu is going to say, look, didn't you see my speech before Congress? 53 times they got up. Did you see that? And Biden and Sullivan, give me a break. We'll get no problem. We'll just go after Hezbollah. If we get in trouble, as we likely will, the U.S. statement, a definitive one, an official one that says, look, you go against Hezbollah unprovoked, and we will not support you. If the administration said that in very certain terms, then the army, the Israeli army, would have some sort of lever to use and say, well, look, Netanyahu, you say the U.S. is going to come to your aid if we get in trouble up there,

which we likely will, but they say they're not. How do you square that circle there, Bibi? And he'll be in trouble because the Israeli army is a powerful independent force, even though nominally they're under the orders of the prime minister. Here is the foreign minister of Lebanon talking earlier today about who is more likely than not to have caused the death of these teenage soccer players. You know, so we don't know who did it. I know Hezbollah is accused by Israel that they did it. Hezbollah refuses.

My feeling is that why would Hezbollah do it to kill Arabs, to kill Syrians? And Hezbollah has been, you know, always targeting military positions of Israel, not civilians. The number of civilians killed in Israel was less than seven, while in Lebanon over more than 100 killed by Israel in Lebanon. So I cannot understand why would has Bella do it there's no logic in it why would Hezbollah intentionally kill its own children that's the key there's lots that can go wrong in war and uh my best guess is that this was not the target, obviously, for what reason. And that it could have been an Israeli defense like a dome surface-to-air missile that missed or fell down, as often happens in this kind of war. The other thing is that, you know, if Hezbollah wanted to advertise this shooting and it did shoot other missiles at the same time, it would have bragged about it.

It did not brag about it. It did not take responsibility. Right, right. The same point that the foreign minister was making. Are you concerned about the employment of American intelligence in the creation of a false flag? For example, the CIA persuading the president that Iran has a nuclear weapon or some other untruth in order to provoke the U.S. to give a green light to Israel? Yes, I am. And a recent example would be Tony Blinken telling the world that Iran is very close,

maybe a week or two away from having enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. Okay. Well, the reality is that since 2007, to its credit, the intelligence community has said there is no evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. And so when you confuse or you conflate highly enriched uranium with a nuclear weapon, you still need a weapon to put that highly enriched uranium in, right? And they've not been working on that as recently as March at

the latest worldwide threat briefing by the Director of National Intelligence. That same estimate, going back to 2007, that Iran is not yet working on a nuclear weapon, obtained. Now, would my former friends there in the analysis part of the agency try to doctor the next estimate? I don't think so. There's so much on the record. But would the operative people, if Blinken said, hey, you operations guys in the CIA, see if you can make some event or make some finding of a desktop treasure trove of stuff showing that Iran is now working on a nuclear weapon. I have to add a caveat here. About a month ago, Iran, under great duress, some of its high generals said, look, we may have to revisit this. I mean, we know there's a religious edict against it, a fatwa. But you know, the secret says that

we may have to revisit this business about not making a nuclear weapon. But that was just a one-off thing. And I see no evidence. And of course, I wouldn't see the real evidence. No evidence yet rhetorically or in the open press that they've done that. Let me ask you a couple of questions about your former colleagues. Would the CIA have known what Netanyahu was going to say to Congress before he delivered the speech? Oh, sure. He gave the text to the White House, and normally the White House would share that with the agency. The agency would have no real ability to comment on it other than say, oh, that's great, that's great. Contrary-wise, on a presidential speech, it used to be the practice

that the CIA would be able to comment on things like claims of weapons of mass destruction that kind of thing but when Netanyahu speaks the CIA nobody has anything to say about it and the State Department would be too timid to even

change probably to maybe. Would Mossad have known of Joe Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race before he announced it? And would Mossad have known what he was going to say to the American public last Wednesday night before he said it? On the former, no. Joe Biden didn't tell anybody. He didn't even tell his campaign staff. He told them a minute before he went on or before he allegedly- You once told me that Mossad knows what's going on inside the White House. Yeah, but if nobody inside the White House knows what Joe Biden's going to do,

then neither does Mossad. My point is simply that Joe Biden didn't tell anybody what he was going to do. He and his campaign staff keep saying he was going to hang in the race until a minute before he did that tweet, for God's sake, and say, no, I'm not going to run again. And so how could Mossad know that? So in this case, the Mossad didn't know it. The other question you had, what did Mossad say or what did they know before? What was the answer? His speech to the American people. I'm trying to find out how deep into the White House Mossad surveillance goes. Would Netanyahu have known or to whomever Mossad reports what Biden was going to say to the American public from the Oval Office last Wednesday night before he said it? Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know that it matters very much on this kind of thing. You could piece together what he was going to say, whether someone within the White House gave them a preliminary draft or not. Look forward to seeing you with Larry Johnson on the Intelligence Community Roundtable on Friday afternoon. You're most welcome, Judge. Thanks. Larry Johnson coming up at 11 o'clock this morning, Eastern, and at two o'clock this afternoon, Eastern, Ambassador Charles Freeman on how perilous is Israel and how perilous is NATO. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.