Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: The Paths of Resistance to Israel

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Ray McGovern: The Paths of Resistance to IsraelSee 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, August 19th, 2024. Our good friend Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, always a pleasure, my friend. I want to talk to you about the path of resistance to Israel and if the resistance has a control room, so to speak. Washington Post over the weekend that you and I communicated about claiming that the Ukrainian incursion slash invasion into Kursk has rattled President Putin and that he's in panic mode. Gee, I wonder who could have planted that with the Washington Post. Yeah, the Washington Post is saying that Putin is frozen. He's frozen. He doesn't know what to do, right? Now, I think we have to recognize that this really is a first. In other words, the Russians believe, whether we believe that or not, that NATO was behind this, that it was well rehearsed,

and they were sort of taken by surprise. So there's a degree of embarrassment here, for sure. But the notion that Putin is just so frozen, he doesn't know how to react. Well, he does know how to react, but he's been reacting in a very measured way all along during these two plus years. So what are they trying to do? Trying to provoke him? Trying to shame him into doing something that they can cite as a provocation so they can send still more arms to Ukraine? It's just sort of, it's kind of, well, amateurish and purposive, I would say. Journalism, if you can call it journalism at all. Our friend Pepe Escobar says anybody that has a pulse knows that this was a NATO planned and plotted invasion and that the American protestations, we know nothing about it,

are utterly without belief and nobody in the West really believes those protestations. Why would NATO do this? To provoke Putin? Well, you know, I think, Judge, we have to go back and who's in charge in Washington. It's not Biden. It's Blinken and Sullivan. They still come out of this exceptional atmosphere where the U.S. can do whatever it wants and rope NATO into doing whatever it wants. Things are not going real well in Ukraine, as you know. And so, well, let's try this. Now, there are hotheads in Kiev saying, OK, well, so, well, let's try this. Now, the hotheads in Kiev say, okay,

well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. We'll try it. It's sort of like a Hail Mary pass, right? But the Hail Mary pass has a better chance of success than this incursion into Russia. It's a deliberate provocation. The Russians will have to react in a stronger way than they have before. But whether they're going to use nuclear weapons or whether they're going to do something really strange, no matter what the Washington Post tries to do in terms of provoking them to do that, they're not going to do it. Now, Lukashenko, the head of Belarus, he said just yesterday, I think it was, look, we ought to get back to negotiations.

We ought to pick up where we were in Istanbul. But, you know, he's whistling in the wind because Putin has already said himself, no chance in negotiations with this crowd. And that will be the case up to and through the election. And that is the key benchmark here. the election and putin has also said weeks ago nothing's going to happen nothing of great consequence is going to happen until after the election in november our election uh lukashenko also said that if this is not resolved by negotiation ukraine could be destroyed, his phrase.

Is he speaking, is he, because he's so close to Putin, is he speaking for Putin? Is this like Medvedev, or is he just on his own? Well, they're vulnerable themselves. I mean, they could get involved in this thing. Lukashenko said all kinds of things, talking about nuclear weapons, that what NATO is trying to do is mousetrap Russia into upping the fray to include nuclear weapons.

So, yeah, Lukashenko is a little bit like Mityazov, but he's got a real stake in what happens. He's trying to warn the Ukrainians, look, don't you know when to fold them? You're holding these things just because the U.S. says hold those cards. You ought to think about folding them. And, you know, the point is coming where that's going to happen, whether it's before the election or after the election. They do seem to be preparing the ground for telling Zelensky, please, please go off somewhere to whatever villa abroad that you have built. The Kremlin has characterized the invasion as a terrorist operation, which may actually be a technical phrase that they use. I can't seem to find the phrase, but if it is a terrorist operation, they don't take prisoners. They kill everybody

that they believe was behind this. Am I right? That's right. And, you know, in another sense, it's not an act of war. OK, so a terrorist act can be responded to in other ways than, you know, frontally confronting the terrorist state. These are these are bad actors. And that's the way I interpret it. A terrorist act can be in a category short of actual war. Why does our friend, former ambassador Craig Murray, say that the West are not good guys? Yeah, actually, this is the unspeakable, Judge. Craig is a really good friend of mine. We gave him the Sam Adams Award. He was just the good guys, but he adduces proof positive that we're the bad guys and that we have to own up to that. I won't refer to the skit. There's a great skit the British did about we're the bad guys, but this is more serious than a skit.

And he's saying it out loud. He's saying the unspeakable. And Americans can't really wrap their minds around that because of the prevalence of propaganda that's shown. No, no, we're always the good guys. And the people who lead us say we're not only the good guys, we're the exceptional guys, we're the indispensable guys. And everybody else should sort of just kowtow to what we do abroad. Reverting back to President Lukashenko, here he is yesterday saying that the West is trying to provoke Russia into using nukes. Cut number three. This kind of escalation on the part of Ukraine is an attempt to push Russia to asymmetric actions.

For example, the use of nuclear weapons. For sure, Ukraine would be very happy if Russia or Belarus used tactical nuclear weapons there. They would be happy because we would hardly have any allies left. No countries would ever sympathize. And secondly, on nuclear weapons, the world has a negative view of these. So the Ukrainians want to push this possibility. They want to push Russia. Who could defeat Russia?

Ukraine cannot do it. Who can? The West. NATO. We, myself and President Putin, think that NATO would then get the green light to invade Russia without hiding its intentions. To invade Russia without hiding its intentions. This guy sees exactly what's going on. Technical question. Does Belarus have nuclear weapons uh they do uh they are under Russian custody but they not only have nuclear weapons they have these gander missiles that can that they can be used with and actually I think uh Lukashenko refers to that as well he says you

know there's these ganders and we have you, there are nuclear weapons here in Belarus. We don't want to be provoked into using nuclear weapons either that are already in five different NATO countries, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. So there are five such places in NATO. This is one extra one besides Russia in that part of the world. Very, very, very dangerous. I want to get back to Craig Murray, Ambassador Murray, for a minute. What happened to him when he exposed torture, either committed by MI6 or condoned by MI6? Well, Craig was the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, okay? And when he arrived there, as is typical for Craig, he went around, did these little foot things, and he went into courts, and he saw how people were being imprisoned and tortured on false charges.

He became known as the kind of person who cared about human rights. And so the next thing you know, somebody put through the transom in his office, awful pictures of somebody who had been boiled alive. It happened to be the son of this person, this mother who dropped these pictures. And Craig said, my God, this kid. So he sent it to the medical people in the foreign office there in the UK. He didn't explain what it was. They said, yeah, this person was boiled. Okay. Now they left that person's body on the kitchen table because they had no other place to put it. That's how the mother got the picture. That was just part of the thing. Craig knew that some of the intelligence he was getting was from torture done by CIA surrogates in Uzbekistan. He complained to the foreign office

and he said, my God, this is awful. Do you know this is going on? And they said, are the British doing it? And he said, no, no, it's just Americans. Well, it's none of our business. Stop it. We don't want to hear any more about it. So that didn't suffice. He went to London, stirred up a storm, got canned, was able to fight for his pension.

And right after that, we awarded him the Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence in New York, 2005, I think it was. Now, what does that mean? That means that this guy had a conscience. This guy was not going to bow to the bureaucracy. And in his speech, you know, he talked about, you know, what it's like for him to be bereft of any support by his former colleagues, people he played golf with, people he went to school with in the foreign office. It's a lonely sort of thing. And he gave up a very promising career. He was one of the youngest UK ambassadors ever. Okay. And he gave that up because he stood against torture and he would

not relent. And of course they get rid of him. So he's a paragon of virtue. He's a big, big, big supporter of Julian Assange all the way. Who was the prime minister of the Kandem, Tony Blair? Yeah. It would have been Blair, yeah. How strong is the Middle East resistance to Israel, particularly in light of the live streaming of the rape, the gang rape of the Palestinian prisoner and the efforts by the Knesset to immunize the rapists?

It's extremely strong. We here in the United States only get a third of the kind of atrocities, these photos and all that sort of stuff. They get it all from Al Jazeera, from Al Mujahideen, from all kinds of places. So it's a boiling, it's a powder keg right now. What we're all waiting for is how Iran is going to reply to the assassinations. And my guess is that it will be a pointed and a measured response, but it will be against Israel, Israeli military facilities. And I think there's a 50-50 chance that part of this axis of resistance, the guys in Iraq and in Syria, where we still have hundreds of troops as sitting ducks. You wonder if that is

on purpose, okay? They're going to get hit too, in my view, at least a 50-50 chance. And then it'll be hitting not only Israel, but hitting the U.S., and that will be a choice for Biden if he's alive or if he's an accomplishmentist. Blinken and Sullivan top the ante still more. There are all kinds of naval vessels in the area. What's going to happen? Bottom line is Netanyahu and his coterie want to mousetrap the U.S. into active military involvement. It'll start with missiles. It will start with artillery. Will it end up with Marines on the ground? I don't think so, but my God, it's close to that right now. There's 5,000 Marines here, 5,000 Marines there. They could get sent in because Blinken and Sullivan

are not, well, are not the sharpest knives in the draw. They don't know what Reagan did back in 83. Reagan survived that. He pulled these people out, okay? They should really shun active involvement militarily, no matter how much Netanyahu tries to mousetrap them. Does anybody believe that Netanyahu seriously wants to negotiate toward a ceasefire? I mean, when I say anybody, I mean, Blinken and Sullivan and the White House and the West Wing and the State Department. Don't they recognize that Smotrich and Ben-Gabir and their colleagues will pull the plug on them and Netanyahu won't have a government? And then back to being a defendant in three criminal cases. And we all know that that domino effect scenario. But does anybody trust him at his word

when he says he wants to negotiate? Well, I don't know of anybody who has a good sense that thinks that. Blinken was in Israel yesterday. He's in Egypt today. You know, one thinks of one of his predecessors, Condoleezza Rice. People, the Arabs, where she traveled extensively, decided that Condoleezza translated means perpetual motion. She was a traveler. That's what had been translated from English. So he's building up these miles. And, you know, the British call it a charade. It's a charade.

We call it a charade. And no one thinks that these negotiations. I mean, Hamas has already said, look, Netanyahu is posing still more obstacles. They want to finish off the Palestinians. You know, people talk about, well, they reached the 40,000 mark. I think that's what 40,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. Well, guess what, folks? Those are only the ones that have their wallets with them and

their ID. Okay, they can count them, put them on the list. How about the people still under the rubble? Okay. How about the other people that are just killed in different ways, like mass hunger, or the lack of medical supplies? As you know, the British Lancet, very respectable medical organization, puts the number at 186,000. And our good friend, John Mearsheimer, has looked at the methodology that they use to come up with 186,000 as opposed to 40,000. He said, it's valid? I would say, says Mearsheimer, it's between 200,000 and 250,000 Palestinians dead in Gaza. Now, I don't know math very well, but if you take 2 million plus Gazans and you say 200,000, I think that's, what was that, 20% of the Gazan population. My God.

10% maybe. It's a little bit more than 10%. Here's Prime Minister Netanyahu earlier today. Now, it's hard for me to believe that anybody, even around the table where he's seated when he's speaking, believes what he says. But I'll let you weigh in on it as you see fit. Cut number one. Israel is prepared for any threat, both defensively and offensively. We are determined to defend ourselves and we are also determined

to exact a heavy price from any enemy who dares to attack us from any arena. I want to emphasize that we are conducting negotiations and not that we just give and give. There are things can be flexible on and there are things we cannot be flexible on, which we will insist on. We know how to distinguish the two very well. We will stand by the same principles that are sustainable for Israel's security. These principles are in keeping with the May 27th framework, which has received American support. Once again, I would like to emphasize, up until now, Hamas has been completely obstinate. It did not even send a representative to the talks in Doha. Therefore, the pressure needs to be directed

at Hamas and Sinwa, not the government of Israel. They didn't send a representative to Doha because you murdered him. Yeah, this is PR. This is to strengthen the Israeli population into thinking he's in full control. And, you know, when he says we have American support, he goes back to May 27th. Is that right? Well, you know, he can cite what Congress did, of course. Whether Blinken and Sullivan will be stupid enough to give Israel military support once it gets into a wider war

with not only Hamas, but Hezbollah and Iran, well, you know, I wouldn't rule it out, but that's what he's counting on. And the only thing that can counter that is somebody to stand up within the U.S. administration and say, look, Habibi or Netanyahu, you're on your own if you do that. We're not going to support you because we don't want to get sucked into this thing. Nobody in any position of power in the United States is willing to do that for obvious reasons, and especially before the election coming up in November. What do you think Secretary Blinken said to Prime Minister Netanyahu? I'm going to play a clip in a few minutes of him speaking in the presence of Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel,

but Netanyahu is not there, at least not in the clip. What do you think he said to Netanyahu? This is it, baby? Either cut a deal now or we cut you off? Would he have said something as drastic as that? Joe has to have peace before election day. Are you going to show a film here? No, no, no. I want your, I want your thought on what you think he said. And then I'm going to show you the clip. Well, I think Blinken probably said, look, I'm blinking here. Please, please be more reasonable.

Now, I know you can't, but, hey, be a little bit more reasonable. And, you know, if you get involved in wider war, I don't know if I'll be able to persuade that cipher named Austin and his military folks to get involved in this because, you know, they're beginning to give me some resistance here. They don't want to get involved in this because, you know, they're beginning to give me some resistance here. They don't want to get involved in a war. So please, just consider it. Consider the charade, the charade, and keep going the way you have been.

Well, you've got our support unless the military rebels and says this is stupid. So, yeah, that's my guess. All right. Here's Secretary Blinken with Israeli President Herzog, not Prime Minister Netanyahu, shortly before he left Israel for Egypt earlier today. Cut number seven. I'm here as part of an intensive diplomatic effort on President Biden's instructions to try to get this agreement to the line and ultimately over the line. It is time for it to get done. It's also time to make sure that no one takes any steps that could derail this process.

And so we're working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way could move us away from getting this deal over the line or, for that matter, escalating the conflict to other places and to greater intensity. Is he stupid? Doesn't he know that Netanyahu will never agree to a deal, no matter how flexible Hamas might be? Yeah, he knows that. This is part of the charade, okay? And if Iran reacts to those

assassinations the way most of us think it will eventually, after it gets all kinds of air defense and other equipment from Russia, okay, then he will blame, he'll blame Iran and whoever cooperates with Iran, like Hamas and Hezbollah. So yeah, these would be terrible steps that would be, the people guilty would be the axis of resistance led by Iran. Let me prevail upon your vast experience in the intelligence community. Is it likely that from the CIA or Mossad or MI6 or some other source, the Israelis are aware of what preparation Iran is making for either its assault or its defenses from the likely response to the assault? Well, Judge, the concentration of satellite imagery, and I'm not just talking about photography, but radar and multispectral and radar, we have Iran covered like a blanket. The question is, how much can they conceal from us?

I think pretty much we're aware of what Iran is planning to do. The only question is when they'll do it and what precisely their targets will be. As I said before, I think they'll be careful to select important military targets, avoiding civilian deaths, but they're going to do it. And that's inevitable. And they'll be prepared for any retaliation, thanks largely to these very sophisticated air defense missile systems, S-400s, almost the best the Russians have, which by all accounts are now arriving as we speak in Tehran. So, yeah, I don't think that this is going to end nicely. It's going to really require a situation where the White House,

whoever's running the White House, is going to have to decide whether we jump in and defend Israel full bore with military support or whether we do something more sensible having told the Israelis look you know our military is not real real fond of getting involved we'll have to see but I think that will be coming within the next week or so uh Friday afternoon after the intelligence community roundtable, Senator Lindsey Graham, I suppose we could stop right here, but I'm going to tell you what he did, introduced legislation in the Senate, which, if adopted by Congress, would authorize President Biden or any future president to attack Iran anytime he wanted. Now, I'm assuming that this is a political farce. What would be the likely response to something like this? Not the attack, but the legislation authorizing it.

Well, everyone knows that Lindsey Graham is a loose cannon, but the problem is that the Congress is the best Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. So let's say that legislation became adopted. What would Iran do? Well, they'd keep their powder dry and they'd do exactly what they plan to do in terms of retaliation for the assassinations. And the big thing is Iran is part of BRICS now. It's part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's this close to a mutual, almost defense treaty with Russia. China is very involved in supporting Iran. So this thing has the possibility of escalating out of control if the US is foolish enough to obey the likes of Lindsey Graham. My dear friend, thank you very much, Ray.

Much appreciated, no matter what we talk about. We'll look forward to seeing you at the end of the week with that youngster, Larry Johnson. Most welcome. Okay. All the best. Thank you. And the aforestated youngster, Larry Johnson, right here with an update on the invasion in Kursk at 11 o'clock Eastern. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.