Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: What Can Stop the Siege of Gaza?

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Ray McGovern: What Can Stop the Siege of Gaza?See 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. Happy New Year. Today is Tuesday, January 2nd, 2023. Ray McGovern will be with us in just a moment on the consequences of government lies. But first this. Justin Faltano here. I love being a spokesperson for causes that I believe in, and one of them is the soundness of money. We don't have that anymore. The markets are casinos. The Fed is printing cash like it's going out of style. What is the government doing to my money? What is it doing to your money?

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800-511-4620, learjudgenap.com. And when you speak to these good folks, tell them the judge sent you. Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend. Happy New Year to you. Thank you for all the time and energy and intellect you've given us in 2023 and with many hopes and aspirations for our continued professional collaboration, much to the delight of your fans in our audience in 2024. Thanks, Judge. It's often been said that the job of the CIA, in fact, Mike Pompeo once said this in an unguarded moment,

is to steal secrets and lie about them. Do you think the public expects the government to lie? And do you think the public has the remotest conception of the consequences of accepting government lies. On the first part, Judge, I think most of the American people do suspect the government of lying. After all, the evidence laid out there, even if you just watch the mainstream media, as to whether they expect the government to continue to lie and to have the consequences that we have experienced. No, because they're brainwashed on a whole different narrative. It's always the Russians, the Russians, the Russians, the terrorists, the terrorists, Iran, Iran, Iran. They are, and I use the term advisedly, Judge, they are brainwashed. And so

they don't realize what it is, for example, for seven, eight years ago, this legend about the Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee computers and gave us Donald Trump. They don't realize that that has been totally debunked now by court testimony. They don't know that, and so they can't appreciate the consequences. But the culture in your former place of employment, Mike Pompeo was, of course, military and then CIA and then a congressman and then the director of the CIA and then the Secretary of State. Is he right when he said the CIA's job is to steal secrets and lie about it? Well, he said that in a unguarded moment out there at Texas A&M where he knew everybody would clap really loud. He was having a little hubristic moment there. What he said was, you know, we have all courses

at the CIA and teaching us how to lie, cheat, and steal. I mean, it's really great. And everybody applauded. Well, you know, yeah, that's what goes with the CIA overseas. What we tried to do in the analysis part of CIA was tell it like it is. And that's why Truman set up the whole damn agency, right? So yeah, Pompeo is just the inheritor of a corrupt regime, malleable managers, I call them, put place by bill casey and bobby gates who would just salute if casey said it's the russians that are responsible for all terrorism in the world right and they was just sir mr casey gates yes i see five russians under those rocks in Nicaragua. They got promoted. They, in turn, promoted more people.

And when you get to the Iraq fiasco, when Bush and Cheney made clear that they wanted evidence, they wanted some kind of reason to substantiate an attack on Iraq. Well, we know that story. American people don't know it very well, but they should know in a word that after a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, use to justify the war in Iraq was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent, period, end quote. That was a bipartisan decision by this body, this Senate Intelligence Committee, and it was unanimous. So, you know, that's the word right there. Uncorroborated, contradicted, and even non-existent, his words, what's non-existent intelligence look like? This was the most profound sadness I had when I saw my profession of intelligence analysis

corrupted to that extent to justify a war of aggression. Did George Tenet tell the truth when he blamed 9-11 on the Saudis? You know, I don't know about that. I have not seen a lot of stuff. I know that he did not tell the truth about weapons of mass destruction, and I know that he was responsible for having an estimate, a national intelligence estimate, a fraudulent one prepared just in time for Congress to vote to enable Bush and Cheney to make war on Iraq. That is the document that Colin Powell relied upon at the UN. I think Colin Powell knew better, but he said it anyway. So

Tenet has disappeared into the woodwork. I don't know where he is now, but he should be brought up on charges of starting an illicit and immoral and unnecessary war. Well, we know that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were of the view that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction before 9-11. Somehow their opinions changed after 9-11. How do we know their opinions before 9-11? Well, Chris found these. Chris, let's run both of these clips.

Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice before 9-11. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt. And that, many believe, was the truth. A truth that was covered up and conveniently forgotten after September the 11th, when Bush and Blair decided to attack Iraq. Why do you think they attacked Iraq?

To deflect attention from Bush's asleep at the switch on 9-11? Could you rephrase that? Why do you think we attacked Iraq to deflect attention from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's regime being asleep at the switch on 9-11 or otherwise engaged on 9-11 or otherwise engaged on 9-11 or complicit in 9-11 or wherever you want to look at it? Well, we know that the project for a new American century had Iraq at the top of its list, Syria, Libya, you know what happened to those folks, right? So this was something long in coming. Now, even those documents by these neocons indicated that an explosive event, something

that was really, really explosive, like a new Pearl Harbor, that would let them go much more rapidly into this kind of domination of that part of the world. So there is evidence out there. It's circumstantial evidence, and there's a lot of it. The question is, they're going to do Iraq anyway. It was a matter of time. And Iraq was really a function. I had been asked at a congressional hearing, well, can you tell me why? Why they falsified the information when it's Iraq? Well, yeah, there were three reasons. I used the acronym OIL,

okay, O-I-L. Well, O for oil, I for Israel, and L for logistics, the bases, the permanent military bases that we coveted at that point in Iraq. Now, we didn't get the bases, okay? Oil, well, no, we didn't get much of the oil. Israel? Well, we removed the main threat to Israel as the Israelis saw it. And I increasingly believe that it was that latter factor that had most influence in the decision. several months has proved that. I've been accused of, well, I was run out of the, pretty run out of the hearing when these, all these Democrat representatives rose up and said, why could you, why would you say Israel? I said, I say Israel because CNN is on, C-SPAN is on there, and I'm an intelligence analyst. I don't need any money, and I don't need any job in the mainstream media. Do you think

when Colin Powell lied to the UN, when George Bush was looking for United Nations support for his invasions, that the intelligence community knew he and Tenet were lying?

I'm 95% sure, and I know that from Colin Powell's closest associate, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who has a book, which I do hope he'll publish soon, which recounts exactly what happened as they were preparing that speech at the UN. They were going to dish away most of it. It was some of this stuff with respect to Iraqi Saddam Hussein ties with al-Qaeda. Rubbish, okay? And they went into this private room. This is from Larry Wilkerson. And Larry and Colin Powell said, you know, this is crazy. There are no ties. Nobody says this except the Defense Department. Let's get that out of speech.

They go back into the main conference room where I've spent many hours with George Tenet comes in. He's, oh, we have a new report. And then the report says, aha, yes, there were ties. Here's a great report. Now, it was a report done under then a report says, aha, yes, there was ties. Here's a great report. Now, it was a report done under torture, okay? Now, Larry rues the day that he said, now, wait a second, this is a little fishy. Who is this guy? And who did he tell, the Egyptian services? Well, the day factor was under torture. So the answer to your question, Judge, is Colin Powell had been around a long time. Larry, of course, is very view, before the UN, because maybe he thought that, I don't know what he thought, but this is what happens when you get...

What do you think most intelligence agents thought? The intelligence? They had been totally corrupted. They had instructions from Dick Cheney, who used to visit CIA headquarters down the block from where he lived and tell them what they should say. This is documented. And my great regret is that I know some of those guys that wrote that estimate, and they're not still ready to own up to the fact that, yeah, they were used, and they were used in such a way as to justify an unjustifiable war. Now, that clip, let me just make a thing about that, the clip that you showed of Colin Powell in February 2001 and Condoleezza Rice in late July 2001.

So same year that 9-11 happened in September. Now, they were telling the truth, okay? They said Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, not even a threat to his immediate neighbors. And who found those clips? I didn't find them. We came out right on our diagnosis, but the person see on that clip saying, yeah, that was the story before 9-11. After 9-11, as everyone well knows, everything changed. So to finish up here, before 9-11, Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Witness what Powell and Congolese already said. After 9-11, weapons of mass destruction descended from the heavens like manna to make a soft landing on Iraq, where there was lots of oil that we coveted. I mean, hello? I had lots of mileage out of John Pilzer's clip there,

as I made lectures right after I discovered them. He came in and interviewed me, and I had not known who he was before, but I know now, and he's a champion, and I much regret his passing, but his example is there for all of us to see. His documentaries especially are incredible. Here is Colin Powell before the UN. First, you will recall that it took UNSCOM four long and frustrating years to pry, to pry an admission out of Iraq that admitted having these weapons in 1995, the quantities were vast. Less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax, a little bit about this amount. This is just about the amount of a teaspoon. Less than a teaspoonful of dry anthrax in an envelope shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001.

This forced several hundred people to undergo emergency medical treatment and killed two postal workers just from an amount just about this quantity that was inside of an envelope. Iraq declared 8,500 liters of anthrax, but UNSCOM estimates that Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters. If concentrated into this dry form, this amount would be enough to fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons. And Saddam Hussein has not verifiably accounted for even one teaspoonful of this deadly material. I don't think that data there was correct because he wasn't the secretary of state in 2015, but it clearly was Colin Powell.

He was clearly before the U.N. and clearly so was behind him. Negra Ponte and Tenet, almost as if to silence him if he didn't say what they had put in the speech. Well, yeah, that was a clip from the 5th of February Colin Powell speech at the UN. And I'm going to revise my estimate from 95% to 100%. He knew what was going on there, and he did it anyway. Why do I say that? Because our friend, Scott Ritter, was beating the doors down in Washington saying, look, I know from the – I headed up the team at UNSCOM. Okay. I know that they destroyed all those weapons under UN supervision in 1996.

And we have Saddam Hussein, son-in-law, telling the UN, the British, and us that same thing. Now, Colin Powell could not have escaped knowing that. And, of course, Ritter wasn't given the time of day, either by Colin Powell or by Joe Biden, who happened to head up the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time. So yeah, he had to know that he was lying. He became a cog in the wheel of the bureaucracy. It's really sad to see a person who before that I had sort of admired. I had briefed him every other morning before I saw his boss Weinberger. He was from the Bronx.

We were friends. I gave him a little insight into what I was going to tell his boss because that had to be one-on-one. And he was appreciative of that. But then to watch him do this kind of thing was really, really sad. But it is symptomatic of how captured you get by the bureaucracy and by the need to fit in with the rest of the guys. And he fit in with the rest of the guys. Talk to Larry Wilkerson about that. He knows all this firsthand.

And maybe finally he'll publish that book. Let's bring this up to date. Ukraine war is effectively over. They have effectively lost. They are begging for cash and military equipment. The Congress isn't going to give them any. The Prime Minister of Great Britain and the President of the United States are, according to the Financial Times and according to Senator Lindsey Graham, contemplating stealing Russian assets that have been frozen in Belgian banks and converting those assets, I guess they're cash deposits or some sort of deposits, over to Ukrainian use. Just background to my question. Will the next lie be the war is a stalemate? See,

we stopped Putin from reaching Kiev. Therefore, Joe Biden, I did a good job. Joe Biden has not been truthful on all this. He's been very poorly advised. On your question about seizing those assets, there is no better way to shoot yourself in the foot internationally by doing such a thing. Now, the fact that this is being rooted about and contemplated, it sort of persuades me that Joe Biden is still calling the shots, for God's sake. You know, I had sort of dismissed the notion that he was he was one of a main player, but even Blinken and Sullivan and, of course, Secretary Yellen of the Treasury, you know, they must know what seizing Russian assets would do and what would be a stopgap, you know? There wouldn't be enough to fund what Ukraine needs for more than a couple more months. So when are they going to finally wise up and say, look, this is over. The fat lady is about to sing. Let's make the best deal that we

can. Switching over to Gaza, is there any discernible military benefit for Israel for the obliteration of the Gaza Strip and the genocide exterminate genocidal extermination of the Palestinian people. There's no military benefit for it other than the fact that once the Gazans are driven out of Gaza or killed then Israel will feel a little bit more secure. There are two hopeful signs that I've noticed. Some brigades, Israeli brigades, have been withdrawn from Gaza. And of course, the USS Gerald Ford has been called home to Norfolk. These are straws in the wind, Judge. But it's hard not to look at these things at face value and say, oh, so we're pulling out one of our aircraft carriers from the area? That's a good thing. So Israel's pulling out some troops from Gaza. That could be a good thing,

too. So again, straws in the winds, but let's not give up hope. The Yemeni thing in the Red Sea is causing everyone to change their calculations. And Israel is really suffering economically. Will the U.S. taxpayer keep Israel afloat at this cost? I don't know. But I think Biden may be getting better advice now with respect to the real present danger of having aircraft carriers as sitting ducks out there in the Eastern med here's um a clip that we found for you ray nelson mandela on the plight of the palestinian people i wonder what netanyahu would think of this one of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies. I explained to Mr. Sidney that we identify with the PLO because just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self-determination. Many Jews, members of the Jewish community in our struggle, and they have occupied very top positions but that does not mean to say that the

enemies of Israel are our enemies we refuse to take that position you can call it being political or a moral question but for anybody who changes his principles, depending on whom he is dealing, that is not a man who can lead a nation. What do you think, Ray? Well, when you think about Nelson and when you think about Bishop Tutu, where is the moral leadership today? I have an article up on my website today which talks about the unconscionable silence of church leaders, whether they be Protestant, Catholic, whatever. It's just, you know, a repeat of what happened in the 30s and 40s in Germany. Moral leaders could not find their voice. Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela are dead. Have we no worthy successors?

Great, great observation. Don't know how this is going to end in Gaza, but it appears to be ended in Ukraine. Ray, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. We'll look forward to you and Larry Johnson in the Intelligence Roundtable on Friday afternoon. All the best. Thanks, Judge. Coming up at 11 o'clock this morning Eastern, the aforestated and aforepraised Scott Ritter, live from Moscow. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. MUSIC