Judging Freedom - Russia China and the future of Ukraine - fmr CIA Ray McGovern

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, March 21st, 2023. It's about 11.35 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Ray McGovern comes back to the show for which we are deeply grateful. So a couple of things I want to talk to you about, Ray. I want to talk about the latest developments in Ukraine with respect to the indictment of, no, not Donald Trump, the indictment of Vladimir Putin as supposedly a war criminal. I want to talk to you about the suggestions made earlier today in Moscow by President Xi in his public meetings with President Putin. But before we get to that, you have been doing a lot of work lately, searching your memory as

well as searching documents and other materials with which you're familiar on the origins of the war in Iraq. You, of course, were in the, I think you were still in the Central Intelligence Agency, maybe you had left by then, but you have a lot of insights on the origins of the war. I have argued that George Bush and Dick Cheney committed war crimes by bringing us into a war in which people were murdered under false pretenses, but I'm going to give you the floor on the origins of the war in Iraq, Ray. Well, there was an article yesterday about the fellow that said it would be a cakewalk. Okay, a cakewalk. His name was Edelman.

He sort of personifies what I call... That's Ken Edelman, who was really one of those bellicose neocons back in those days. Exactly, yeah. I guess I'm being repetitious by saying bellicose and neocon. Maybe there were some more calm neocons, but I don't know who they might have been. Yeah, I just wrote about Ken Adelman, not to pick on him specifically, but just to show what kind of military know-nothings, but rather well-connected, well-heeled,

a feat, I would say, a people that was supporting the war long before it even started. When Adelman said cakewalk, that was a good year before it started. But more important, you know, when you talk about the International Criminal Court, as you say, there's a whole slew of Americans, starting with Bush, then Cheney, then Rumsfeld, of course, a bit too late. But there are whole people that started what Nuremberg called a war of aggression, which Nuremberg defined as launching a war of aggression is the superseding criminal event. It differs from other war crimes only insofar as it contains the accumulated evil of the whole. Okay? Think torture.

Think all those things which were war crimes. So to have Putin prosecuted or convicted or what I've tried by the court, of which the U.S. is not even a member, neither is Russia, is just a propaganda move to blacken Putin still more. You know, you would think that these people, if they have any idea of getting together eventually, that they would avoid this kind of stuff. But they're benighted.

They think they are exceptional. Ken Adelman was one of those guys. You know, when I was a Fordham judge, we had a certain number of people who had camel hair coats. Now, I have nothing against camel hair coats, but that was the power, the yellow power tie in those days. And then there were others that envied them, and those others wanted to have a place in Larchman when they graduated, right? So we had this little ditty. We're moving to the upper middle class. We're moving to the upper middle class.

We're moving to the upper middle class. I'm going to park my ass on Larchmont grass. We're moving to the upper middle class. Well, let's just run in our policy. And for those unfamiliar with the geography, Larchmont was and still is one of the more magnificent and desirable little towns in Westchester County, New York, just a little north of Bronx, New York, where Fordham is located and where a lot of rich people even today live and people who aspired to be rich lived. But before we get into Putin,

just to get back to Iraq for a minute, do you think that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Edelman and Wolfowitz and even Colin Powell knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that this was just some sort of a petty vendetta on the part of George W. to vindicate Saddam Hussein's threats and attempts to assassinate his father, George H.W.? Well, the simple answer to your question is hell yes. They all knew. Hell yes. Hell yes, yeah. That speech that Colin Powell gave was one of the most articulate in the modern era.

Articulated. Filled with lies and knowledge of lies. And grabbed headlines around the world, and that was the point of it, of course. So, yes, they know. Now, with respect to why, after a month or two, I pieced together an acronym, OIL. Now, Jon Stewart took me to task. He said, McGovern, you're violating the rules for acronyms. You can't have OIL. And then the first word being oil. Next one was Israel, judge, judge. Next one was logistics, the permanent military, what we call them, enduring military bases that we coveted in northern Iraq. Okay, so it was in equal proportion, oil, Israel, and logistics.

So, yeah, maybe George Jr. wanted to get even for what they tried to do his father. I mean, I wouldn't put it past him, but there were- Well, there is that famous, there's a couple of famous or infamous one-liners here articulated in unguarded moments. And the one I'm referring to now is where he said, remember Saddam tried to kill my daddy, whatever. As for John Stewart, he's my dear friend and I love him. Now, I don't know if when you were at Fordham, you were taught by the nuns, but if you were taught by the nuns,

you'd get whacked for calling it oil because the first letter in an acronym can't be the same word as the acronym. That's what John Stewart, who was not taught by nuns, is trying to remind you. He lied over to the issues confronting us today. Joe Biden, and this is absurd, Ray, praised the International Criminal Court for indicting Vladimir Putin. Now, we all know the countries that are not in the International Criminal Court. They all are, except China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the United States.

Why Biden is praising them, even though we didn't sign the Treaty of Rome, I guess it's just to sort of heap some scorn on President Putin. What was the act, the alleged act that was a war crime? Kidnapping children. What did Putin's people do? They picked up stray children and orphans in battled areas and destroyed cities and saved their lives. And for that, they want to put them on trial. Yeah. Well, Judge, I think that Biden is not with it. The last couple of times I've seen him on camera, he's not with it. I mean, he had to memorize that it was St. Patrick's Day when he met with the premier, the prime minister of Ireland,

read from his notes the whole time. It's the other guys. It's this elite feat to think they're, what, impudent. They have impunity. Right. Now, President Putin has said that explicitly. And I know that you want to move to the Chinese visit. So I'd like to talk about that now. But if you have another question before that, I'm listening.

No, I'm ready to get to the, well, just on this indictment. I mean, this really will make him even more of a pariah than he already is. I mean, he could literally, you know, if it wouldn't produce violence, be arrested in almost any country in the world for however long this warrant is out there, but let's not forget for whom else an international arrest warrant, not international, but only EU-wide, exists. And that's George W. Bush, still indicted for war crimes by a Spanish magistrate. I don't know that Bush and Mrs. Bush have any wish to visit the EU, but they better not because he might not come home. Okay. So President Xi of China meeting very publicly with President Putin of Russia. President Xi suggests a ceasefire. Here's the official response to that suggestion from the United States government. Take a listen.

We'd be concerned if coming out of this meeting, there was some sort of call for a ceasefire, because right now, while ceasefire sounds good, it actually ratifies Russia's gains on the ground. It actually serves Russia's purpose for a ceasefire to basically call a stop right now without any acknowledgement that Russia is illegally inside Ukraine. So United States will be against the ceasefire because this principal issue or because it was proposed by China? I think I've been very clear. It's about the principle of a ceasefire called for right now, which would essentially just ratify Russia's gains. Retired Admiral, United States Navy, now Principal Spokesperson for the National Security Council. I don't know if he was in China or where he was, but you heard what he said.

Well, Judge, you know, I object to these Ukrainian flags on lapels, but even more, I'm outraged to see a shamrock on his thing, which is posing those platitudes. So no ceasefire. Indeed, let the Ukrainian army fight to the last man. That's what's happening, Judge. You know that from Colonel McGregor and other people who have their heads screwed on, right? So what does that mean? That means that in another month or so, the Russians will have the ability to go all the way up to the Dnieper River, and then the balloon will go up. The U.S. has to decide whether they're going to do a deal and just tell Zelensky, look, we have to make the best deal we can,

or they're going to escalate some more, God forbid, to the point of using these really, really small tactical nuclear weapons that are only as strong as the one we did on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's crazy, but it's going to come to that denouement just this spring, and we have people like Kirby saying, well, you know, no ceasefire talks, even though the Chinese and the Pope, for God's sake, of course, the Pope has said he's willing to go to Kiev and Moscow to help facilitate these things. Well, I'm just appalled at this. And with respect to Xi being here in Moscow,

the elite, or elite that are running our policy, and Biden, let's face it, is not really doing that. They have missed it. They've missed it for the last two years. They have missed the fact that what the Soviets used to call the correlation of world power has changed. It's a tectonic change. It used to be an equilateral triangle. See if I can do this right. Okay. With Russia, China, and U.S.

Now it's isosceles with, you know, with U.S. literally on the short end of the stick. Kirby says, the spokesman, he says, well, you know, it's a marriage of convenience. So Kirby is just a mouthpiece. I don't mean to demean him. I mean, I met him many times when I was at Fox, and he's an admiral, and I have respect generally for that. But right now he's just a mouthpiece. But the people making policy who are telling him what to say, are there realists among them? Are there realists in the CIA who can say,

look, we're on the ground. Ukraine is not going to win this. Is this message getting to Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and to the extent he understands it, President Biden? No. The CIA is totally corrupted. Lloyd Austin, he was guilty of fixing the intelligence on Syria. I mean, he was head of CENTCOM. 51 DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency analysts complained formally to the IG at the Pentagon that he was, he and his top coterie of officers were falsifying what they were saying about Syria. So there's no hope for Austin.

With respect to Bill Burns, who I had initial hopes that he could stand up to these guys, forget about it. That's the current head of the CIA. Yeah. And he's now, you know, he was the guy that Sergei Lavrov, newly appointed in those days foreign minister of Russia, he called Burns in and said look Mr Burns this is a red line yet means yet no Ukraine in NATO and he reported that we have the cable we have the cable because of WikiLeaks all right and if it's you know it's authentic if I've seen one cable from Embassy Moscow probably seen a couple thousand okay so that he was warned about that

okay and now what is what does Bill Byrd say well the attack on Ukraine was unprovoked it was unprovoked well you know his love rough telling him in 2008 you're gonna provoke us into intervening and now Bill Byrd's become a propagandist. No, it was unprovoked. What he's telling the president is almost certainly what he thinks. Well, not the president. Let's get away from that. What does this perversion of truth do to agents in the field who are truly and accurately reporting data that they acquire, which they expect to be analyzed with intellectual honesty? Or have they been around the block enough times to know it's not going to be analyzed with intellectual honesty? It's going to be twisted and perverted so that it comes out of

the analytical process the way the administration wants to hear it. It's the latter, Judge. All right. Very, very corrosive effect on the whole intelligence cycle. You would think that presidents would be able to identify with Truman, who wanted one place, just one place to go for an unvarnished, what he called an untreated presentation of intelligence, not the Pentagon, not the State Department. You work for me. I have your career. Okay. Now, getting rid of that, as they did 20 years ago before the attack on Iraq, who signs up to work for the CIA now?

People interested in torturing people or people interested in, you know, just getting ahead in government and becoming a yellow tie instead of a camel hair overcoat as we used to have? Yeah, they're careerists and they know that they have to tell Bill Burns, or he wants to hear Burns and what what are saying, April Haynes, the Director of National Intelligence, whom I had a certain respect for. She's a bright lady, but she's also mouthing these platitudes like, oh, Russia is running out of ammunition. I mean, give me a break. It's all going to come to a head, and it's going to be as startling a surprise, Judge, as the guys that are advising Biden don't go for the, you know, don't go for the ulterior weapon. What people don't realize, Judge, is that Russia has not only

a conventional forces advantage, it has a strategic forces advantage now. Weapons that go faster than, nine times faster than the speed of sound, if you can believe it. Weapons that can't be defended against. And they did that. They did that starting in, well, about 10 years ago. Now they're perfected. They're fielded. And, you know, worse comes to worse, they can use them. So these guys, these benighted guys running our policy need to know that, need to know that when Putin says he's got these weapons, he's just, he's not just making noise.

Ray McGovern telling it like nobody else does. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll have you back soon, please. You're most welcome, Judge. Thank you. Morris, we get it. Colonel McGregor, 3 o'clock Eastern Time this afternoon. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.