Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter - Ukraine, Russia & Poland

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

President of Poland: entire territory of Ukraine should be liberated, including Crimea https://news.yahoo.com/president-pola... #Ukraine #russia #Putin #BidenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 24th. It's about 2.45 in the afternoon. Our guest today is, of course, no stranger. He's the most popular guest we have, Scott Ritter, former intelligence, former U.S. Marines, and our go-to guy on what's going on on the ground in Ukraine. Scott, welcome here. I know we had some scheduling difficulties. I'm deeply appreciative, as are the people watching us now, that you were able to be here and you changed your schedule for us. Thank you. What's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. So did the CIA have any involvement in the killing of this 29-year-old journalist whose father is some sort of a nationalistic Russian philosopher that supposedly President Putin

listens to? You know, I'd like to believe the answer to that is no. First of all, there was no need for CIA involvement. You know, the Ukrainian intelligence service actually has better connections inside Russia than the CIA does. So it's not as though they would be falling in on CIA safe houses, network support networks, etc. It appears that this was a Ukrainian initiative. It would also appear that the British intelligence service, MI6, which has no qualms about carrying out this sort of activity, the CIA is prohibited by law. And while I don't like CIA leadership, I'm not going to disparage the honor and integrity of the men and women who serve in the CIA to believe that they would willingly violate and commit a felony for something that brings no gain to the United States. I mean,

Alexander Dugin was not a threat to the United States worthy of this kind of risk. Why would the Ukrainians ratchet up the war by killing somebody whose father was in Putin's circle? What did the Ukrainians gain by this? Well, I believe the target was Alexander Dugin, that the daughter was a tragic accident. The car that was targeted, he was supposed to drive. And at the last second, he opted to drive another car. So his daughter went behind this wheel. He was driving right behind her when the explosion took place. He saw his daughter die.

And, you know, why hit Dugan? Look. He's a philosopher. He's not a military guy. Right. Well, I'm an American historian, and I'm on the same blacklist now death list that he is. I mean, we need to understand that the blacklist that we've been mocking. And I mean, I belittled it a little bit. It's a death list.

And I warned people about this. I said that this takes one. It takes the Ukrainians is one second to shift over to kill people. When they call you an information terrorist, when they say that because you speak your mind, you deserve to be arrested and prosecuted as a war criminal, it's a death sentence. And we saw them execute a death sentence on Alexander Dugan. But Ukraine is in a war it is destined to lose. It is losing, why would it animate Putin to do the same, killing civilians in Ukraine? Well, no, I mean, here's the thing.

The reason why I think MI6 was involved is because MI6, British Secret Intelligence Service, does do this kind of black information operation. I think there's universal recognition that Ukraine right now, if something doesn't change, Ukraine is going to lose this war and lose it badly. What they need to do is change the algorithm, get the Russians to do something they otherwise wouldn't do. And you do that by provoking Russia. You do that, for instance, by attacking Crimean air bases. You do that by attacking Russian cities. You do that by assassinating Putin's brain. The goal is to get the Russians to deviate from the plan of action that they currently are implementing and do something that changes the dynamic. And you're hoping that that dynamic is changed in a way that is detrimental to Russia, beneficial to Ukraine. above killing people. I mean, Trump ordered them to kill the Iranian general and they killed him and he was about to have lunch.

He was no more a threat to us than the man on the moon. Right. They were able, with the case of Soleimani, to make a case that he represented an imminent threat to the lives of Americans. It was an exaggerated case. That's garbage. Of course it is. But it's a case that could be made

because he is the head of Quds Force. Alexander Dugin has no army, no ability. He has a brain. There's no way the CIA could sell that he represented an existential threat to American lives. The CIA will kill foreigners when it can give a public justification for it.

Or if they could do it in secret and nobody knows about it. Got it. Got it. Okay. How is, it's hard for me to ask you how the war is going, but we keep reading all this nonsense that the CIA is feeding to the New York Times, that Ukraine is on a roll, that Russia is demoralized, that things are turning. Where are they getting this from other than propaganda from the CIA and maybe MI6? Look, I have a piece coming out in Consortium News that talks about this very phenomenon. I talk about the Newsweek intelligence editor, William Arkin.

And William Arkin has been writing for some time now. And for a while, he was known as a credible analyst of military affairs. Is that Arkin of the Arkin Group? If it's the Arkin Group, then it's a group that he alone leads. But I just know him as Bill Arkin. I can't speak to whatever other affiliations he has. But what I can say is that he has written a series of articles for Newsweek that is just, I mean, they're so ludicrous as to be embarrassing. But one thing that... Give us an example, because I keep getting into cocktail party arguments, not a cocktail party, but that kind of argument with my friends who read the New York Times and believe it.

One example is he started off an article with, no matter what you see on the battlefield, Russia is losing this war. So wait a minute. So we're supposed to disregard everything we see on the battlefield and just take it face value. And then Russia is demoralized. They're exhausted. Their troops are ready to surrender. Their leadership is, they've lost faith in their leadership. And then it all comes down to, so says an anonymous high ranking defense intelligence agency officer who spoke to me only on conditions of anonymity. And he uses this same source over and

over and over again. So now we know what's going on. Bill Arkin has become a stenographer for an American intelligence disinformation operation, and so has every single other journalist. Because there's no way you won't find a response. Again, I'm not I'm going to take the CNN generals off the board. They have disgraced themselves. General Hertling, Spider Marks and all these other guys. They are an embarrassment to the military tradition of arms because they are saying things they know to be false. But you won't find a serving military officer who isn't, you know, a disinformation order somebody who's going to speak honestly say yeah russia's losing every single one of them is going to say the following the russians are winning the russians are winning decisively there's nothing we can see right now that can help the ukrainians change the tide we're trying to provide weapons but that seems to be a

futile effort uh we are desperate to find an end game. That's the real statement coming from real officers, not these journalists who quote anonymous sources whose sole job is to spread disinformation. Are the real CIA officers, the people who are in charge of gathering intelligence on the ground and getting it either, I'm not sure of the chain of command, Department of State, Department of Defense, but eventually the Oval Office. Are they telling the truth? Does Joe Biden know that the $3 billion in ammunition that he's sending this week is just going to cause more bloodshed? It's not going to change the way the war will end.

Look, the CIA is a broken institution. There are junior analysts who are recruited because they have integrity, because they have intelligence, and because they have a certain amount of knowledge about a given subject matter that allows them to come up with sound assessments. But then they write these assessments and they go to middle management. By the time you make it to middle management, you've forgotten about integrity. Now you're just worried about your career, and your career is to get into senior management. Senior management works at the highest levels of the decision makers and their job is to make the president happy. It used to be to tell the truth to the president. It hasn't been that way for many, many years. It's now,

give the president what he wants. So the senior CIA leadership tells middle management to put pressure on the junior analysts to produce a product that the president is going to read. The president isn't going to read something that says your policy sucks, everything you're doing is wrong. The president wants to read something that says, if you only do X, Y, and Z, you might be able to accomplish A, B, and C. CIA is a corrupted institution intellectually in terms of its integrity. And I hate to say that, but it's the truth. And again, I'll put this out there right here, Judge. Any CIA officer who disagrees with me, I will have a debate with you anytime, anyplace, any form. Let's do it, because I will crush you. You know what I'm saying is the truth. I believe what you're saying is the truth.

I can tell you from the messages that are coming in and the thousands watching us at the moment, the overwhelming majority of those good folks believe that what you're saying is the truth. Why doesn't Joe Biden know what the truth is? That $3 billion in, I'm not sure what it was, I think it was ammunition that he authorized yesterday or the day before, is money borrowed in the taxpayer's name that the taxpayers are going to pay interest on for God knows how long, because the government never retires the principal of its debt. And it's just going to result in more deaths. Don't Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, don't the generals that work for Mark Milley, not the guys on CNN, but the ones still in uniform, don't they know this?

They do. But let me tell you about the generals who work for Mark Milley. They're going to keep their mouths shut unless absolutely pressed because they're approaching retirement age. And when they retire, they need to go through the revolving door and get that wonderful board membership or get an assignment in corporate America and the military defense to make sure that they can live in comfort when they retire. Because living on a general's retirement salary isn't all that it's made out to be. I'd be happy with it. It's upper middle class, but they want to live the life of luxury. And to do that, they got to get on the boards and to get on the boards, they got to play the game. And that's the problem is that this game has corrupted everything we do in Washington, D.C. to include the integrity of the generals who should be telling the president

as loud as they can. This is bad policy. But we're talking about Joe Biden. We're talking about the most hubris filledfilled narcissist in the history of American politics. We know who he is. Wait, wait, wait. More so than his predecessor? At least Donald Trump had a sense of humor. I mean, that is true. Okay. Donald Trump could make fun of himself. I haven't seen Joe Biden. Joe Biden bristles. He gets very, very angry when you challenge him. He doesn't like to be challenged. And let's be honest right now. He's old.

I'm not picking on old people, but, you know, he doesn't have the energy level that a younger person does. It means he gets distracted. He gets tired. He's not focused. And all of this adds up to the fact that people have to spoon feed him data. One of the things I learned early on in my military career, I was told this by a general, when you're explaining, you're losing. I was explaining something. I was right. But he said, it doesn't matter if you're right. The fact that you're in front of me explaining,

you've lost. Get out of here. Nobody wants to be explaining to Joe Biden right now. Okay. It's almost Labor Day. In four months, it's going to be very, very cold in the Ukraine. Is winter Putin's backstop? Does he have to achieve his goals by winter? Or is this thing going to go on into its second year? Is it going to break the anniversary date of February 24? A couple things. One, before you answer that, winter has another effect, like the absence of heating fuel in Germany.

Yeah. Winter is going to have some economic and political impact on Europe that's going to be to the benefit of Russia, not the detriment. It's going to be to the benefit of russia not the detriment it's going to be against ukraine the russians have made it clear that this war is driven by operational objectives not the calendar they don't care about the calendar and here's an important thing for all the people that say russia planned for a quick war and that this took them by surprise let me tell you something you don't fire 60,000 rounds of ammunition a day without having pre-planned this, without having years ago started to increase your budget to procure this stuff, to start to stockpile it. I believe in 2014, the Russians said, we are going to have to go to war in Donbass eventually. So let's start preparing. And they've

been stockpiling, stockpiling, stock. They will never run out of ammunition, which means that they were prepared to fight a long war all along. Not because they wanted to fight a long war. The calendar doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the objectives. The Russians don't care about the calendar. They can fight in any weather, any climate. How close are they to their objectives? Well, they claim that at least their allies, Denis Pushilin, the president of the Donetsk People's Republic, claims that Donetsk People's Republic is going to be liberated by the end of August, early September. And then after that happens,

that means that they'll have unlocked the Ukrainian defenses, which I believe means that we're going to see a rapid progression on the battlefield. We're very close to the endgame, I believe. I think the Russians are, and according to intelligence that appears to be coming out of there, again, I'm not an active duty intelligence officer, so I'm a prisoner of data, but, you know, open source data. But the open source data that I'm seeing from multiple sources suggests that Russia is building three large offensive groupings of forces, one in the south, one in the center, one in the north. And when they unlock these defenses and they roll them up, they're going to unleash the dogs of war. They are also building up massive amounts of air power. We're talking 400, 500 combat aircraft that haven't yet been committed. They're going to come in and carry

out the kind of close air support and strategic bombing campaign the Ukrainians haven't seen yet. I think we're going to see, it depends on when this town, Advika, I'm sure I'm saying that wrong, but it's a town, it's the key to the Ukrainian defenses. When that town falls, everything else unravels. And then at that point in time, I think, and look at what happens at the U.S. embassy. They believe this too. Why is the U.S. government ordering every American out of Ukraine? Not just out of Kiev, out of Ukraine, because they know the hammer's about to come down. Are we evacuating the embassy? I believe we're evacuating

everybody it's not just us take a look at the tv reports the the the images the ukrainians are fleeing kiev it's traffic jams getting out of the capital city right now um the ukrainian government has stopped uh working in their normal uh work workplaces they're working in in reinforced underground bunkers because they believe that at any moment now the Russians are going to come in and take them out. So there we go. I'm going to let you go. This is another wonderful, wonderful interview, Scott. You're so knowledgeable and so intellectually honest. But I have to say to those people in the CIA who heard your offer, if you want this debate,

let us know and I will moderate the debate. Of course, I'm on Scott's side, but I'll do my best. You're a judge. You're a judge. Right, to be a neutral moderator. I might even put my black robe on. There you go. Scott Ritter, thank you so much. All the best to you. Thank you, sir. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.