Judging Freedom - The Intelligence Community & the Ukraine War w/Phil Giraldi

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, April 29, 2022. It's about 1.30 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. My guest today is Phil Giraldi, truly one of my favorite guests because he has such a wealth of information about the intelligence community in the United States and what it knows and how it acquires information and what it does with the information and when it's being truthful or not. Bill himself is a former member of the CIA and

former United States military intelligence who famously resigned because the Bush administration was not telling us the truth about what was happening in Iraq. Bill, it's a pleasure, and thank you for your time. Thanks for joining us today. Good to be on again. What is the goal, the end game of the United States government in the war between Iraq, excuse me, between Ukraine and Russia today? Well, it depends on who you're listening to. Certainly, what I'm hearing over the past week or so from the talking heads in Washington, the Secretary of Defense out of the White House, is that our objective seems to be to wear Russia down, to wear down Russia's military capability

so that it can't interfere, presumably, anywhere in the world. Because at the current time, obviously, this conflict is taking place right at Russia's front door. But the intention would be to diminish Russia's capability as a military and as a political power. And at what cost are we willing to do that? I mean, stated differently, are we willing to allow the military and civilians still in Ukraine to be slaughtered in a war that they are destined to lose? Yeah, I would agree with your conclusion there, that they are destined to lose there is no way you're going to remake or affect effectively the imbalance between the two countries that are engaged in this fighting the united states will

merely prolong the process uh or at least this appears to be the intention. And they will basically, as some jokers are saying on television and the internet, fight Russia to the last dead Ukrainian, because that's the inevitability of this. Ukraine cannot win. Russia could have come to terms before this fighting even started, but for the obstacles that basically the United States was putting in the way. So we have a terrible situation, getting worse, and now, of course, there is talk about the use of nuclear weapons. What do you either know or surmise your former colleagues in the intelligence community are telling the president? I mean, are they telling him that Putin is scrambling, that Putin's a madman, that Putin

doesn't know what he's doing, that Putin's on thin ice and the Russians can lose? Or are they saying to him, Mr. President, the Russians are going to win this thing, no matter how much military support we give the Ukrainians. I rather suspect that he's getting a lot of the former, which is basically the pep rally talk about what's going on out of the intelligence community. That's because the people who are at the top of the intelligence community are basically in place because they're cheerleaders because uh they'll bring good news to the president and to the secretary of state now but at the same time there are some people in the intelligence community believe it or not who are actually intelligent who are actually aware of what really is at stake here and what is really going on.

And I think the leadership probably gets a little nervous when it sees that kind of thing. But don't they have, excuse me for interrupting, Phil, don't they have a legal and a moral duty to tell the president the truth, not what they think he wants to hear to justify his past behavior, but the truth. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And that's why these people are becoming a little nervous, because they know that there is an alternative narrative about what's going on, which quite significantly differs from the narrative that's being promoted.

But bear in mind, in the intelligent world, truth is a very elusive thing. You have truth if you're sitting in a room and Vladimir Putin is saying, "'This is what we are going to do tomorrow,' that's kind of a good bit of evidence that tells you what he probably will do tomorrow. But just looking at what you see going on in Russia and what kind of meetings are taking

place and you're probably intercepting low level telephone conversations and that kind of thing. You don't have the truth. That's why we have analysts. The analysts put all this stuff together in a certain way, and they don't always get it right. All right. How about on the military side? A friend of mine sent me a clip the other day. I don't know if it was intended to be public or not. It's public now, of the CEO of Raytheon, you know who they are, one of the biggest manufacturers of military hardware, maybe the biggest in the world, basically saying the

Defense Department and NATO are giving the Ukrainians equipment from their stockpiles. We're not manufacturing new stuff for them. This is old stuff that they have in their stockpiles. We're not manufacturing new stuff for them. This is old stuff that they have in their stockpiles. And much of it is being destroyed by the Russians because the Russians know where these stockpiles are. They're already over there before the Ukrainians even learn, Ukrainian soldiers even learn how to use them. Oh, and by the way, once these stockpiles are depleted and then he sort of goes, yay, yay, then we're going to be getting orders for more. All right. So Raytheon wants to make more equipment to destroy more people and destroy more equipment and replace the equipment that's already been destroyed. True or not? Well, I think that's straight out of the horse's mouth as the expression goes uh of course i mean lockheed and raytheon are in the

business of of uh providing equipment that uh has only a limited shelf life and uh the more you limit the shelf life the more money they're going to make uh this is the problem with this the whole business of what we're seeing in ukraine is is essentially a it's it's kind of a stew of a lot of different interest groups and interests that come together that want to see this thing escalate to the point of the united states getting involved actively in it and the reason for all this is because it benefits those groups. It benefits the oligarchs. It benefits the defense contractors. It benefits the clowns in Congress who somehow seem to make money when all of these deals are churning around. So there are a lot of people that benefit from this. And that's what it comes down to, because there's

no logical reason on earth why the United States should be involved in this conflict. Doesn't it also benefit, and you may have alluded to this, I just want to be precise, because this is a hot button issue with a lot of our viewers. Doesn't it also benefit the globalists in the State Department, whose real goal is to diminish Russia and get rid of Putin? Yeah, yeah, I think there absolutely is that tendency or that, I don't know how you would actually describe it. It's not like a cult that gets together every Thursday night or something like that. It's certainly a group that talks within itself, that exchanges views, gets funded by the sources that we all know about, like Mr. Soros. And they have a worldview. They have a world conception of what they want to see in a country like Russia, which is socially conservative,

and also, shall we say, Christian, is something that is, to a certain extent, abhorrent to them. Right, right. You mentioned Congress, and I know your field, Phil, is intelligence and military. This is a political question. Two weeks ago, Senator Coons, Chris Coons of Delaware, who now occupies the seat in the Senate that Joe Biden once occupied for 36 years and is supposedly Joe Biden's best friend in Washington, sounded like Senator Lindsey Graham when he said we have to consider seriously putting American troops on the ground. Is something like that a trial balloon? Is something like that being planned for by the Pentagon, discussed between Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of Defense

Globalist-in-Chief Antony Blinken and the president himself? Yeah, I would have to suspect it's, I wouldn't necessarily call it a trial balloon, but I would refer to it as an option. These people like to have options on the table. And certainly there is a strong constituency for going active in terms of this conflict, getting directly involved on the ground. I believe also that the Republican counterpart of Coons, Fitzpatrick, said something very similar. So this is bipartisan to a certain extent. So is it likely that Joe Biden has a plan B that the Pentagon has worked out and that that plan B would be for the 82nd Airborne, or I don't know which military unit it would be, to paratroop in and start shooting at Russian soldiers

I would suggest that the Pentagon has like a whole series of plans about Ukraine that generally will start with a fairly mild intervention of some kind but that as you go up the ladder, you escalate in terms of the U.S. involvement. And I would not be surprised if we see that kind of engagement where somehow the U.S. will get its foot in the door and see what the Russian reaction is, and then they will contemplate doing something more aggressive. And this can keep going on, as you can imagine, till you reach the point where U.S. troops Los Angeles, or is he a shrewd, calculating, intelligent politician who rose to the top? Well, I think, first of all, you should look at the sources for describing Putin as as a madman or or you know insane in some measure those sources are generally sources that are always hostile to russia and are basically stitching stuff together to make it look like putin is out of control about to be deposed

as i say insane that's where this kind of stuff comes from uh in my uh opinion uh and i do uh read and follow uh developments every day i i don't read russian very well anymore but i do follow the european media i follow the u.s media i. I think Putin is acting perfectly responsibly in terms of what his objectives are in Ukraine. Is the game over? In other words, is it for certain that Russia has won or will soon win this? And if so, why are we still sending military equipment there that results in needless bloodshed, suffering, and death? Well, there are a couple of aspects to that. First of all, sending the equipment is basically a measure of how critically the US administration sees this issue, this conflict. It's sending a message to the European allies. It's sending the message to the rest of the world that we are going toe to toe, we're being tough and aggressive. So I think there's a measure of

that there. Now, in terms of winning and losing, here's where it gets really gray. There are ways to win militarily, and I think Russia has a limited objective in terms of the parts of Ukraine that it wishes to exercise some control over, but at the same time, you can lose politically. And this is really where the danger comes in for Russia, because obviously the United States is going after the Russian economy. And whether this effort is having any serious effect is difficult to judge right now, but whether in the long run it will create problems for russia and perhaps create the kind of turmoil within russia uh that no one but joe biden and and mr blinken want to see uh it remains to be resolved i mean this is a this is a very complicated issue as it folds and unfolds. Wow. Phil Giraldi, I mean, you bring us such a breath of fresh air from your own experience in the intelligence community and the people with whom you're in contact

and from whom you gather your information. One of our other guests, who I know you know, Scott Ritter, brings us a similar argument as well. But you don't hear this stuff in the mainstream media. I mean, Ritter told us that Putin's popularity has actually gone up amongst the Russian public, that there's a period, that there's a feeling of patriotic pride supporting his invasion in Russia. Do you share that view? Well, the numbers seem to bear that out. There was a drop-off immediately after the fighting started, because obviously you start a war or you get into a war and there's major concern on the

part of the public as to how far this is going to go, what the direction will be, so on and so forth. It dropped off, but it's recovered. And that is by polls that have been conducted by European groups and groups that have no necessarily bias in terms of what they're reporting. And Putin has been extremely popular right from the beginning. This is something that his popularity was over 90% about a year ago. And there was a I'm laughing because old Joe's popularity is down to 33%. Well, you know, there was an opinion poll back about five years ago. It was in a European newspaper.

I don't remember which one it was, but it was amazing. It basically asked whether it was the Germans or the Brits or the French or maybe a combination of all of the above, how do you rate the leaders in Europe and Putin came out on top in Western Europe by a considerable margin and you know so this is a guy that um I think uh knows what he's saying says what he thinks and uh and basically is a nationalist. Now, nationalist is an old-fashioned word for us Americans, isn't it? But he's a nationalist and his country is, as I say, it's an old-fashioned Christianity, Russian Orthodox Christianity, and the history of the Tsar is respected.

So this is a country that looks back in history as conservative, and that, of course, makes a lot of people hate it. How much longer can the war go on? How much longer the war can go on really depends on what we do. The war is probably sustainable in one form or another as guerrilla action, as covert action by intelligence agencies for about as long as we want to make it happen. and have the sense to say that this is something that really is benefiting no one, this can be in one form or another. This could go on until the end of the year, I hate to say. It's kind of like Afghanistan. You have to think it in those terms where there are so many elements in the game that it's not exactly like you just put your thumb on one and everything stops. Wow. Bill Giraldi, it's always a joy to listen to you.

Thank you for your clear-headed and courageous analysis of this situation and analysis that you just don't get anywhere else. For those of you watching Judging Freedom, we have a couple of very interesting pop-ups where it's just me explaining craziness going on in the legal system in the United States that'll be coming up in just a few minutes. But Phil, thanks very much for joining us. Have a great weekend. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you for having me on again. Thank you.