Judging Freedom - Ukraine corruption? Intel and Journalism w/Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, September 18th, 2023. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time today. What do you think is behind, you've written about this recently and very powerfully, what do you think is behind the media mania in support of the U.S. and the Western involvement in the war in Ukraine? Well, I think there are two things behind it. There's first of all, your classic kind of self-interest where the media ever since 9-11, you might say,

or the war on terror has basically been a parasite feeding off of the government in terms of a lot of its stories and where it wants to go with these things. And I think you see that constantly. A piece I just finished is basically about three stories I saw last Friday in The New York Times that were appalling in terms of what they were saying. So there's that. And of course, there's also the angle of self-promotion for a lot of the journalists. So you see a lot of that kind of thing going on. And this is not completely unique.

The United States has always been characterized by some good journalism and some bad journalism. But right now, I think we're in a phase where everybody is kind of feeding at the trough in one way or another. And this is kind of why they lie about everything. Is the intelligence community, you have often told me how good MI6 is at this,

is the intelligence community behind this. All of it, which does not necessarily equate to being behind it. I think it means to a certain extent that the governments are the ones that are pushing these policies, and that's both over here and in britain and a lot of european countries and the intelligence services of course are a tool in this process the uh the british much more so than the americans in my experience working in europe with cia the british had contacts in the media that were deep and that were everywhere. And we Americans were kind of toddlers when it came to, you know,

getting that kind of depth and ability to spread stories and to do things. You could argue that the British were the major player in pushing Ukraine to push on Russia to start this war in the first place. How does it work? Is there a payment of money? Is it, I'll give you these military secrets or these intel secrets before anybody else has them, or I need a favor, so scratch my back, and when you need a favor, I'll scratch yours. How does it work? How does the Intel community get the media to publish basically false or misleading information in order to dupe viewers and readers of the media into supporting the government line? Well, I think all of the things you suggested are possible routes to getting people to cooperate with you. And it can be almost anything.

It's very often from the American intelligence community perspective, money base, where people are interested in money. But then there'll be some people who are basically interested in five years down the road, defecting from their country and being given American citizenship and a nice pension when they get here. I had one agent when I was in Hamburg, who was a journalist, and he used to write stories very favorable to the u.s point of view on what was going on in the iron curtain and what he wanted uh to motivate him to do that and do what we wanted him to do was a jaguar tk 150 so i had to uh find out where in arizona of one of these cars in good condition was was still around and that was his gift. So it varies.

People have their own sort of needs and their selfishness. And that was my little story to tell. So the CIA actually took American tax dollars and bought this car and gave it to this European journalist. That's right. And in fact fact it was cheap at that price this guy was really quite good and um it was i can't remember what the car cost probably in a ten thousand dollar range but we had agents in uh in europe that we paid ten thousand dollars every month to so this this was a almost a freebie you say agents, you're talking about intelligence agents from foreign countries that were revealing things to the CIA and being paid for it. Yeah. In the agency, we refer to them as controlled assets. That's the way we looked at them. And many of these people were senior officials in foreign governments that were giving us inside information on what their governments were up to,

which was considered to be cheap at that kind of price. Does the intelligence community pay American journalists in automobiles or cash or other things of value? And now I'm using the phrase in the Brebber statute, thing of value, in order to get them to publish what the government wants to have published. Well, that depends on where the American is and what his access is. As a general rule, nobody in CIA can provide information to a source who is an American citizen and whose writings will appear in the U.S. media. The thinking behind that is that the United States government should not be using intelligence resources to corrupt the news process in the United States. So that's the rule. But at the same time, if I were to recruit a German or an Italian, and somehow his article

wound up in the Wall Street Journal, or his article was alluded to in the Wall Street Journal, that kind of was breaking the rules. So it was a very difficult kind of rule to follow. But the general rule was Americans who might influence policy in the United States were no go. I could recruit an American working for a German company inside Germany who was providing information on technology, that would be okay. Is it just a coincidence that the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington

Post, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, all say the same thing? It's in American national security interest. They can't explain it deeper than that. At least I haven't heard it explained deeper than that. It's in American national security interest that we back Ukraine with money and material. I think it's quite scary. I don't think we've ever quite seen anything like this. There was certainly a lot of pushback from the media and from the public over the Iraq war, for example, and 9-11, the various security bills that were passed after 9-11. There was a lot of pushback again from the media and the public and now all of a sudden the media has rolled over uh i think it's scary uh you can you can go to any of the major publications or the wire services things like yahoo news uh are are just as bad if not worse than the mainstream uh print media and uh

these they're they're lined up they're lined up as if they're receiving a check every month. And they're just standing there in line until the check is put in their hand. It's awful. national security interest truly is here. We all know the neocons want war. We all know Joe Biden wants to run for re-election as a wartime president. We'll get to that, what he's planning to do in a minute. We all know that the military-industrial complex benefits enormously because as we deplete our stockpiles, they have to be replaced. So all that stuff has to be built. But has anybody articulated a bona fide American national security interest at stake in the military conflict in Ukraine? Well, I think the short answer to that is they've they've articulated something but it's not a good reason and I'm referring specifically to the fact that the Pentagon and some people in the White House have also alluded to their desire to weaken Russia, why we would be required to be weakening Russia, which did not threaten us

in any way before this all began, escapes me. And I've alluded to this many times in my articles and also when doing interviews. I said, where is the actual reason that would compel the United States to basically enter into a proxy war that could turn nuclear based on the desire to weaken Russia. I mean, I don't get it. We're going to take a break. When we come back, I'm going to ask Phil how far he thinks the government will go to weaken Russia. Will it involve troops on the ground? Can the president do that on his own? Does the president think he can do that on his own? Right after this.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Lear Capital. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital because it's the right thing to do because the government is regulating too much and printing too much money and reducing the value of everything you earn and everything you own. And the best hedge against this is gold and silver. That's what I've done. I know the folks at Lear. I trust the folks at Lear. I've worked with the folks at Lear.

And I use their advice when it comes to my investing in gold and silver. You should do the same. Call them at 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com. You'll have a very nice conversation with a very knowledgeable person who will send you literature to read, which you can review with your spouse and your financial advisor, and then you can call them back and decide what you want to do. Why Lear? Lear has 25 years experience and thousands of five-star reviews and a 24-hour risk-free guarantee. And when you have this conversation with the Lear representative, you'll find out if you can qualify for a $15,000 gold bonus. So call Lear now, 800-511-4620 or learjudgenap.com. Lately, this is very scary, Phil, and you have written about this.

The president himself has been making noises that he can use the military however he feels is critical to American national interests, not national security, national interests, without involving the Congress. I don't know if he's talking about the War Powers Resolution or if he has some new bizarre interpretation of his role as commander-in-chief above and beyond what his immediate predecessors thought. They all killed people on their own. They all started many wars on their own. What do you think Joe Biden is up to? Well, you know, I don't know apart from the fact that he can't seem to put two sentences together. I mean, all right, the fact is here, when the President was given the authority under the War Powers Act

and the Constitution to take military action, it was intended to be something that would be done extremely rarely and done only if there were an imminent military or security threat. Now, that is not what we've been enduring for the recent wars that we've been fighting without any congressional authorization. And I would cite syria i would cite actions we've taken against the turk of iran uh certainly the case of what's going on in ukraine right now is a perfect example this is a proxy war going on and indeed there are boots on the ground they're just not wearing uniforms in most cases these are people that are working for contractors and basically are ostensibly civilian. And there are a lot of them there. They're intelligence officers,

and they're also military officers and enlisted men. And this is going on already. This is a war. And as some people are waking up to, we are on the verge of something catastrophic as a result of the carelessness with which this is being pursued. So I would say, yeah, I mean, he has absolutely no authority to be doing any of these things that he's doing, but he's doing it anyway. And of course, his predecessors did, too. And there's very little very little way to stop him other than public opinion and public pressure. Let's let's be very clear. The Constitution could not be clearer. Congress declares war. The president wages war that Congress has declared. But because his predecessors have gotten away with these words that you've just articulated against Iran in Syria, in Libya,

each president that does this unchecked establishes a precedent for future presidents to do the same thing. Joe Biden, when he was in the Senate, condemned this type of mission creep. And now that he's in the White House, you know, the world looks very different from the inside looking out than it does from the outside looking in. We all know that from our own personal experiences. But Joe Biden now seems to think and hinted over the weekend that he can introduce military boots on the ground in uniform without consulting Congress if he believes it's in national security interest. incredibly unconstitutional, was vetoed by President Nixon. He believed it was unconstitutional because it cramped his style, not because it unleashed his style. Nixon literally believed

that the president could start any war and fight any war on his own. The War Powers Resolution, which requires reporting to Congress, and after 90 days, Congress's approval. And if not, then after 180 days, it's got to stop and the troops have to come home. Joe Biden is apparently of the view that he can put boots on the ground for at least 90 or 180 days without seeking a declaration of war. These are very, very dangerous times. I wonder, Phil, if he's saying these things now out of his own mouth and out of the mouth of Jake Sullivan as sort of trial balloons before he actually does it. Yeah, I don't know. That's the big question, isn't it? Of course, the scary thing with the discussion we started this morning, you know, if he does something totally outrageous and unconstitutional, I mean, let's bear in mind the Constitution basically was set up so that there wouldn't be a president who could just go to war on a whim.

So anyway, if he does do this sort of thing, the media will have his back. And that's what's really scary about the situation. Yes. I mean, and Madison could not have been clearer in separating the powers. In fact, Madison, James Madison himself once said, if the president could both start a war and wage war, he's not a president, he's a prince or even a king. And we fought a revolution so that we wouldn't have a prince or a king. We fought a revolution so that we would have a limited central government.

I mean, how dangerous is war when there's no national consensus for it? And that's the reason for requiring the declaration of war. And maybe that's a facade too, Phil, the war party in Congress. The war party's 90% of Congress. There's a little fringe on the left of the Democrats, the progressives. There's a fringe on the right, the libertarians in the Republican Party. But the vast majority of everybody in Congress, this is Kevin McCarthy and Chuck Schumer in lockstep. They want and they love war. So maybe if Joe Biden said,

give me some authority to introduce troops into Ukraine, they'd say, yes, my constitutional argument would collapse, and then it becomes a political argument. The media is cheerleading it. Well, this week is going to be particularly interesting because we have uh we have zielinski and netanyahu both coming for a visit and they're going to be going to the white house and there'll be the hugging and the kissing and you know it's uh there there is some criminal pathology that has taken control of uh of washington and uh it's too bad we can't fumigate the whole place and, you know, get it out. I mean,

this is obscene. And it's going to affect our children and our grandchildren and us right now. This is a war fever that just has no sense or reason behind it. And as you point out, it's bipartisan. Do you think that the Russians have some, I'm hearing noises about this. I have to ask Larry Johnson, but he's not on until tomorrow. Do you think that the Russians have some sort of new weapon that the West is unfamiliar with that President Putin might introduce? Or are these just rumors? And if they are rumors, have you heard them? Well, I've certainly heard rumors that there are some weapon systems that exceed the capabilities of what we have, both defensively and offensively. Now, to what extent these are true or not are based on hard intelligence. I just really don't know.

If you're going to be talking to Larry, Larry, I think, has his ear to the ground closer on this issue than almost anyone. How reckless would it be for Joe Biden to put troops on the ground in uniform, thereby opening up the American mainland to Russian retaliation. Yeah, that would be about as reckless as it comes. The only thing that could be worse is if he probably will carefully configure these troops as support people or intelligence people or that sort of thing. But if he puts any combat troops into action in Ukraine, some of them will die and some of them will presumably kill Russians. And this escalates the whole war situation to a level that's, I would have to say, unimaginable.

Right now, if there are troops on the ground, and we believe there are from various reports that you and I have access through our colleagues, this is a violation of the Geneva Convention. A soldier without an identifiable military uniform can be summarily, well, be arrested and can be summarily executed as a spy, not even entitled to due process. That's the Geneva Convention. Joe Biden must know this. Well, it's also a war crime. I mean, this is invasion of somebody else's territory in a situation where you're not at war with that party. You know, this whole thing is just so astonishing. You know, they've basically thrown away all reason in terms of what they're doing.

And it's hard to see where we will be able to recover from this. We don't have enough politicians who are saying the right things, who are even thinking the right things. This is scary. We'll keep monitoring it. We appreciate all that you do to monitor it and to bring your good sense to our viewers and listeners. Thank you, Phil Giraldi. Always a pleasure. Well, thank you. Well, there you have it. Another superb report from one of our incredibly talented, deeply experienced former intelligence folks. I haven't looked at the subscriptions and I'm going to lay back on the subscription thing soon. So I don't know if we have broken 200,000.

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