Judging Freedom - Ukraine_Russia update with Scott Ritter

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

Ukraine/Russia update - a conversation with Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer.#UkraineWar #PutinSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, April 13, 2022. It's about 1.30 in the afternoon on the East Coast of the United States. My guest is a man who is the personification of personal courage and whose work I've admired for many years, Scott Ritter. Scott is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, former UN weapons inspector, and current, past, present, and future teller of the truth when he discovers that somehow it's different from what the government has been telling us. Scott, it's a pleasure. Welcome to my podcast, Judging Freedom. Well, thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here. Thank you. I just want to go back in your history a little bit. I really want to talk about Ukraine,

but before we get there, did Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction of the nature and capacity as stated by the Bush administration sufficient to justify the invasion of Iraq? Well, he did at one time. When the United Nations weapons inspection process was formed back in 1991, Saddam Hussein had considerable chemical weapons, biological weapons. He had a nuclear weapons program that was six months away from possibly having a nuclear device. And he had a long-range ballistic missile program that had not only fired missiles against Israel and the Gulf Arab States during the Gulf War, but research was being done to create a missile that could carry

a nuclear warhead. So this was a real threat. And the other thing is that Saddam lied about it initially, under-declared his missiles, under-declared his chemicals, denied having biological and nuclear weapons capability. I was brought in a couple months after the creation of this unit when the UN was confronted by these lies. I'm an intelligence officer. I'm not a chemist, a biologist, a nuclear physicist, or a rocket scientist. My job is to collect information and then assess it and then package it so it can be used to carry out inspections. And for seven years, we did this very difficult job. By the time we

completed, we could account for about 90 to 95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And we could mitigate against the concern of the unaccounted for material by saying, hey, we were monitoring the totality of their industrial infrastructure. They weren't producing anything new. And the stuff that we couldn't account for was probably blown up and we can't find the bodies. But even if it was there hidden, it's dated. Chemical weapons have a lifetime. Biological agents degrade over time. We know he didn't have a nuclear capability. We could account for all of his missiles. So in 1998, when I left the job, Iraq posed no threat to the international community worthy of war. And that held true in March of 2003, when the Bush administration made

the decision to send American troops over the border in what I believe and other people believe was an illegal war of aggression. And what was the reaction of your superiors when you told them that he has nothing or what he has is not usable? Well, I mean, you know, I started recognizing some of this early on. And as early as 1993, I had a meeting with senior CIA officials in the office of then Director of the CIA, James Woolsey, where I briefed them that we could account for all of Iraq's ballistic missile capability. That was a message the United States did not want to hear. Immediately, the CIA went and told the U.S. Senate that there were 200 missiles unaccounted

for. They just made that number up. And later, when we confronted them and did some investigations to disprove them, they came back and said, well, that number is 12 to 20 and it will never change no matter what you do. That's a direct quote. It will never change no matter what you do, which meant that our work was useless because we weren't there to disarm Iraq.

We were there to facilitate the impression that Iraq was noncompliant, therefore to justify the retention of economic sanctions that would destabilize Saddam so the United States could carry out its ultimate objective of regime change. And, you know, there's a variety of reasons as to why George Bush wanted regime change. Probably the most absurd and demeaning for him is his infamous quote that, quote, Saddam tried to kill my dad. Close quote. We, close quote. We all know that. He never really was called to account for it.

But people like you were disregarded by the government because you told the truth as you perceived it to be, and they didn't want to hear it. No, the truth was the enemy. The fact is, if we weapons inspectors succeed in our job of disarming Iraq, the United States would not have been able to implement its policy of regime change. And so the truth became the enemy. And those who are seeking to I was summoned by the CIA into the U.S. mission in New York, where I was put on the phone with a senior member of the National Security Council who begged me to stay. Basically, he said, if you leave, you'll destroy the inspection process. And I said, well, the inspection process doesn't work unless you guys support us. You got to let us finish the job, do our job. And they wouldn't. So I hung up

and I said, I'm going to resign. The CIA guy looked at me, he said, you know, once you submit that letter of resignation, the FBI is going to, and he used an expletive and indicated a part of my body. And I went, so be it. That's just the price you have to pay. I mean, what American shies away from telling the truth? I mean, literally, you can't. And so I did what I did, and I paid the price that I paid, and so be it. Here we are today. And so George W. Bush and then Secretary of State Colin Powell and all the people around them engaged in a colossal act of deception in order to persuade the American public that it was necessary to enhance the national security of the United States of

America, not the personal grievances of George W. Bush, in order to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Fair to say? You're 100% correct. All right. Fast forward. I'm establishing this backward. It's a fascinating history, Scott. I could talk to you about it all afternoon. I just want to establish your bona fides in this area. I want to fast forward now to today. If Joe Biden called you up this afternoon and said, Scott, what would you advise me to do with respect to the war between Russia and the Ukraine, as unusual as it would be for you to expect that phone call from him, what would you tell him? Well, I would tell him, first of all, the war has to end today

because every day this goes on, the innocent people of Ukraine are suffering, dying, and being evicted from their homes in a losing cause. That there's no set of circumstances you can imagine that will have Ukraine prevailing in this war. Russia is going to win this war and win this war decisively. It's better to recognize that now and, which is a dialogue between Russia and NATO over what the future security framework of Europe is going to look like. It's not going to look like what Joe Biden thinks it's going to look like. Russia is serious. Putin doesn't bluff. And I'm not saying that we should kowtow to him, bow low to him, but we have to recognize the reality of

what Russia is asking for, which is for NATO to go back to its 1997 borders. That doesn't mean that nations that join NATO after that leave NATO. It just means that you can't have non-national troops. If you're in Poland, you can't have German troops in Poland, American troops in Poland. If you're in the Baltics, you can't have French and German troops. They all have to go home and you have to get rid of the ballistic missile facilities that you put in Poland and Romania. And you have to create a buffer of stability between NATO and Russia.

Russia doesn't trust NATO anymore. NATO lied about expansion. And so Russia views NATO as an existential threat. And unless this threat is dealt with diplomatically, Russia has shown a willingness to use what he calls the military technical option to resolve the issue in its favor. Russia is playing to win. They're not playing to lose. So a fellow that reminds me a lot of you, Colonel Douglas McGregor, you may know him on this program, articulated the view that it is the goal of the globalists and the nationalists in the American State Department, their colleagues throughout the government and their colleagues in NATO to degrade Russia or to remove Putin from being in power.

I thought, well, you know, Doug, you're very courageous. You're like Scott Ritter. You say what you think. Nobody else is saying that. A week later, the president of the United States, the middle of a pizza was watched all around the world, said effectively the same thing. which either means militarily degraded, economically degraded, or politically degraded, some sort of a democracy in Russia without Vladimir Putin. With all of that as background, what do you say is the true goal of the State Department and its collaborators in Europe with respect to this proxy war we're fighting in Ukraine? Ukraine has always been viewed as the soft underbelly towards Russia, that if you could take Ukraine away from the Russian sphere of influence, that you would so destabilize Russia, forcing it into security arrangements it couldn't afford, you would destroy it economically by denying it access to Ukrainian resources that would be deferred to the European Union, European community, et cetera, that this would create economic distress and bring with it public

unrest that would achieve the ultimate objective, which is to remove Vladimir Putin from power. This has been the stated policy of the United States since 2009. They can deny it, but if you remember the great reset of the Obama administration, the embarrassing misspelled red button word, that was a policy of regime change. The United States was committing to keeping Dmitry Medvedev in as president and permanently removing Vladimir Putin from any prospect of being president. Joe Biden traveled to Moscow in March of 2011 and said that to a group of Russian opposition leaders. He said, Vladimir Putin shouldn't run for re-election because it will turn out bad for him and Russia. That's regime change. It doesn't mean that you're invading. It means you're trying to remove a legitimate public official from consideration

from office. That's been the goal of the United States ever since that time, the goal of the United States today. But I will tell you this, Vladimir Putin has been in charge of Russia during five presidencies. He'll be in charge after Biden. The regime change is going to take place here at home. The Biden administration will not survive Vladimir Putin. How close is this proxy war to World War Three? I mean, suppose some Russian tank commander misreads his GPS either intentionally or or negligently and and directs a couple dozen tanks to fire

their projectiles over the border into Poland and they destroy American equipment. They're ready to be shipped to Ukraine and they kill American and Polish soldiers. What the hell happens? I think what happens is the Russians recognize they made a mistake and they will write out any limited retaliation by the United States and the both sides will disconnect because nobody wants World War III. I don't think that that's a danger. First of all, any large-scale combat, let's just be frank, NATO is incapable of waging the kind of combat today that Russia is waging in Ukraine. This is large-scale combined arms warfare of the sort that we used to fight back in the 1980s when I was in the Marine Corps and I trained for it.

And the United States forgot how to fight it after 20 years of running around the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. We don't know how to do it. We're not trained to do it. We're not equipped to do it. And we don't have the resources to do it. Neither does NATO. That's why you see the panic right now, the talk of reconstituting forces, of pushing forces forward. There's going to be a NATO summit in June in Madrid where they're going to talk about all this. But the reality is, who's going to pay for it? Who's going to host it? Who's going to be a NATO summit in June in Madrid where they're going to talk about all this. But the reality is, who's going to pay for it? Who's going to host it? Who's going to do it? Nobody has these answers.

So this is the real risk. NATO is talking the talk, but it's highly unlikely they are able to walk the walk when it comes to confronting Russia militarily in Europe today. Did you, in collaboration with your friends in the intelligence community, conduct some sort of an investigation of what allegedly happened at Bucca last week, where the American public was told through government sources and media that civilians were tied and hogtied and tortured and executed? I didn't collaborate with anybody in the intelligence community. Nowadays, the people that I know from the intelligence community have bought lock, stock, and barrel into the government position

that Ukraine is the greatest nation in Europe. And so I pretty much stand alone. But I did investigate the open, you know, the available information and, you know, open source information. What did you find, Scott? What I found is that without exception, without exception, all of the data points to the Ukrainian National Police carrying out a cleansing operation on April 1st that targeted pro-Russian collaborators

and what they called Russian saboteurs. And when you say cleansing operation, it means killing them. There's a video where a member of this national police unit asked permission to shoot people who aren't wearing the blue armband, and he was given permission to fire. This is the Ukrainian national police murdering Ukrainians who are perceived to be insufficiently pro-Ukraine. Correct. These are Ukrainians who were wearing the white armband that signifies either neutrality or pro-Russian sympathies. They were carrying the green Russian army dry ration packs that the Russians had handed out to the civilians as a humanitarian gesture. And they were gunned down in the streets as they were moving in a direction towards the

Russian lines. So they were killed by the Ukrainian National Police. Now, the Ukrainians will claim that this didn't happen. Indeed, the New York Times put out a satellite photograph that says, no, no, these bodies were there on March 19th. I don't want to get too graphic on your show, but I've been around dead bodies and bodies that were killed on March 19th, left out in damp weather and temperatures of 40, 50, 60 degrees will not present themselves as they're presented in those photographs. It'll be something quite different. Any police forensic investigator knows exactly what I'm talking about. The bloating, double the size, black size black face burst bodies putrid liquid that's

what you'll see 14 days after being killed and left outside unattended that's not what we saw there so you're telling us that what we saw was staged um concocted by the ukrainians bought and sold and accepted by the american military and the American media? Well, I'm not saying it's staged. What happened was murder. The Ukrainian national police went through Bukha and murdered people, murdered them, shot them down the streets. Some of these people had their hands tied behind their back and were shot in the back execution style. This was not a staged event. What happened is Ukrainians realized that they had a PR problem. And so they shifted the narrative. And that narrative was bought by the U.S. I'm not going to lies and this this lie was to create a narrative of russia as a genocidal state trying to uh massacre innocent ukrainian civilians that's not what happened the evidence is clear if we took this

trial today judge i can guarantee you i'd be able to make a very strong circumstantial case that this crime was committed by the Ukrainian national police and they would have nothing to defend with. How does this end? I mean, if we just keep shipping billions in military equipment there and Putin just keeps sending, you know, thousands more conscripts and generals of great military experience, call him a butcher, but he certainly knows how to command troops. How does this end? Well, first of all, I take umbrage at the notion that they're sending thousands of conscripts. Again, that's a Western narrative designed to create an impression

inside Russia of impending Russian military defeat. Let me make this clear. Russia is winning this war and winning this war decisively and winning this war on a timeline dictated by Russia. Putin just gave a speech the other night where he said, our troops, we're not worried about the West's timeline. We are carrying out what he called a very literal war. That means by the book, by the numbers designed to reduce Russian casualties and inflict maximum casualties on Ukrainians. Just yesterday, we had a thousand

Ukrainian Marines surrender. Prior to that, it was 200, 200. In the days to come, you're going to see 5,000, 10,000 Ukrainian troops surrender at a time because they're caught up in a cauldron. They can't escape. Their choice is to surrender or die. That's the reality of the war. This war is about to end decisively in favor of Russia, and the West is going to have to deal with that reality. And Putin said one other thing too, there will be no negotiated settlement. Zelensky can sit there and talk to the Western media all he wants about the various points he's going to bring up and the issues and concerns of Ukraine. It doesn't matter. It will be unconditional surrender dictated by the Russians to the Ukrainians.

That's the reality. That's what's going to happen. There's nothing the West can do to change it. All these weapons that are being sent in are either being destroyed shortly after they arrive, or as soon as they arrive in the hands of the Ukrainian troops, those troops are killed and targeted by the Russians who control the skies, control the firepower, and control the maneuver. They're winning this war. I have not seen or heard as clear and precise a description of what's happening there as you just gave us. You are a great man for your personal courage and fidelity to the truth. Just switching gears before I let you go, because we've all had problems with Twitter. What have they done to you now?

Well, I'm permanently banned. I was banned. I didn't know it was permanent. I thought you were on some sort of a suspension, and they didn't tell you why. Well, no, they suspended me once last week. They claimed it was a tweet that I wrote about Bucha, about the, I was saying that it was done by the Ukrainian National Police. They then lifted that suspension only to suspend me a few days later about a tweet I actually wrote before the first tweet, again about Bucha. This time they notified me this morning that my appeal was denied and it's a permanent ban because i am promoting abusive and uh harmful uh rhetoric uh basically it's because i refuse to kowtow to the official narrative and i'm um you know i'm i'm sticking with the facts not the fiction that twitter wants so i'm done with twitter i mean i'm sorry about it i enjoyed it it was a it was a nice forum it

was a great place to have informed debate, discussion, and dialogue, which I think is the cornerstone of democracy. But I've been shut down. Whether it's official violation of First Amendment rights or just outright censorship, the bottom line is my voice is no longer going to be heard on Twitter. I think in the next edition of Webster's Unabridged, next to the phrase personal courage, will be one of those little postage stamp pictures of Scott Ritter. Thank you very much for joining us. I hope you'll come back, my friend. Anytime, sir. Thank you very much for having me. One little announcement to everybody watching us now. Congressman Ron Paul will be here on Tuesday, April 19th at 1245 in the afternoon. He was scheduled for yesterday. We had a technical difficulty. It's been fixed. He'll be with us next week, Tuesday,

1245 p.m. Eastern. Scott Ritter, what a pleasure. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.