Judging Freedom - Ukraine Russia War Latest

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

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Hi, everyone. This is Judge Andrew Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 25th, 2022. It's about four o' Giraldi is, of course, one of the most, one of the more courageous former intelligence agents in the modern era, and he is our go-to person on matters of intelligence, whether it's domestic or foreign. Today, of course, we're going to talk about Ukraine and the latest developments there and in Moscow. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me on again. Do you have any reason to believe that the CIA was involved in the assassination of the young woman, the young female Russian journalist in Moscow last week, whose father is a philosophical guru and purportedly

mouths nationalist arguments that resonate with President Putin? Well, it depends on how you define the word involved. I would rather suspect since the Ukrainian intelligence service is not exactly a tier one service and lacks sophistication, the fact that the CIA, MI6, and also Mossad have also, have all been working with the Ukrainians to upgrade their capabilities. So I would have to suspect that since this was clearly a provocation or a terrorist attack, if you want to call it for that, that was carried out by the Ukrainians, I would think that the other agencies probably knew about it and might have even collaborated on it. And that would mean that their political masters back home in Washington and London and Tel Aviv would be in on it too. So that's my suspicion. All right. This is not the first time you have told us about

MI6 because they're wedded at the hip, though they're very much the junior partner, as I understand it, to the CIA. But at least I think this is the first time you've told us about Mossad. Is Mossad, which of course is the Israeli intelligence service, is Mossad physically present on the ground in Ukraine collaborating with with CIA and MI6, they're British cousins, and informing and aiding and assisting Ukraine intel? I would say absolutely. I can't give you any names or show pictures with faces or that sort of thing, but it has been reported openly in the media, the Israeli media,

that there are hundreds of Israeli, quote, volunteers in Ukraine. And of course, most of these volunteers would be veterans of the Israel Defense Forces. And I would bet that a large percentage of them are intelligence officers. Yeah. Can we conclude that President Putin and the Russian intelligence services are aware of who's there and where they are? Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm sure the Russian intelligence services are quite capable of picking up telephonic and other types of communications that these people are using to call back home and all that sort of thing. They probably have a pretty good fix as to where these people are and what they're up to. What would be the rationale on the part of the Ukraine people and the masters of MI6,

CIA, and Mossad for wanting this provocation. They murdered an innocent girl while she was driving a car. You can't murder somebody because of their political opinion, but that's what happened. Was the bomb intended for her father? And even if it was intended for her father, he's not a combatant, it would have been murder of him. Am I right? Yeah, you're absolutely right. But bear in mind that the two of them do have a political profile. They are both strong supporters of the Russian intervention in Ukraine. So they do have a certain political significance. And I would suggest that there are a couple of possible motives possibly playing out right here. If on a simple basis, you might say that also considering the recent attacks in Crimea, which is controlled by Russia, that they're showing that they can strike

even in Russia, even in Russian controlled territory and kill high-profile individuals who are Russian. So this is that kind of, you know, warning about what's going on. And the other thing that I would look at, and I think this is a stronger argument, would be that Zelensky and whoever is advising him have decided that a provocation that would bring a strong Russian response would be in their interest because then NATO and the United States will feel more compelled to get directly involved in the conflict. There is a theory of warfare, and this has been around for thousands of years, is that if you can make your enemy spend resources or alter his strategy on something where he didn't plan to spend resources, you've weakened him.

Could this be a part of Zelensky's strategy with respect to this assassination? Sure, that's a very plausible way to look at it. The fact is that in Moscow right now, there's probably considerable agitation from people who did not have security protection, did not have bodyguards, and that sort of thing. They're probably looking around and saying, well, maybe I need one now. So that's going to disrupt the planning and the thinking that goes on in the Kremlin. So absolutely, that's a good point. Your friend and mine and a great friend of the show, Scott Ritter, suggested just two days ago that the bomb was intended for her father, but somehow they got in different cars, that her father was in the car behind her and that her father watched his

daughter being blown to bits or burned to death, however you die when a bomb explodes in the car you're driving. Yeah, the information seems to be that the vehicle itself belonged to him, but he was a kind of reluctant driver. So his daughter very often would drive him to places. And obviously, in this case, he went with somebody else in another car. But I would suspect, of course, that they were trying to get him most definitely. And she was just kind of collateral damage as far as they were concerned. We're still reading articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post and even the Wall Street Journal that the Ukrainians are enthusiastic gung-ho that the Russians are lethargic and exhausted, and there may even be

a turn of the tide in the way the war is going. So is this being fed to them by MI6 and CIA? Well, it depends on how they are perceiving what the end game in all of this is going to be. I mean, is Zelensky going to pocket his $20 billion and disappear? You know, how is this all going to play out? Obviously, there is so much corruption in the process of what's going on there in terms of foreign aid and that sort of thing and foreign advisors. And it should be clear to everyone there even the CIA and MI6 and Mossad uh that Ukraine has no chance of winning this war in any real sense uh but the fact is they may see certain um ways of turning things around at certain levels that appeal to them for one reason or another. For example, our Secretary of Defense, Austin, has basically said that the whole objective of being there

is to weaken Russia and to make Russia incapable of carrying out, shall we say, geostrategic policies that would be damaging to global American interests. So this is a kind of complicated, you know, if not convoluted way of looking at things. But there are certainly idiots in Washington that look at things this way. I would include certainly Blinken in that, and it's not clear if the president has any view on this at all. Have we come to a point in this war where the president and Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of State Austin have to be thinking about an American endgame? I mean, if it is more likely than not that the Russians will have succeeded in capturing the territory they want by winter, a very bitter and cold winter in a place like Germany, for reasons we all understand,

as a result of the war and as a result of sanctions. But what is Joe Biden going to do, just declare victory and stop sending material there? Question one. Question two, he just authorized another $3 billion in ammunition. How the hell does he know that the Ukrainians are going to get that ammunition, that it won't be destroyed by the Russians or taken by them? Or taken by some corrupt politician there who will resell it? Yeah, there are no inspectors in this process who make sure this stuff is winding up where it's supposed to go. And also there's the factor that the Ukrainian soldiers haven't been trained on a lot of this equipment.

And if you've ever been in the military, you would appreciate that that has a significance. I'm sure Scott Ritter has mentioned this more than once. He has. He doesn't have personal knowledge of this, but let me ask you, is it more likely than not that the more complex equipment we've given them is actually being operated by Americans out of uniform because it just takes too long to train a Ukrainian to operate some of this stuff? I mean, you're not talking about pulling a trigger. You're talking about equipment that looks like the control room of a television network with hundreds of different decisions that have to be made and buttons that have to be pressed.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I would think there is a considerable probability that there are American trainers. Now, I'm not talking in frontline units, but I'm talking in artillery units and strategic missile units, which are far back from the actual line of combat. So I would with some confidence say that there are American trainers either in civilian clothes or in uniforms without any distinction in terms of, you know, American flags on their shoulders or ranks or unit designations. I would suspect very strongly that that's the case. Has the CIA, or let me restate it, does the CIA reach a turning point or a breaking point in a situation like this where they have to tell the president the truth, where they can't tell him just what they think he wants to hear. Ritter tells us that the CIA on the field are generally courageous, honest people who have a variety of sources of info, and they feed it up.

And the higher up it goes, the more political the spin on it, until it's really spun to the point where what the Oval Office gets is what the Oval Office wants to hear, not necessarily what the folks on the ground have developed. Yeah, Ritter is absolutely right. And in my own experience, as someone who was on the ground for 20 years and deferring to the people who were at headquarters and whispering in the ear of the president and secretary of state. Yeah, they're telling those people what they basically want to hear. They're

clever enough to trim it in a way so they have kind of an escape door somewhere in the back in case the information turns out to be false. But they're quite capable of this kind of thing. Think of George Tenet sitting there in the United Nations behind Colin Powell, and Colin Powell lying his head off and George Tenet nodding away to show that he was endorsing everything that was being said. These people are criminals. They should be in jail. Well, George Tenet must have known that what Colin Powell was saying was untrue unless the people immediately below George Tenet must have known that what Colin Powell was saying was untrue, unless the people immediately below George Tenet were lying to their boss. many of the top analysts were my former classmates and they were telling me privately i said this this information uh you know is is uh about weapons of mass destruction and about what saddam hussein is doing is is totally contrived and much of it is is totally invented so you know they it was no one sure it was no one and it would have been known to Tenet, but he was the politician. All right. Getting back to what I asked later, does there come a breaking point where the CIA has to tell the president the truth in order to save him from tremendous embarrassment and political loss?

I mean, how is he going to justify $60 billion, more than the national budget of the entire Defense Department of Russia, more than the national budget of the entire government of Ukraine? How is he going to justify $60 billion to the American public if Putin is sitting in Moscow smiling, saying, okay, we got what we wanted. We have the parts of Ukraine that never were really Ukraine, that were always Russia. And we're going to stop at this point. Well, yeah, there is a breaking point. I mean, obviously, when suddenly the Ukrainian army collapses completely and starts heading for Poland, then you know that there's a breaking point that has to be discussed.

But as I sort of suggested before, these guys are clever up at the top level. They always have a reason why this happened or why what they predicted didn't quite turn out the way it did. They're smart enough to do that. I mean, George Tenet and Colin Powell went on to stellar careers after they lied their heads off to start a war that we didn't need to fight, with people that didn't threaten us, and wound up killing a half a million of them. You know, George Tenet wound up at Georgetown and, you know, took off from there. This is criminal. You mentioned, I think, in an offhanded way when the Ukraine army heads for Poland, and it reminded me of something I wanted to ask you.

Three days ago, the president of Poland said Ukraine needs to recapture all of its area landmass including Crimea which has been Russian for a long time what is he suggesting that he wants Polish troops on the ground that he wants to Bingo trigger nader NATO which Bingo triggers NATO, which, bingo, triggers World War III? Well, that's where that kind of rhetoric can lead. I mean, you have to, I think, put his comments in the context of the historic antipathy of the polls for the Russians and vice versa. So I think it's blowing a lot of smoke for his audience to a certain extent. I do not believe for a second that he would be, shall we say, as risk-taking as would be needed to send Polish troops to fight the Russians inside Ukraine. But, you know, hey, these people sometimes, you know, are flying by the seats of of their pants and they don't always make sense in what they do and how they make decisions glad we have you here phil to help make sense of all this it's always a pleasure no matter what we're talking about thank you very much

my dear thank you my dear friend thank you that's judge napolitano for judging freedom.