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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, March 14th,
2023. It's about 1130 in the morning here in the East Coast of the United States. Phil Giraldi
is our guest again today. Phil, always a pleasure.
Thank you for being here. Since we last spoke and you provided your analysis of Cy Hersh's
investigative reporting on the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, your former colleagues in the Central Intelligence
Agency have opined to the New York Times that there was a sailboat on the Black Sea,
or the Baltic Sea. I mean, it's almost so ridiculous, it's hard to say with a straight face,
that they think might have had something to do with the destruction of the pipeline.
Is this the type of nonsense that the American media has been receiving for years from the intelligence community and spreading as if it were worthy of belief?
Yeah, I think it's of that nature.
There's no question about it. And I think in this
case, specifically, why we're seeing this kind of reaction, which is idiotic, as you point out,
that the four guys with scuba gear on this small boat were able to plant these explosives and carry
out this operation. This morning, I saw a follow-up report
on it saying, yeah, they rented a boat to go out and do this, and they had foreign passports,
but I don't remember if they were Romanian or, you know, it goes on and on and on. This is a
monstrous spin, and the reason they're doing it is because this uh uh cy hirsch report is a is a game breaker
uh the the fact is the united states it appears uh attacked a country with with which it's not at war
though hostile and another country with it was which is an ally so um you still don't see much of Cy Hersh's reporting in the U.S.
Your former colleague and good friend of the show, Ray McGovern, private, no press, no aides, no
translators meeting that he had with President Biden two weeks ago. And then the article on the
front page of the New York Times, the initial article about this sailboat, which followed that
private Oval Office meeting by about two days. Stated differently, the mainstream media
and its allies in the government, or put the other way around, the CIA and its allies in
the mainstream media have managed to suppress the report that the Navy SEALs and the CIA destroyed
the pipeline here in the U.S., but they have not
succeeded in suppressing that report in Germany, where the current German government may be
lacking for the stability it wants, because people believe the report, because it's well
documented, and SAI wouldn't make up a lie like this, and there's no other credible countervailing explanation.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact is that, again, the evidence comes down to who had a motive.
And here we had a president of the United States saying, if Russia intervenes in Ukraine, we will stop the Nord Stream. And he said that in advance,
promised to do it. And then when it happens now, everybody's looking in the opposite direction,
trying to find someone else to blame. The whole thing is sublimely ridiculous. I would
point out to your listeners that Cy Hersh is going to be at the National Press Club tonight
at seven o'clock and it's on Zoom and he's going to be answering hard questions about his report.
For those who are seriously interested in how Cy goes about his investigative reporting,
this could be very interesting. Well, I'm glad you pointed that out. We've been knocking on Cy's door to try and get him to come on Judging Freedom, even though he and I have only met a few times.
He knows I'm a big fan of his, and he also knows that we have many, many mutual friends like you
and Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern. Yesterday, I was talking to Ray McGovern about the attitude of CIA officers and
analysts when they are asked to do something that is on its face unlawful and arguably immoral and
wrong. So I put the same question to you. You both had careers in the CIA.
You both left for courageous, noble, and moral reasons.
Neither of you has ever hesitated to criticize your former employer. What do agents, officers in the CIA do when they're asked to do something that is obviously illegal and largely immoral,
like attack Germany and Russia by blowing up the pipeline?
Well, to a certain extent, it depends on the officer and how his own perspective of what is
being asked of him fits in with his own moral code. So you're going to
find people who will go along with it, and you're going to find people that won't go along with it.
Is there an intellectual academic debate? Is that acceptable in the CIA? Or,
since the CIA is the president's private army and private torture chamber,
do they just do whatever the hell he commands them to do? Well, I think the general breakdown
would basically be how ambitious people are and how much they want to play along with the leadership
to get promoted. And I think that's really how it comes down and it and this applies both to
analysts who spend all their time in washington and to operations officers like myself who spend
all the time overseas you you make the decision based on what's in front of you and i've known
people overseas that refuse to do things uh that ultimately could have involved foreigners being killed.
I know them to say, no, I can't do that.
And they got away with it.
But then there were always others who said, yeah, sure.
Hey, that sounds good.
So I'm going to assume that you don't get fired.
Well, maybe I shouldn't assume.
I'll ask you.
What happens to those who refuse assignments?
I mean, it's not the fast way to promotion, I would imagine.
Is it the fast way out the door?
I mean, suppose a CIA diver said to whoever his boss is, I'm not going down there with those Navy SEALs because that's a war crime? Yeah, well, he probably would be fired because this obviously is a high-level
operation that had the approval of the White House. And if it were an operations officer,
someone like me or an analyst or someone like that, you would find out that your next overseas
posting would be in Rwanda, and you'd wind up as a terminal GS-11. So, you know, there are things
that you weigh down. Terminal GS-11 is a rank and a pay grade above which you all want to go.
Yeah, that's kind of an entry-level pay grade. Okay. Okay. All right. Is there a difference in attitude about compliance with the White House in the CIA between officers and analysts, between you and the folks you worked with and Ray McGovern and the folks he worked with? And you could throw in Jack Devine if you want.
I could. Yeah. Well, of course, there are different perceptions. When I joined the CIA in 1975,
analysts and operations officers were not even supposed to have any contact with each other inside the CIA headquarters building. And the stated reason for this was because the
perspectives of those two types of professions were so different that they would wind up tainting
each other. And so there is a perception always has been in the agency that the operations guys
were the spies and the analysts were the eggheads who essentially were the ones that were in contact with Congress and in contact with the White House.
So it's a completely different set of perceptions. understanding, I know you were operations and not an analyst, but was there the understanding that
whoever gave the president or a person in place of the president, McGovern told us that
Ronald Reagan usually dispatched Jim Baker and George H.W. Bush to receive the presidential
briefings rather than receiving it personally. But was there the
perception in those days, in the mid-70s, that you would tell the president what you think he
wanted to hear, even if that meant putting substantial spin on the analysis that the
analysts in the fields had derived? Well, again, to a certain extent,
that depends on the analyst. And a guy like Ray McGovern, I would expect to tell it straight.
But there certainly have been other people who briefed the president who were very sensitive to the president's needs.
You get a guy like Bill Clinton.
He never met with his director of central intelligence, and he was not interested in the intelligence briefs.
So, you know, there were different perceptions.
I mean, somebody could have gone in there and said that, hey, we just got invaded by the Chinese,
and probably Bill Clinton would not have even noticed that there was a war going on.
But, you know, again, different perceptions, different war going on but you know again different perceptions different games going
on i would think ronald reagan whom i admire immensely would have very strong views on foreign
policy working with jim baker and and the elder bush and i think he would uh he would get across
to the analysts that uh briefing him that what his views were i'm kind of surprised
about what you said about uh bill clinton i mean we're all familiar with his extracurricular
activity in the white house but it seems to me he's a smart guy and at times even
a micromanager and basically you're giving me the impression of someone who was indifferent
indifferent to uh foreign intelligence and even foreign affairs yeah I think that's an accurate
assessment and I've heard that from numerous people who had contact in Washington with the
Clinton administration while it was in power and uh and some of this is documented the uh uh the
fact that he never met with his director of Central Intelligence during the his whole first
four years um is documented uh by the director and uh you know so it's a Clinton had his own agenda
and Clinton had his own advisors uh and the the quality of those advisors is indicated by the fact that after the administration was over,
he sent his boys around to the National Archive to steal documents that put him in a bad light vis-a-vis places like Sudan and Afghanistan. Well, we all know about that. The famous or infamous
Sandy Berger, the former national security advisor for Bill Clinton, literally, literally
taking documents from the National Archives and putting them in his underwear
as he exited the building. You know, he was caught. He eventually pleaded guilty,
a slap on the wrist. I don't know if the documents were ever returned or found or if he managed to destroy
them, but I think that's what you're talking about. Yes. Okay. Recently, Nikki Haley,
who was running for the Republican nomination for president, and Ron DeSantis, who probably is as
well, I say probably because he hasn't announced it, their campaigns were attacked by hundreds of
thousands of what we now call bots, you know, not non-human beings, but sounding and appearing to be
a human when you get something, some sort of an
email from them. You recently wrote a piece about this. What are your thoughts on it?
Well, this was kind of interesting. It apparently was revealed by, of all things, an Israeli
cybersecurity firm that literally hundreds of thousands of bots had been more or less created in the social media, starting with Twitter.
And these had basically been used to attack Dickie Haley and attack DeSantis and to praise Donald Trump.
So this gives one the impression that there is a campaign going within the Trump campaign or with somebody that's associated with it to try to bolster his reputation at the expense of his competitors.
Now, how does this work? There was another revelation that came out just about the same time about, again, another Israeli company, a company which called itself Jorge, which boasted that it had interfered in 33 elections around the world using this kind of been successful 27 times by using this process of creating false personalities on the internet and then getting
these personalities to say and do certain things that create like a public perception
of the candidates. And as I say, this Israeli company is boasting about it.
And so it's kind of curious. and one wonders if there are analogous organizations
in the United States operating. There certainly might be. So, you know, it's an interesting pair
of stories, let's put it that way. So we might have a presidential election in 2024
profoundly influenced by AI. Is there any significance to the fact that these two
revelations about which you wrote were both Israeli companies? I'm familiar with the Israeli
development of software, which has been used by the federal government to spy on Americans, particularly zero-click. That's the software
where you don't have to be tricked to click onto a link. They can get access to everything in your
mobile device or your desktop just by having the computer ID. But I'm not familiar with the use of Israeli-generated AI to influence the outcome of elections.
Now, all these companies seem to be in Israel. Are the laws looser there? Does the Israeli
government get involved in or support this stuff? Are these people ideological or are they just
businessmen making software and selling it to the highest bidder?
Well, I would say it's a little bit of all that. The thing is that Israel, of course,
is probably preeminent in terms of developing these kinds of snooping softwares and worms and
that kind of thing. And they've used this kind of stuff prolifically and and very often in cooperation with our own nsa uh and the thing is that this produces for a very small country
a whole lot of people who are really expert in this stuff and the israeli government looks the
other way because they considered an asset and indeed one might assume that the israeli
government that these guys don't really ever leave the Israeli government, that they cooperate with the government as needed. And in this case, of course, we have a
private guy who used to work in the Israeli Secret Service who's boasting about the fact,
he's got his office in Tel Aviv, and he's boasting about the fact that he influenced the results of 27 elections.
Of course, in America, we have a Secretary of Defense who used to be a four-star general, and after that was on the board of Raytheon, which is the second largest military defense
contractor in the country, perhaps in the world. So it's the same type of revolving door. Lloyd
Austin is just a little bit more, shall we
say, discreet than these people that are in and out of the Israeli government. Would the CIA or
American intelligence community assets have had any involvement in the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank or the Signature Bank,
which we all just witnessed and which seemed to be terrifying the economic community in the past week?
Yeah, well, as far as I know, I haven't seen anything creating that linkage,
although I would be maybe looking elsewhere in the federal government,
in the area where people are fooling around with sanctions and they're looking into people's
bank books and assets and that kind of thing, where there would have been some connection
with people maybe from the Treasury Department, from the FBI. It would be unlikely for the agency unless there were a real kind of foreign spin to it,
which there could turn out to be.
There's a report yesterday that the Israelis have actually had prior knowledge this bank was going under
and a bunch of Israeli companies that were invested in it drew their money out before it happened.
So there you go.
Phil, you never cease to perform and educate. Always a pleasure. Thanks very much for joining
us. Well, thank you for having me on again. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Remember,
like and subscribe, like and subscribe. Larry Johnson this afternoon, right here, 2 o'clock Eastern.
Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.