Judging Freedom - Ukraine Secrets & Lies - Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

See omny.fm/listener for privacy information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, Friday, happy Friday, Friday, May 12, 2023. It's about 1.30 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Phil Giraldi joins us. Phil, always a pleasure. Phil, this is your second time this week. You can come on every day if you want. It's such a joy to be able to pick your brain about the arcane ways of the intelligence community. You had a piece at the UNS review and reprinted at lewrockwell.com with the very, very intriguing title of The Difference Between Secrets and Lies. Now, I suppose that the

intelligence community has a category of secrets it feels it has to protect in order to save the lives of individuals that gave them those secrets. But can they lie about it? Well, that's, of course, the tricky part. I'm sure you've heard of the expression that the intelligence agencies have to protect their sources and methods. I've heard that till I'm blue in the face. Yeah, well, that's a secret. And in my career with the agency, I ran many agents who were betraying, in effect, their own countries to provide information to the United States. Now, those people's identities had to be protected if we were going to get the information and if they were going to survive. I knew of at least five agents during my time that I knew personally that there were revelations of their relationship with the U.S.

They were arrested by their own governments and they were executed after being tortured. So this is serious stuff, and that's what I call a secret. That is something where it's in your interest, and it's in someone else's interest to protect information. That's a secret, and it's good that the government is conscious of that and does it on occasion. So when asked under oath about information that is a secret, the truthful and transparent answer to which would result in the torture and death of an innocent or another person, never mind their innocence, torture is always wrong. We'll talk about that in a minute. How does one answer?

Does one lie or does one just decline to answer? I think the right answer is you decline to answer, unless the questioning mechanism is such that that kind of information could be very carefully protected. Meaning the Q&A occurred in some secure, secret federal facility as opposed to an open public hearing on Capitol Hill. Yeah, exactly. asked by Senator Ron Wyden, director, does the federal government spy on tens, excuse me, on hundreds of millions of Americans? And he said, no, he lied. Was that a lie to protect a secret, or could there have been a non-perjurious way to have answered that question? Well, I think it's an out-and-out lie.

That comment, in fact, is famous as being an out-and-out lie. And the reality, of course, is he was lying to protect a policy that was in place by the government that in itself was illegal. So that's a double lie. That's where I'm seeing the distinction between there are some things that are secret that have to be protected for various reasons. And I think it's pretty clear if you explain to the average American what that distinction might be, they'll understand it. What are intelligence agents taught? What are the rules given to them about secrets and lies? How do they decide what secrets are worth lying about? Well, actually, the average intelligence officer like myself, mid-level type officer actually working in the field in the intelligence business,

we are told never to reveal to anyone information that is classified. And that's basically the way most people, CIA and other intelligence agencies in the U.S. government, operate when they're overseas or even in the U.S. It's a hard and fast rule. You do not reveal classified information. So I guess Clapper should have said, Senator, I'm unable to answer that question in a public forum. Yeah, he could have said that if he'd been a little more, less a politician. Now, bear in mind that all these guys that are at the top level in all these agencies, all these letter agencies, are basically politicians, and very few of them have actually worked as intelligence officers in the field. This is something that, in a lot of ways, they're not even really familiar with. All right, let me ask you then about individuals.

George Tenet, Jack Brennan. I know you have some very strong words about him, words with which I, when we get to them, and I know the audience will agree. William Burns, Mike Pompeo, Leon Panetta. I'm just rattling off from memory the names of recent directors of the CIA. Were they ever in the field gathering secret information from foreign sources, the identity of which could not be revealed? Or did they come from Congress or business or some other place and just put in charge of this massive spying operation? Well, the reality is that almost none of them have had any experience working as an actual intelligence officer. And George Tenet, for example, was a congressional staffer and made the jump over to the agency and became its director. This is absurd,

but that's the way the system works. It rewards political loyalty more than it rewards expertise. What did you mean when you wrote, the administration of George W. Bush elevated lying to a level hitherto hardly imagined in Washington. All right. I probably should have said that the Pentagon Papers were an indication that there was something before George W. Bush. Okay. All right. was something before George W. Bush. But George W. Bush, I'm citing because he's within our living memory of what took place. It was a war against a country that in no way threatened the United States that was stitched together by a series of lies that were put together by the administration very consciously in terms of knowing exactly what it was doing. And it was all designed to trigger a war.

That war wound up killing 400,000 Iraqis, you know, and we still have troops there. This is the kind of thing that's going on now in Ukraine. Same sort of thing. Where's the threat from Ukraine? Right, right. But before we leave Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Scooter Libby, I guess we could put in there Dick Cheney and George W. himself, did not hesitate to foster lies to the American public and perpetrate a fraudulent war. You know that personally, don't you? Yeah, I was still in the agency at the time when all this was going on.

I was sitting there with some of my former CIA classmates who were analysts, who were covering all these issues, and saw all the raw intelligence. And these people were telling me this is nonsense. Meaning the idea that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction is nonsense, because we have the raw intelligence here, and it's telling us he doesn't have it. Right. That's exactly right. And everyone inside the system at a certain level knew that this was all fraudulent. Did George W. Bush himself know that the mantra Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction was fraudulent? That I don't know. I mean, I do know that this certainly went up through the pipeline, at least to the Vice President's office, that was Dick Cheney, and it went through the system in the

Pentagon. The Pentagon set up a separate office, Office of Special Plans, headed by Doug Feith, which basically existed to funnel information into the system. Information that may very well have been fraudulent because that's what their bosses in the West Wing of the White House wanted to hear. Yes. Okay. With that as a background, you say the following. George W. Bush's subterfuge, I'm adding the word subterfuge, was child's play compared to the contemporary environment

where the media has joined with Joe Biden to lie about nearly everything. Your phrase, Phil, God bless your courage, involving Ukraine, to lie about nearly everything involving Ukraine. Explain. Okay. My explanation as to why it's worse now is because the media is fully on board. The media does the work that the George W. Bush team would have done in terms of debunking criticism. The media does all the running for them. As soon as someone like Cy Hersh comes out with a devastating story about a war crime, it's the media that turns on them and comes up with a fake story to disprove that or to diminish what he's suggesting. How did the government succeed in co-opting the media? I'm thinking in my mind when I was a teenager,

the Vietnam War. Oh, the media must have caused LBJ sleepless nights, night after night after night after night. And now we know why. Once the Pentagon Papers were revealed, thanks to Daniel Ellsberg. But now the media is almost literally in bed with the Biden administration. We're going to talk about Teixeira anymore. People will say, oh, it's not even on the front pages. It's not even on the back pages anymore. This kid revealed some of the most, if he's the revealer. I'll say it precisely, this kid, he's 21 years old, is accused of revealing documents, the accuracy and the authenticity of which the government hasn't challenged, and the essence of which shows that the government knows Ukraine is losing, knows Ukraine's air defenses have been degraded nearly down to zero and lies about it to the American public.

And his name appears nowhere because the media is in bed with the Biden administration. How did that happen? Well, that's the perfect example of what goes on here. I mean, as we've discovered with disgusting previous days, the fact that this guy has kind of disappeared and his story has disappeared, his motives have never surfaced. This is all incredible. This is a cover up of enormous proportions. And it's basically being done to keep the administration from being embarrassed about this whole thing, because, you know, the American public is starting to wake up to the fact that they're being lied to all the time. It started with COVID and it's continued with Ukraine. Cy Hersh revealed, as you say, a war crime. Cy Hersh revealed an an American military attack on the civilian property of an ally, the Pipestream. The ally never complained. The country in commercial cooperation with the ally, the ally is Germany,

the country in commercial cooperation with them is Russia, said, well, we told you all along the U.S. did it. Why the silence in the media? Well, that's again, that's, well, there's a mystery there, which is why this has become so extreme, this reflex on the part of the mainstream media to cover up for government lies and for government crimes. This is quite incredible. But I would argue that a lot of this has been an evolutionary process over the last 20 years, whereby the media and the government have been working together cooperatively because they both need each other. The media needs to have leaks from the government to tell its stories, and the government needs the media to provide cover. So I think that's a simple

explanation of how it's proceeded to get to this point where there is no critique of the government and there's no critique of the media. Has President Zelensky, to your knowledge, ever denied the Cy Hersh report that Zelensky is the head of a criminal organization, a criminal gang that has quite literally siphoned $400 million with an M dollars from the financial aid that the U.S. has given to Ukraine and that Bill Burns, the head of the CIA, has shown President Zelensky a list of the siphoners and his name was at the top of the list. Has Zelensky ever acknowledged or denied this? As far as I know, personally, no, he hasn't. This has been kind of something that at least some of us know about, have heard about. And the Burns visit, I think, has been verified that the visit took place, although nobody is becoming completely clean as to what Burns said to Zelensky. Apparently, it was a warning that we're aware

of his theft, and he can't continue to do it because it would be real hard to continue U.S. support for the war. This is not theft from his own government, although maybe that is happening, I don't know. This is theft from the American taxpayer because the proposal by Senator Rand Paul in the Senate and Congressman Thomas Massey in the House, two libertarians from Kentucky, to have an inspector general examine or hand out the cash rather than just wire it into Ukrainian bank funds. Those two proposals were never even allowed to come to the floor of the House or the Senate for a vote. Yeah, that's correct. And also, Congressman Gates has submitted a similar bit of legislation, which is going nowhere.

You know, yeah, the money is being stolen from the United States. There was a slate of hand in terms of oil purchases to do this. But essentially, this money comes straight out of the U.S. taxpayer's pocket of $400 million. I think that President Zelensky might be honest, however, in this clip we're going to show you from the BBC, where he's basically saying we're ready to fight, but we don't have the equipment with which to do it. Take a listen. Are you ready for this counteroffensive? Mentally, we're ready. In terms of how motivated our military are, we're ready. In terms of enough personnel in our brigades we're ready in terms of equipment not everything has arrived yet that's my answer so you're still waiting for weapons and for the kind of military equipment that have been promised to arrive yes we're still expecting some

things they will reinforce our counter-offensive and most importantly they will protect our people we're expecting armored vehicles they arrive in batches we can advance with what we've got and i think we can be successful but we will lose a lot of people i think that is unacceptable we need to wait we need a bit more time so the spring offensive is not going to come in the spring, if at all. And it's not the Ukraine's fault. It's America's fault for not getting equipment there fast enough. That's the way I read that, Phil. Well, I think Zelensky is playing a complicated game on a couple of levels.

He's obviously eager to keep the flow of money, equipment. I mean, we talk about equipment and everything like that, and he talks about equipment, but quite a lot of money is being funneled in directly to support his government. So that is coming from not only the US, coming from Europeans. So he's eager to keep this going. And I um he's hoping that somehow this will will turn a bit for him uh he knows deep down as does the Pentagon that he's losing the war that the Russians have a manpower advantage of three to one it's hardly likely that he's going to turn it around but this is just something he's like playing a card game here and keeping and an extortion act to a certain extent to keep the flow coming.

And the flow, I guess, will just keep coming. I mean, the White House announced earlier this week $1.2 billion, but it's in the form of a credit, meaning the United States Treasury will pay the American manufacturers directly and they will ship the equipment over to Ukraine. Now, what happens when it gets there is up to the Ukrainians, but they can't really sell a tank. They need to use the tank. So this is not cash that they can easily steal. Do you think that the neocons really still believe that they can use this war, which started out as a border dispute and now is viewed as existential by President Putin because of all the military gear we in the West have aimed at Moscow? Do you think that the neocons in the State Department and the intelligence community and elsewhere in the American government still think they can use this war to drive President Putin from office? Well, that's a good question.

I don't know how to what extent they actually believe that. I think it's it's something they see as a correct policy. When I see, you know, statements from leading neocons, it's usually things to the effect of, well, you know, we have to weaken Russia. I mean, that seems to be the mantra. Weaken Russia, weaken Russia, because otherwise Russia will recreate the Soviet Union. Otherwise Russia will become a threat to the United States. But this is all nonsense. And anyone who knows anything about Russia or its economy or how it sees itself knows that this is nonsense.

I want to play a clip for you from our friend and colleague Scott Horton of Antiwar.com when I asked him the other day what he thought, if there's a plan A or a plan B, that these creeps that brought us in the war actually have in their own minds or have talked about. Take a listen. They clearly think that they're getting the better end of this, that they're bogging Russia down and bleeding them to bankruptcy. But of course, we're spending north of $100 billion on this effort ourselves. But they've said all along that what they want to do is just keep the war going as long as possible. And in fact, if you go back to the beginning of the war, everybody assumed, even the Ukrainian

military assumed, the American spies and everyone else assumed that the Russians were going to roll right over their army and that we were going to be backing an Afghan style insurgency all along. That was plan A. So plan B was, oh, great. The military is able to continue to stand and fend the Russians off for all this time. We'll continue to pour all the weapons we can into them to keep that going as long as possible. But then that raises a real question is if and when the Russians are able to essentially completely smash and route the Ukrainian military, it's still a land the size of Texas. And I don't think they want to take the western half of it. But then if they don't, that leaves a rump Ukrainian state led by right wing nationalists

allied with NATO and armed to the teeth that I presume that that is NATO's plan, that even if, let's say, the Ukrainian army falls apart tomorrow, they'll go back to plan A and try to keep this thing going until Putin has to resign in disgrace. What do you think, Phil? I think he's got his finger onto something. Yeah, I think that's very good analysis. That's better than a lot of what I've been seeing. I think Scott has kind of nailed it. They have this sort of fantasy that somehow if you keep chipping away, chipping away, chipping away, you wind up at a point that's advantageous for you. But of course, it doesn't necessarily work that way.

Bill Giraldi, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Have a great weekend. The weather's supposed to be beautiful here in the Northeast. We'll talk to you again next week. Thank you so much. Thank you. Boy, if you like that, like, tell a friend, and if you haven't, subscribe. Thank you for watching Judge Napolitano. More as we get it, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.