Judging Freedom - Ukraine War - How Should History Inform Us_ w_ Ray McGovern fmr CIA

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. There is a problem that affects many children that I cannot solve alone. It is called toxic stress, and this increases the risk of health problems. Hay un problema que afecta a muchos niños que no puedo resolver sola. Se llama estrés tóxico y esto aumenta el riesgo de problemas de salud. Pero hay pasos que los padres pueden tomar para superar el estrés tóxico. Aprende cómo en First5California.com Hi Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, June 13, 2023. It's about 1030 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Ray McGovern joins us right after this.

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I want to start with a question that I think is profound. Some people think it's academic. You have some pretty well-grounded opinions on it. Did Putin have other options than to invade Ukraine? Well, not only I, but John Mearsheimer, whom I really trust on this, say no. He had no other options. And of course, the reason this is important is because people in the United States need to know this. Putin was forced into it. He was provoked up and up the kazoo, as we would say in the Bronx, prov well, you know, he had other options. And so I say, well, okay. I've thought through this thing. I've thought really closely. Give me a for instance, as again we say in the Bronx. Give me an example. Now, the best they can come up with is, well, he could have studied Gandhi,

or on the other end, he could have threatened nuclear war, like sending aircraft and battleships, guided missile destroyers and so forth, submarines into the Atlantic and said, all right, look, knock it off or else. Now, neither of those seem to me to be real options. That's completely out of character for Poochie to do either. So I remain in this conviction that number one, he had no other options. Number two, to my dying breath, I'm going to try to get my friends and everyone else to realize that because that has a great deal to do with where we are now. There was one academic. Actually, he's quite good. He's sort of progressive.

He's a Brit, but he lives in Ireland, taught at the University of Cork. And he wrote an excellent, excellent memo published last December, and the title was Now or Never, The Immediate Origins of Putin's Preventative War on Ukraine. Wow, of course, now or never, he's going to move, okay. Oh, wait a second, they took that down, they took that down from this very prominent military website, and guess what, one month ago, he comes up with a new article. And the title of that is, Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a war of choice, not of necessity.

He changed his mind. Well, yeah. He doesn't really adduce any new evidence as to why he changed his mind. Let me go back to your opening comments that Putin was provoked. Provoked by whom? By NATO moving eastward, contrary to the promises of George H.W. Bush and Jim Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev? That's where it starts, of course. Yeah.

I had a personal encounter with one of Gorbachev's chief advisors. His name was Kouvaldin. This is about eight years ago, as memory serves. I was in Moscow, and I said, Professor Kouvaldin, tell me. Tell me why that agreement, that promise was not written down. He looked me in the eye. He says, well, Mr. McGovern, there are two usual reasons, and they're respectable. One is that Germany hadn't given its buy-in yet. Of course, it had to do with the reunification of

Germany. And number two, the Warsaw Pact still existed. Okay, so then he looked at me and said, but Mr. McGovern, I'll tell you the real reason. The real reason is that we trusted you. Now, trust is gone. The last modicum of trust came in September of 2013 when Putin helped Obama avoid a war, an open war, in Syria by persuading the Syrians to destroy all their chemical weapons. That was a big deal. 2013 saying, I am very happy with the growth of trust that has grown not only between our two countries, but between us personally. The only thing I object to, says Putin, is to what President Obama said just last week about the U.S. being the exceptional country in the world. I don't believe there are any exceptional countries. I think there are poor countries, countries closer to democracy.

But when God looks down at all these countries, he sees them as being equal, period. End quote. I was reliably told that Putin penned that last paragraph in himself. And where are we? Well, the exceptionalism is what has got us into this fix where the majority of the world is dead set against what we're doing in Ukraine. The exceptionalism, we're going to get back to Ukraine in a minute, has been a disease infecting American foreign policy, probably going back to the post-World War II era. I mean, you wrote a piece recently on the anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an American ship,

in which 34 sailors were murdered and another 200 were injured, excuse me, our colleague Colonel Dan Davis wrote a similar piece on the beauty and brilliance of JFK's speech in June of 63 to the graduates at American University calling for an end of the Cold War and normalizing commercial relationships with Russia. Of course, JFK was dead five months later. LBJ had an entirely different attitude about our relationship to Russia. He arguably knew about and orchestrated, certainly lied about the attack on the USS Liberty. I will let you take it from there, Ray. Well, on June 8th, 1967,

right in the middle of that Six-Day War, the Israelis deliberately tried to sink the USS Liberty, which was snooping. It was a spy ship. It had antenna up the kazoo, you know, antenna all over the place. Couldn't be mistaken for Egyptian horse transport, okay? So they deliberately did. How do we know that? We have the intercepts, for God's sake. But ground control, these are American flags. These are American ships. Follow your orders. Sink it. So, you know, there's no doubt about it. Pat Lang, a good friend of mine, was in Fort Holliver, the Army intelligence officer's intelligence course. And he said, yeah, we use that. We use that in our scenarios as to what can happen. So what I'm saying is the Israelis learned they could get away with murder, literally. I mean, 34 sailors killed. The only way that the rest of them escaped, because there were torpedo boats shooting torpedoes at the USS Liberty. One brave sailor, his name was Halbarzie, Terry Halbarzie, said to the skipper, Captain

McConnell, I think I can rig up that one antenna that wasn't working, that the Israelis didn't shoot down? And he said, yeah, right, right, Midshipman. You got to go out on that deck there full of napalm? Yeah. He said, request permission, sir. He let him. He hooked up the one antenna that had been broken. They got an SOS out.

And a minute later, the Israelis tucked tail and got out of there. U.S. ships came to the rescue. They were called back by McNamara and by Johnson because they didn't want to offend our ally, Israel. Why did McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, and LBJ, obviously president at the time, want the Israelis to attack this ship. Was this some way to try and draw the American military into the Six-Day War, or was this part of some grand scheme that would have allowed LBJ somehow to blame it on the Russians and attack Moscow? Well, I think that's a step farther than I would go. In other words, I don't think that necessarily LBJ McNamara knew anything about this. That ship was intercepting communications

where Egyptian prisoners were being shot by Israelis right offshore there. The ship was in international waters, but it had the capability to find out exactly what was going on in that area. Why were they shooting them? Because, you know, they'd captured so many of them, you've got to water them, you've got to feed them. Better just to shoot them. That's established by Israeli historians. That's one reason why this is, one reason given for why this happened.

The real lamentable thing is not only did LBJ and McNamara call the commander of those rescue ships off, said come back home, but the Navy itself participated in the cover-up. John McCain's father was at first one of the ruling people that looked into this. If I sound a little angry, I know several of those USS Liberty survivors. There aren't too many left that are alive, but I know their pain because I went out there when Terry Halberdier was given a silver star, I think, the second highest. Guess who gave it to them? Devin Nunes. Devin Nunes, whose district was out there where Terry Halbarge was working.

So I went out, flew out there, and it was an incredibly wonderful ceremony, except when we had lunch afterwards, I got a firsthand taste of what it does to a person who sees this, rescues the bodies of his comrades, and then is told, if you mention this, if you mention Israel to any of your friends, even your wife, you'll be court-martialed. Just keep, don't even talk to each other about that. Well, they were under that stricture, still are technically, but they're talk to each other about that. Well, they were under that stricture, still are technically, but they're talking to each other now and they're talking to people like me as well. Here's Colonel Dan Davis yesterday on how wonderful it would have been had the Cold War

ended earlier rather than had been intentionally extended by LBJ. LBJ undid JFK's order to get us out of Vietnam and to end all that support. And he did the exact opposite and began to ramp it up. And of course, we know all what happened from there. And then it turned much more hostile toward the Soviet Union and just deepened the Cold War. And if Kennedy had been allowed to live, we would not have fought the Vietnam War as we know it today. And we could have seen the end of the Cold War decades earlier and saved all kinds of money. And God only knows what kind of world we could have today. But because we failed to do that, and especially since 9-11, where now that we almost just jettison any talk of diplomacy, and all we want to do is carry around a big military stick,

and that's just not working for us. That's one of the things I want we want to do is carry around a big military stick. And that's just not working for us. That's one of the things I want to argue the most is that it's not keeping us safe. It's actually making us less safe by creating more enemies. And people don't want to be coerced and forced to do something that's not in their benefit, in their favor. And that world no longer exists of 2001 or 1991. It's a different world. And if we don't change, it's going to get us and take us down. If we don't change, it's going to get us and take us down. I'll let you comment on that as you wish, but I suspect you're in full accord with him. Well, I am.

And of course, the fly in the ointment is the fact that Americans are oblivious to all this. The mainstream media, so-called, has deprived the Americans of knowing. How many Americans do you know that know about the USS Liberty? How many know about this magnificent speech? I call it a liminal speech because it was right on the threshold of working out a deal with the Soviet Union so that they could prevent what had happened less than a year before, for God's sake, over Cuba. They almost incinerated the bunch of us, all of us, okay? And they drew back, and both of them, Khrushchev and Kennedy, thought there's a better way to do this, we'll talk about things.

And Khrushchev, as soon as he read that speech, the next day, he said, print that thing in toto. No comment is necessary for me. We're on a path toward peace. A couple of months later, JFK is killed, and Khrushchev says to Harriman, okay, well, that was it. We had a deal going. I don't know about this LBJ character.

And as you point out, for some reason, he was very, very hostile to the Russians as well as continuing this bloodbath in Vietnam. We're going to take a break for about a minute to pay some bills when we come back. McGovern on the latest in Vietnam. We're going to take a break for about a minute to pay some bills when we come back. McGovern on the latest in Ukraine. You want to feel safe in your vehicle. And for you, that means easy, rapid access to your firearm. But safety also means your items don't fall into the wrong hands. You don't have to choose between safety and convenience. The headrest safe keeps your firearm where you can access it and no one else can. Just order your headrest safe, install it yourself when it more, and Ukraine,

that it was more likely than not the Ukrainians that destroyed their own dam under the misguided belief that it could deprive Crimea of fresh water and undermine Russian defenses. Now, I don't know if either of those reasons is logical, and I also don't know if you join in this calling it a consensus as to the cause of the explosion of the dam, but what's your take from your observations from open sources and from whatever other sources you have, Ray, on the dam? Well, the jury is still out, Judge, in my view. I think it's most likely that the Ukrainians did it simply because if the Russians wanted to do something like this,

it wouldn't blow it up. They'd open a dam a little bit, and then it closed, and then it opened up and closed. I mean, it was a dam a little bit, and then it closed, and then open up and close. I mean, hello, it was a terrific lever for them. So why would they shoot themselves in their own feet, just like they presumably did with the Nord Stream thing? It doesn't make any sense that Russia did it. Now, it could have been an internal explosion. There had been real damage done to the dam previously by, actually by HIMARS missiles. And so you have to allow for the technicians to kind of decide what happened in that engine room. Was it just the case that it kind of just petered out? So I allow that option to be considered until I know more.

But I think most, I joined the consensus that most likely it was the Ukrainians. What kind of intel do you think Joe Biden is getting? Is he getting anything on issues like this? Is he getting anything as candid and succinct and to the point as what you just gave us? Or are your former colleagues yet again spinning the intel so that the man in the Oval Office hears what they think, only what he wants to hear? Well, I have to lean to the latter explanation, Judge. Look who's running the president's daily brief, a woman named April Haynes. You know what? She's the national intelligence director, right? She sits above the whole edifice of all the intelligence agencies. She runs the president's daily brief. What did she say just a couple months ago? I am very optimistic. I am very optimistic about the Ukrainian forces counteroffensive because- That is defied by the documents that were allegedly leaked by that kid in Massachusetts, defied by them. And no one from the government has challenged the authenticity or the accuracy. Sorry for my anger because I hate.

Yeah, well, you know, it's really pretty complicated here because she said that. She said the Russians were running out of ammunition and missiles and so forth. They couldn't replenish them and so forth. It was all cockamamie stuff. Where'd she get that stuff? You know, I hesitate to say she got it from my old colleagues she got it from the ukrainian security service which so is that what she's telling is that what she's telling the president if she is then you know we're not uh long from a

definitive uh defeat of the ukrainian forces the last week has gone horribly for them, and it's going to be decision time in just another month when the Russians will say, okay, now we're at the Dnieper River. Do you want a deal? And if you want a deal, we offer a diessa as something around which we could build some sort of deal. If there is to be a deal to produce a ceasefire, what role, if any, will China play in that deal, Ray? A great big one. Thanks for asking, because from day one, I've been emphasizing that Putin felt his, had his druthers and had his encouragement after he went up and talked to Xi Jinping on the 4th of February, 2022. Xi Jinping said, all right, we'll give you a waiver on Westphalia. If you got to do it, well, you got to do what you got to do. Since then, China has been strong in its support of Russia.

So strong that Anthony Sullivan, Jake Sullivan, I'm sorry, Jake Sullivan had to go to Vienna to meet with the top Chinese diplomat, a member of the Politburo, okay? And they spent eight hours. What was that all about? The top Chinese diplomat was reading the Riot Act to Sullivan, and now we have Blinken going to Beijing. He's going to get the same sort of lecture, namely, look, Russia and we are joined at the hip now. You cause real escalation in Ukraine.

We're going to come even closer to your warships and to your aircraft flying in and around the Taiwan Strait. Two-front war, it's crazy. Putin himself has said the U.S. is crazy to create conditions for a war on two fronts. And he's absolutely right about that. He attributes it, by the way, to arrogance and a feeling of impunity, end quote, both of which characterize not only Sullivan, but Blinken. Ray McGovern, always a pleasure, my dear friend, whether it's history or contemporary with you, it's always reality. Much appreciated. Thank you for joining us. Most welcome, Judge. Of course, more as we get it. Judge Napolitano. Oh, you like this? Like and subscribe. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. The Headrest Safe is quick and easy to use.

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