Judging Freedom - US Aid is Destroying Ukraine. w_ Ray McGovern, Fmr.. CIA Intel

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

US Aid is Destroying Ukraine. w_ Ray McGovern, Fmr.. CIA IntelSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, October 16th, 2023. Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, my dear friend, always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for these very informative Monday mornings, even as the world becomes curiouser and more challenging. As we speak, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is hopping around from capital to capital in the Middle East trying to avoid military contact himself. The Israelis have destroyed the Syrian airport in Aleppo

and have rendered useless the Syrian airport in Damascus. We'll talk in a minute about violence extending outside of Israel and Gaza, but of what value is diplomacy, if any, at a time like this? Well, Secretary Blinken has lost the thread. No one takes him seriously. He's in way over his head, let's face it. When he's traveling around talking to folks, the president of Iran is calling up the head of Saudi Arabia to coordinate how they will respond. Now, give me a break. This is unprecedented. China is deeply involved. Many of the Middle Eastern countries, the Arab countries, asked China to convene a meeting yesterday, which they did in Beijing. Bottom line for me is that there are several days before I think Israel is prepared to mount this full-scale ground offensive in Gaza.

I think they need to think this through because the tectonic shift in relationships between Israel and the rest of the Western Asia, or Middle East, we used to call it, have changed considerably. And even Biden has seemed to get second thoughts about, you know, whether you should occupy. Well, whether you should invade, whether you should, you know, there's a difference between terrorism and ecocide, or what's the word? Genocide, okay?

There's a big difference. And in the law, genocide is precisely what the Israelis apparently intend to do in Gaza, unless someone stands up and stops them. When 9-11 happened here, the Bush-Cheney administration grossly, grossly overreacted with the Patriot Act domestically and with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which were based upon deception, fraud, and falsehoods. What is the danger of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his colleagues overplaying their hand against Gaza, the danger to Gaza, the danger to Israel itself, the danger to the Middle East? Well, Israel is not the United States. It is not all-powerful. It used to be by virtue of its

being joined at the hip with the United States, but that is no longer the case. Even Blinken has seen fit to contact everybody and his brother. Now, he just got off the phone with his counterpart in Turkey. What's that all about? There are some hints that Turkey is prepared to furnish supplies, humanitarian assistance to Gaza with ships covered by Russian aircraft and Russian warships in that part of the Mediterranean. Now, that's just one report. It's from John Helmer in Moscow. It's a little spotty. But, you know, just think of the consequences of that. We have two aircraft carriers now in the Eastern Med. That makes

no sense at all. It's not going to deter Hezbollah. It's not going to do anything except put 10,000 U.S. naval personnel at risk. How much are those aircraft carriers sitting ducks for drones and other unmanned projectile offensive weaponry? Well, that's how I described them yesterday in a tweet. But then I checked with people who know a lot more about this kind of thing than I do, Judge. Yeah, they're sitting ducks. Now, the kind of weaponry that is available to Joe Blow in Gaza or to some swimmers, you know, it's just, they're not going to sink these aircraft carriers, but they can do a hell of a lot of damage. And it reminds me of 1983 when Ronald Reagan was persuaded by the same type of people up above the State Department to put Marines in Beirut. You know the story. Two-hundred-and-forty-one were murdered by two truck bombs.

Now, what did that do? Well, Reagan was smart. He said, whoops, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Okay, you battleships, and that's what they were, battleships off Lebanon then, you continue to fire rounds into the hills there in Lebanon and Syria, but I'm getting the hell out of Dodge. And he did. That was the smart thing he did. The dumb thing he did was putting U.S. Marines where they were. And I think it's a very dumb thing, putting two U.S. aircraft carriers in the Eastern Med. Here's Secretary of Defense Austin

Cut-5, Chris, boasting about this, Ray. What's your assessment right now of the chances of Lebanese Hezbollah opening up a second front? Well, that possibility is always there. We would highly discourage any entity, any country, any organization from doing that. As you saw, Nick, when this happened, we rapidly moved a carrier battle group into the region, and that carrier battle group provides us with a number of options. So you heard President Biden say the other day that if anybody ever is thinking about this, you know, we would say don't. Before they do something as foolhardy and provocative as a carrier battle group, which I guess is an aircraft carrier and other support vessels as well, do they do an intelligence assessment? I mean, stated differently, is the CIA asked to advise them on the safety or desirability of doing that? No.

And there's the flaw in the system. That hasn't been the case since Vietnam. I recall participating in national intelligence estimates, a dying breed now, where we would be asked by LBJ, okay, if we put another 200,000 troops in South Vietnam, would we win then? And we'd go back and say, no, you wouldn't. Now, we were disregarded because of the politics of the thing. Right now, the CIA is not even being asked.

And that goes back to Afghanistan when Petraeus took charge of the CIA and said, we don't need any national intelligence estimate. We know what's best. And so I doubt seriously whether the CIA was even consulted. And if Bill Burns was told we're going to do this, he would say, oh, great idea, because that's Bill Burns, the cog in the wheel. How about Secretary Austin's own DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency? Do they have the assets to acquire intel the way the CIA does? And would Secretary Austin ordinarily, I don't mean him personally, would the Secretary of Defense generally even consult them? Or did Joe Biden just say, well, let's remind them who's boss,

send some aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean? That's how it seems to work here. Now, DIA has some very good analysts. They've been writing about a lot of things. They also have a heavy influence of what we call liaison. What is liaison? That's the Israelis. They depend heavily on what the Israelis tell them and the relationship with Israel. So it's not completely unbiased what you get from DIA analysts, but it's better than nothing. I doubt whether Austin even consulted them. Now, are the Israelis in danger of some reaction internationally

when this is over, arguing genocide and war crimes? I mean, the goal of Israel is theoretically to extract the hostages and to degrade Hamas so this doesn't happen again. That doesn't mean killing civilians. It doesn't mean destroying towns and cities. It doesn't mean starving by denying food, water, and fuel to millions of people. That's right, Judge. Genocide is sui generis. There are laws against that, and they have been enforced. Now, yesterday, I had the presence of mind to contact Professor Francis Boyle, who won two genocide cases against Yugoslavia, defending the folks that Yugoslavia was genociding against, so to speak, back in the 90s, two of them. Now, I asked him, what about Israel? He said, well, you know, I talked to Israeli lawyers

in their justice department, in their military, and they agree with him. They can't counter my arguments, but they say, look, it's a PR thing. As long as we have the media in the United States, as long as we have public relations, we don't have to really be very concerned about that. They say that to me. They've said that to me more than three or four times. That's where it rests, the PR, the U.S. Now, the the American people will never be given the true story about how all this evolved initially with an Israeli attack on Egypt and Syria way back in 1967, unanimous UN resolution condemning that attack and requiring the withdrawal of Israeli forces from those

conquered territories. What's that? 67. You do the math, okay? It's never been honored. And the Israelis have admitted, yeah, we weren't threatened. We did that because we thought we could, and we did it, and we're happy. And we need to be honest, said a former Israeli president, Menachem Begin, 82, after all. You know, we're being honest. We weren't under any threat from the Egyptians and the Sinai. We did it because we could do it. And, you know, we're proud of having done it. And we'll do it again.

When we come back, where is Ukraine? But first this can you believe the chaos confronting americans today the government is out of control debt is out of control and have you heard the dollar is under attack this will soon be replaced by digital currency no more paper cash. It's coming fast. So you need to get educated in your wealth into gold and silver. So educate yourself about investing in precious metals. Take charge of your retirement with gold-backed IRAs, and you can transfer a portion of your existing IRAs tax and penalty-free. So don't procrastinate. Take control.

Do the right thing for you and your family. Go to learjudgenap.com or call 800-511-4620. So while all this is happening, not a peep in the Middle East, we don't hear a peep from President Zelensky. The Congress, of course, can't appropriate more funds until the House of Representatives organizes itself. President Biden, when last talked about this publicly, asked for $28 billion, Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and the southern border, throwing that in there to get some more conservative and libertarian Republican votes. But how close is Zelensky to the end of his rope from your intelligence sources, Ray? Zelensky is very close to the end of his rope.

Incidentally, his reflex action response was to blame Russia for what happened in Hamas. He's not really well connected to reality. Here's the situation. President Biden two months ago said Russia has already lost. The head of the CIA said the Russian military have been exposed as ineffectual for the whole world to see. Okay, now, one week ago, President Putin said the Ukrainians are already lost. Okay, who are you going to believe? Well, we're going to see in the next couple of weeks, okay? We're going to see if the Ukrainian forces, without many shells for their artillery, or their mortars, or their tanks, can hold a line.

The Rasputitsa, the time in Ukraine where everything melts, you know, and that beautiful black earth, you can't even walk in it while it's slugging through, okay? That's coming in probably about two weeks. So the question is, will the Russians take advantage and go ahead, go all the way to the Dnieper? I would have said it was an equal chance a couple of weeks ago, but I don't know now. Some of the Ukrainians seem to be putting up a pretty decent fight in some key areas. So my guess now is that the Russians kind of wait, wait until it freezes over, okay? And that's a couple of months from now. And then what? Well, then I think they'll go to the Dnieper and say, okay, you're ready to negotiate now.

And if Zelensky is out of ammunition, and it's not because of a lack of largesse from the West, then the West has no ammunition to give him, right? Okay. So it doesn't look good for Zelensky. I just think that the carnage that he has allowed and played a part in of so many thousands, so many hundreds of thousands of people dead because of his decisions, I think that's unacceptable. The consensus seems to be that the spring and then renamed summer offensive has failed. And the consensus seems to be that the Russians are actually slowly but persistently moving westward and that they've gained the offensive. There are pockets

of substantial resistance, but overall, it's not going to stop the onward march. From your experience in the intelligence community, what's your best guess as to how this ends? Do the Ukrainians just throw down their arms? Is there a coup? Does President Zelensky flee to his house in Paris or Tuscany or Miami? Is he incarcerated in Kiev? How do these things end? You've got Victoria Nuland offering to protect him, she who instigated all of this.

You have Tony Blinken and Joe Biden, whose legacies are on the line. You have the West, which won't be able to justify $200 billion in aid in a lost cause. How does this end, Ray? Joe, I mean, Judge, the main problem here is the U.S. election. That's key to all this. And when we look at how vulnerable Joe Biden and the Democrats are, not only to being seen as losing this war, running out of ammunition, for God's sake, but also failing to support Zelensky and also being sort of corrupt. Now, what I'm saying here is that there are people who are saying, many people are saying, look, they got the goods on Joe Biden and Hunter. They got the goods on

Blinken, who set up that operation where managers of the CIA said this Hunter's laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian intelligence disinformation operation. They have all that. That's illegal. What's going to happen if they don't win? They could end up in jail. Now, I don't want anybody to end up in jail, but I'm thinking, I'm trying to put myself in their position. Lincoln, Sullivan, the author of Russiagate, completely exposed as nonsense now by court documents and court testimony. Okay. So what are they going to do? Well, they're going to go for broke.

And that's their modus operandi. And it scares me to hell. What happens if one of these swarms of drones hits one of these USS Ford or the USS Eisenhower out there in the Eastern Med, well, that could be a good sort of thing for solidifying support for Biden and company. I dare say that may be the way they look at it. So you're suggesting that however the Samas attack came about by an intelligence failure or by deliberate indifference, it has obviously that the same effect may happen to Joe Biden, who's teetering on the brink between impeachment, prosecution of the son, and a catastrophic loss in a reelection campaign. But that might look differently if he's the commander-in-chief vindicating the deaths of American sailors. Well, yeah, it's a cruel thing to say,

but these are the calculations made by politicians. I really wonder whether anybody sensible is speaking to Biden or those making decisions and saying, look, restrain the Israelis. You've got about three or four days before they mount this ground offensive. You know that's going to be terrible. You know that's going to be genocide. Restrain them, for God's sake. Is there anyone like that? Well, we used to think that Bill Burns, head of the CIA, was the adult in the room.

He certainly dissipated that impression. So who's going to tell him, look, enough is enough. You can't win this one. Cut your losses. Tell Zelensky to go to that nice little chateau he has in Tuscany and get a government in Kiev that can deal with the Russians because you wait any longer, the chances of a real deal in any sense appealing to Ukraine are zero. Ray McGovern, always a pleasure. My dear friend, no matter what we're talking about, thank you for your time. We'll see you on the roundtable with Larry on Friday.

Thanks, Judge. Of course. More as we get it. Thanks, Judge. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.