Judging Freedom - U.S. Military & Biden Admin So Compromised w/Karen Kwiatkowski fmr USAF Lt. Col.

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

U.S. Military & Biden Admin So Compromised w/Karen Kwiatkowski fmr USAF Lt. Col.See 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 Friday, September 8, 2023. My guest today is a longtime friend of mine, but I believe this is her maiden appearance on Judging Freedom, is retired Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who in her years in the Air Force analyzed intelligence for her colleagues and her superiors. Colonel Karen, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I have been here before and I love it. Okay. Okay. My, my, my apology. We, we produced so much content and, uh, I, my, my apology. You are always, uh, welcome back. You are of course a friend and collaborator of some of the regulars on the show, like Larry Johnson, uh, and Ray, uh, Ray McGovern. Do you, uh, sense,hesion of the Ukrainian military? Do you sense a sort of

public awareness that notwithstanding this over-propagandized war, that the people who are making observations of what's happening there have come to the conclusion this can't go on much longer. Yeah, and we've been seeing that for a while, actually. But I think most recently, with some of the firings or vacation of office of some of the military leadership in Ukraine, it's telling us that it's even getting this sense of reality is dawning on even the higher levels. And when you combine that with what's going on here with our ability to continue to send unlimited amounts of weaponry in there, that's stopping, that's ending. You know, I think everybody's kind of getting the same picture now. How much longer do you think the war party in Congress, which is about 90 percent of everybody in Congress, there are some, you know, progressives on the left and some of our friends, libertarians on the right, who don't want to have anything to do with war, but the overwhelming majority of both parties and certainly the White House, how much more do you think they will allow themselves to be deluded

by the propaganda that comes out of mainstream media, including my former employer? Well, that's a good question, because they're really late to the reality game in the case of Ukraine. Even from the beginning, information has been available for anyone who wants to look at it and assess it and check it out. That information has been out there that this whole thing is kind of a drama game rather than a real combat situation. This is I mean, it's there's combat. But this whole thing was created for entirely different purposes than what we've been led to believe. And that information has been out there. So why Fox News, why the mainstream media is still so eager to carry the water for this administration and the neocons, I don't really know. I think maybe they're not very good reporters. They've lost the skill of actually being reporters, and they really are an arm of the government, you know, captured by the same people that own most of our Congress, the military-industrial complex.

And, you know, they feel like their hands are tied. And really, when people do speak out, they are taken off of mainstream media. I mean, we still see that very consistently. Well, people like you and McGovern and Johnson and Colonel McGregor, your colleague, and Scott Ritter, they can't get on mainstream media. They come on here. You know, we have millions of viewers, for which I am deeply and profoundly grateful every single day. But quite frankly, the mainstream media has a bigger megaphone. But do you agree that this is probably the most propagandized war in modern history?

I mean, you and I remember Vietnam where the media was on the other side and the media challenged the government at every conceivable turn. Walter Cronkite flew to Vietnam himself. And when he came home, LBJ said, man, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country. It doesn't happen today. No, no. We don't have any independence. And we really haven't for many years. invasion of Iraq when CNN made its bones, you know, the, you know, the, the, basically tracking the war and watching the things blow up and celebrating that, that was not reporting.

That was government media at work. And we've had that for 30 years now, at least. Let's take, as an example, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. Seymour Hersh beat everybody to the punch. He interviewed people that were involved in the preparation for it. He viewed the emails and texts that they sent to each other. He did everything short of naming names. And the mainstream media says, oh, it's two guys in a sailboat. Here's a picture of the sailboat. Yeah. Well, you know, at some point, you know, the truth does win out, even in small ways. And,

you know, nobody who challenged Seymour Hersh's reporting was able to produce any documentation of what they were saying. And Seymour Hersh is reporting, was able to produce any documentation of what they were saying. And Seymour Hersh is very well documented. And of course, that's characteristic of him. And he has credibility. And also, too, America may not matter as much as we as Americans think it does. You know, your global audience really gets it. And they do understand this. And there's so many of them that see this from a very clear-eyed perspective of national interests. And the American national interest, as communicated by the Biden administration and the neocons, is well understood by the rest of the world. They don't appreciate it, but they do understand what it is. And I think that allows them to be a little more clear-eyed than we Americans can be. When you were in the Air Force, you worked with intelligence officers, you received their data,

was one of your jobs was to analyze it. How do you think they feel when their raw data, their raw analysis, which is objective, is turned around subjectively and fed to the president or whoever receives this stuff in the White House in a manner that the feeder thinks the recipient wants to hear it. The truth be damned. How do you think the people who risk their lives to collect the truth feel about what's done with what they collect, if you follow me. Well, yeah, and I do, and I think they're very angry, and I know what I saw in 2002, 2003, extreme anger, and that anger led to very little because even the intelligence officers at the senior SES level would be replaced immediately if they complained about what was being done, the politicization of the information in order to pursue a very particular agenda that, you know, people that understand kind of our country and what's important.

And I'm not saying everybody knows the right answer, but many of these intelligence guys, they are patriots. And when they see their hard work, their honest work being used for stuff that really is harming this country in the long term. And I don't think there's any doubt that the politicization of our intelligence from you pick the year, you pick the decade. It harms our country. It weakens our country. It divides our country. It's wrong. It's harmful. It's expensive, of course. And they feel this way and they're upset about it. And I honestly don't see how anyone would would serve in the Pentagon today in any important job because it is a betrayal. It's a betrayal. If you don't have control, if you're not able to support the Constitution in the daily work that you do, you don't need to be there.

And right now, I don't think they can. Well, it's hard for me to believe, and you know, I've made a living out of this, that the CIA has the slightest deference to the Constitution. I mean, they're just notoriously indifferent to human dignity and to the Fourth Amendment, finding as many holes as they can. They just don't care about it. You can't even mention CIA and search warrant in the same sentence if you're in the CIA, because they don't give a damn about the search warrant or the Fourth Amendment. They just spy on whomever they think they can spy on. That's right. That's exactly right. And the growing domestic encroachment of the CIA and organizations connected with the CIA, whether it's overseas organizations spying on us on behalf of our CIA or domestic organizations, it's really horrendous. And I

think we live in a post-constitutional era. And the CIA is one big reason for that. Yes, yes. We have a warfare state, a welfare state, and a national security state. And 90% of the Congress just keeps feeding it. I'm going to run a clip now of the neocon-in-chief, state uh tony blinken this just two days ago i'd like your thoughts on it colonel uh talking about uh the offensive the this is hard to say with a straight face the ukrainian offensive has made real progress well i'll let him say it in the

years since i was last here ukraine has taken back more than 50% of the territory that Russia has seized from it since February of 2022. In the current counteroffensive, we are seeing real progress over the last few weeks. As it happens, President Zelensky just returned from the front lines, so I was able to hear directly from him his assessment of the counteroffensive. And I think it very much matches our own, which is, as I said, real progress in recent weeks. Now, who can take that seriously other than the mainstream media? Yeah. And Zelensky and Blinken can take it seriously. He looks somewhat embarrassed

in speaking that way. I imagine that the intelligence that Blinken is getting, even from his own filtered neoconservative propaganda factory, I think belies what he is saying. And I think he knows it. And I think it's written on his face. I don't see how he keeps a straight face, honestly. People looking at the maps can tell that it's not true. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.

Yeah, you're going to see him again now claiming that the West is building a force for the future and Ukraine is growing stronger because of what the West is doing for it. I think you're going to see even less credibility in its eyes, but I'll let you evaluate, Colonel. It's critically important that we and many other countries that have agreed to do the same help Ukraine build a force for the future, a military force for the future that is capable of deterring future aggression and, if necessary, defending and defeating it. We now have 29 countries that have signed on to a declaration issued by the G7 at the end of the NATO summit that is focused on doing just that helping Ukraine build this force future and we need

President Putin to understand that he cannot outlast Ukraine he cannot outlast Ukraine's supporters that Ukraine is actually going to grow stronger and even more effective with a military force that is world class, but also a strong and vibrant economy and a strong and vibrant democracy. So right next to Secretary Blinken is his counterpart, the foreign minister of Ukraine, who could not look Secretary Blinken in the eye as he was saying that stuff. Oh, wow. I was wondering what the expression on his face was as he listened to some of this. He looked like, Karen, he looked like this. Oh, my goodness. You know, the Ukrainians have been led down a primrose path,

and the Americans, the neocons who have no experience in war or strategy and very little in positive, effective foreign relations in any, I mean, they just don't have a track record. You know, these guys are not even believable to the Ukrainians. And of course, that country has been laid up, you know, has been put out to dry. It's been destroyed in so many ways. It went from a quasi-corrupt democracy to a basically military martial law dictatorship. It has lost, I don't know how many millions and millions of people, not just in the war,

but people who have left and who are not coming back to Ukraine. And it's lost its Russian speaking and somewhat productive agricultural lands permanently. It's a permanent loss. We already have a smaller Ukraine, both in numbers and territory, and certainly the economy is in shambles. So all of that has to be, you know, what is it? We're helping you by wiping the slate clean and reducing your footprint as a nation. That's what we're doing for you. I mean, you know, Blinken, Blinken, it's a shame. It's just, it's just a shame. I mean, all of this because the neocons, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and I guess the vice president, you know, he wasn't always a neocon, but he is now, want to use Ukraine as a battering ram because they fancifully think, crazily think they can somehow drive Vladimir Putin from office.

Oh, sure. And I don't think they really understand what, well, I think you mentioned it. They don't understand Russia very well. They don't understand, they certainly don't understand Putin, but they haven't even studied the information that is out there about what Russia is and how it looks and how it works and how it operates. And even, you know, geographically, I'm not sure many of them understood much about the geography of that area before they decided they're going to, you know, go up against, and we're going to displace Vladimir Putin and have a have a new military market now that we had to leave Afghanistan so abruptly. You know, I mean, very short sighted and ill informed. And this is what you get with politicized intelligence. You get bad decisions, mistakes, waste of life and money.

It's sad. Here's my friend and former colleague, Tucker Carlson, interviewing Viktor Orban. It's a great clip. It's maybe about a minute long, and it's just what you are talking about, how the West does not understand Russian culture and how the West fails to examine Russia as Russia looks at itself.

To understand the Russians, it's a difficult thing. So when we speak about politics, I mean Westerners, what is the focus point of our conversation? The focus point is freedom. How to provide more and more freedom to the people. When you speak on politics in Russia, this is not the number one issue. The number one issue, how to keep to the people. When you speak on politics in Russia, this is not the number one issue. The number one issue, how to keep together the country. That's generated different kind of culture and understanding of politics. That's created a kind of military approach,

always on security, safety, buffer zone, geopolitical approaches. But we have to understand that we cannot beat them as we do just now. It's impossible. They will not kill their leader. They will never give it up. They will keep together the country and they will defend it. We finance more, they will invest more. If we send more technical equipments, they will produce more.

So don't misunderstand the Russians. So they're not going to get sick of Putin and throw him out. Come on, it's a joke. What do you think? Yeah, I think Orban knows a lot more than we do. And of course, you know, we don't listen to him in this country. He's a boogeyman over here. That's right. Yeah, I think that's really important to understand. And the fantasy that the neocons have, it really is, it really is fantasy. And I'm not sure, actually, that they don't really want to destroy things, because their track record in their foreign policy has been very destructive. It's very much, let's blow things up, you know, creative destruction. Let's blow things up, and then we'll see what happens. And maybe we'll,

you know, we'll make a little money, and then we'll go on to a new project. That's their habit. Do you think they have an off-ramp? Do you think Joe Biden has an off-ramp? Well, Joe Biden himself is very close to his, you know, normal expected lifespan off-ramp. The poor man is not in very good shape. But the people that run this administration, I'm not sure what they're thinking, because they do need to be planning for that off-ramp. The people in this country aren't going to pay for Ukraine anymore. And the people have already decided Congress needs to get that through its head. And I think it kind of suspects this is the case. You know, we have our own problems. America first is not a Trump statement. It is what everybody believes. How they define that may be one thing, but we want our money to stay here. We have limited amounts of it in the future. So that part's ending. And I think what the

neocons want is a project. And again, much like Mr. Blumenthal stated last Friday, they want a little Israel, kind of a very prickly little security state that can experiment with modern military weapons and crowd control techniques and kind of a martial law, permanent martial law kind of thing that we own and control. I think that's their off-ramp. And I think that is also, like so many of their ideas, is unrealistic. I think it'll be much, it won't end up that way. I think it's going to end up a tragedy.

It's a very interesting observation, Colonel. Very interesting. Here's Prime Minister Orban again saying Russia will win and the neocons know it. And when they say Ukraine is going to win, they're not misspeaking or mistaken. They're lying. In the United States, the view is that Ukraine is winning this war. It doesn't sound like that's true. No, it's a lie. It's not just a misunderstanding. It's a lie. It's impossible.

Everybody who's in politics and understand the logic, the figures, the data, no way. Why is it impossible? Because that way, the poor Ukrainians die every day. Yes. Hundreds and thousands, you know. So my heart is with them. It's tragedy for Ukraine. But they will run out earlier from the soldiers, number of soldiers, than the Russians.

What finally will count is boots on the ground. And the Russians are far stronger, far numerous, more numerous than the Ukrainians. Many more. So this strategy that we are just supporting is a bad engineering of the strategy. Wow. You don't hear that in the American media. You know, Tucker and I both spent substantial careers at Fox. Fox now is what it is, but basically a mouthpiece like the mainstream media. This is what CIA and MI6, not the people on the ground, but management, want the media to tell everybody. Victor Orban is one of the

viewers saying otherwise. Before you respond, I'm going to play another Victor Orban. It's just as profound, Colonel. The U.S. can stop the war in 24 the war is over. The solution is in your hand, is in the hand of your president, the present one or the future one, but you will solve it. The United States can do it, nobody else. It's not the solution for the Ukrainians. Of course, it's about Ukrainians. They cannot be neglected. They must be involved. But the real factor is not Ukraine. The real factor is intention of the United States. Right on the mark, don't you think? Absolutely. Absolutely. How do you think this ends, Colonel? Or how much longer do you think it goes on? Well, I had a prediction that I talked about just amongst myself, you know, and a few friends. I'm seeing a little smile on your face, so I don't know what's coming.

I thought it would be, I thought the war would be over by the fall of 2023. I thought it would be the end. And that was because of resource evaporation, both people, aid, the whole thing, and also the morale, both of the politicians in Ukraine and the people. And that's happened. That's happened. But we continue to persist, probably because the neocons and the government, the U.S. government, cannot imagine a peace in which they don't lose face. Well, that's a tough problem. But, you know, this is going to sound sexist, but we have to man up. We made mistakes in backing and stoking this war and wasting the resources and destroying the country and its culture for many. I mean, for all intents and purposes, Ukraine has got a tough road ahead no matter what, even if peace happens today. And we did that. We did that. So we have to own that.

And it takes somebody with courage. It takes, you know, the kind of people that we do not have in our government today. And we don't have them in the Pentagon. We don't have them in Washington. We certainly don't have them advising the president. And we do not have them in the Congress. So our hands are, you know, it's kind of going to get done for us. But this is our problem, our mistake, our error.

And we need to admit it. The war is, in my book, over. Resources, whether even if Biden says no more resources, there are no more resources. We've pretty much played out everything, both ourselves and the NATO countries. They're, you know, they've already gotten rid of all their old stuff. We're giving them depleted uranium and cluster bombs. That is stuff from a long time ago that we can't use anywhere else. And that's what we're giving them now, which means we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. The vision for how that over looks like, it may be up to us to help them. I don't think they're going to come up with it themselves, but it's happening. It's going to happen to them. Colonel Kwiatkowski, a gifted and eloquent

statement. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you come back. I can tell from the comments and from the number of people watching, you're a fan fave, Karen. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a great honor. Thanks for your time. Have a great weekend. Wow. If you like what you saw, and I suspect you did, help us spread the word. Like, subscribe, tell a friend, tell a colleague, tell people you meet at the supermarket or at cookouts or barbecues, depending upon what you call these things, where you are in the country. In New Jersey, it's a cookout. In Texas, it's a barbecue. But tell your friends about judging freedom.

Tell your friends that this is the one place where former military and former intelligence officers can speak with absolute freedom and with no fear and with direct candor. Because what do we do here? We look out for your liberty.