Judging Freedom - Who would believe the CIA? w/Ray McGovern

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Who would believe the CIA? w/Ray McGovernSee 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, September 18th, 2023. Ray McGovern joins us now. Before we start with Ray, I want to say very happily that in the past couple of hours, we did reach 200,000 subscribers. 200,000 of you have taken the time to subscribe to Judging Freedom. after you subscribe. You'll be notified by email whenever people like Ray McGovern and his colleagues and mine are coming on. But I am deeply and profoundly grateful, not only for all of you who have subscribed, but for the great, selfless, courageous people who come on the show as guests,

not the least of whom, by any means, joins us now. Ray, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for coming here. So here's what I want to talk to you about. President Zelensky had an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS News, and he said some wild stuff like there will be no peace until the Russians military leaves Crimea and leaves the Donbass. We are fighting a war for the whole world. Vladimir Putin is a second Hitler. I'm not making this up and I'm not exaggerating. I'm paraphrasing, although that is an exact quote, a second Hitler. And media, mainstream media, ABC, CBS, NBC, my friends and former colleagues and my former bosses for 24 years at Fox, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, they take this stuff seriously. They say what the CIA wants them to say. They have almost become a mouthpiece for Zelensky. So the question for you, with all of your experience in the intelligence community,

and with your intellectual honesty, Ray McGovern, is why? How does this happen? The media has been co-opted by the system, Judge. The system being what Eisenhower referred to as the MIC, think tank, complex. Mickey Mac rhymes sort of with Mickey Mouse, so you can remember it. Now, why do I say media? It has to be in all caps. It's the linchpin.

It's the crucible that defines everything else. And who controls the media? The same people who profiteer from the selling of arms by the Mickey Matt, by all the other things that are influenced by excessive government money going not only to the military industrial complex, but to academia and to think tanks. It's all pretty much corrupted you know i i want to tell you a little anecdote this is heavy stuff you know there's this apocryphal story about dick and jane and tommy being asked in school what do you want

to be and jane says i want to be a nurse and and dick said i'd like to be a firefighter how about you how about you tommy and tommy said well i'd like to be like my dad because he's a topless nude dancer in the bowery at a gay bar club and the teacher looked at him and drew him right outside you know tommy you know that's not right why did you say that and how he said well actually he writes for the new york times and now the Washington Post. And I didn't think I should expose him to the rest of the class. I did not know where you were going with that, Ray McGovern. You know, it really, I mean, there's good money in it.

And I think the big key, Judge, is that no one has ever been held accountable. Okay. Now, here's a- Tell us how it actually works. Is it cash corruption? Is it I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine? Is it here's a tidbit of something that's going to happen in the next week? You can break the news, but you've got to put this spin on it.

Is it journalists in the employee of the Central Intelligence Agency? Tell us about this symbiotic relationship. Well, they don't have to be employed. They don't have to be paid. As long as they report what needs to be reported, they're handsomely rewarded. It's really quite amazing. You know, when the weapons of mass destruction were being sought to the tune of $1 billion more by this fellow named Kay, and he finally came back and he announced to the press, as well as the head of the CIA, there aren't any.

We were wrong. There are no weapons of mass destruction anymore. I happened to be in Detroit at the time. You're talking about David Kaye. David Kaye, exactly, yeah. He was an honest guy. He thought the weapons of mass destruction. So he was baffled. So next day I had a board, a briefing of the board of the Detroit Free Press. Used to be a

really good newspaper. Okay. And there was an honest guy there who ran that board and he said, Ray, what is this? So I gave him the whole story. What happens? They do a major newspaper editorial and they say, we were fooled. We were fooled to a fairly well. And we confess that we misled all our readers. And we suggest that there were lots of other countries, other newspapers that were fooled. We suggest they follow our lead. Guess how many newspapers follow their lead? Zero.

So you get people who stoked the wars for Iraq. Now I have two wonderful examples, wonderful. Fred Hyatt, who recently died, he manned the Washington Post editorial op-ed section for, well, since the beginning of the war and he right before it now before it he ran editorials some study was done eight eighty percent of those editorials oh yeah the weapons of mass destruction and we got to get him we got a zip him okay so after the war is over

he goes up to Columbia School of Journal of journalism and they ask him now uh mr hyatt um you you reported not only in your editorials but in your you know in your straight reporting that there were weapons of mass destruction that was flat fact for you how do you account for that and hyatt said well i i guess if if there were if there were no weapons of mass destruction, I guess we shouldn't have said that there were. Wow. They printed that. Now, Bob Perry, my mentor in journalism, says, you know, Ray,

that's sort of an elemental approach to journalism. If something's not so, you're not supposed to say it is. And that's what they did. Now, they got away with it. Look, David Sanger. David Sanger, the dean of the International Reporters for the New York Times. Seven times in the same piece, July 29, 2002, talked about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as flat fact. Okay?

So it's not only Hyatt. It's the Times. It's everybody who wants to make a quick buck and be very distinguished by getting all these. Before we bore down into Ukraine, which you, Larry Johnson, Phil Giraldi, Matthew Ho, Scott Ritter, Colonel Doug McGregor have all said is probably the most propagandized war in the modern articulate speech in the U.N. about weapons of mass destruction and staring him in the face was George Tenet. Do you think the head of the CIA at the time, do you think Tenet knew that Colin Powell was lying and remained silent? I have no doubt that Tenet knew. Wow. And Larry Wilkerson, who was tasked by Powell to prepare his speech, can swear to that. Larry has a book. I wish he would publish it he talks about how up at cia headquarters where all this stuff was done he and colin powell at one point went into a different room because i had

to discuss this privately and i said look all this stuff about al-qaeda and ties with saddam hussein and the implication that that saddam hussein was in part responsible for 9-11. We got to get that out of there because there's a lot of horse manure. Okay. So, okay. They decided to go back in the room. Now, I don't know whether the tenant and his associates had bugged that room, but just then in comes a new report from a fellow who we later learned was tortured, who said, oh, al-Qaeda has very strong ties with Saddam Hussein, so we better include it. So what does Powell do? He says there's a sinister nexus between the two. Well, give me a break. Powell knew that wasn't the case. He didn't know chapter and verse, but now we do know. And I just wish Powell would call up Tenet and ream him out for

being deceived on these things, because Tenet was doing the bidding of the vice president. Powell should have known better. Perhaps he did know better. But it was really Tenet and Negroponte who also sat behind Powell when both of of them knew and it was just the policy with respect to today in Ukraine you have argued uh that the military industrial media think tank academic congressional I think I have them all there complex is really a one mindset uh this includes the war party in Congress which is about 90 to 95 percent of all members of both houses. There are libertarians, there are progressives on the left and libertarians on the right who challenge the perpetual war. But for the most part, it's it's de rigueur. Chuck Schumer and Kevin McCarthy are hand in glove on all this. Do you think it's just money

that the same people that own the New York Times are also heavily invested in the arms industry? Do you think it's also ideology? What role do the neocons, many of whom are not wealthy, but all of whom are diehard, determined people to start wars, what role do they play in all of this? It's really hard, Judge, to dissect all this and to apportion various percentages of this. But I would say about 20% are real diehards. They believe in this stuff. They believe it's their call to destroy Russia. They're going to do everything they can. As Secretary Lloyd Austin said about a year ago, we're going to move heaven and earth to inflict a strategic defeat, or as he said, to weaken Russia.

Well, that's the general idea. They thought they could do this. They're not going to be able to do this. And how to unlearn all this stuff is really hard for them. The rest of them are just in it for the profit, for the prestige, for getting on TV and then pronouncing and saying all this, well, we say male bovine excrement, which just pours out of these things and you know i haven't seen james clapper or or john brennan on on their respective channels recently i wonder why that is we do see petraeus who has not yet been shamed but will be when it comes out that everything he said about Ukraine, as well as now Iraq and Afghanistan, has been male bovine excrement. The use of Ukraine as a battering ram to drive Vladimir Putin from office as absurd and ill-conceived and extremely unlikely and nearly impossible as that may be, is that the U.S. national interest? No, it's not.

You will have Jack Devine and other people say that that's going to happen, that Putin is going to just put her away. It's not going to happen. What's the national interest? Zero. In realistic terms. Now, I come from, I'm told, the political science school of realism. I never knew that. I mean, just act with facts and try to interpret them.

Okay. Now, realism says that we see no threat from Ukraine, okay? Now, how about Russia? Is Russia going to take over Ukraine and the rest of Europe? The answer to that is clearly no. Here's an example. You want to, for instance, why are we out of 155 millimeter artillery shells? Good question. And we have to replace them with a piece of ammunition that is illegal on 98% of the planet called cluster bombs. Why are we out of them? Well, one would think that if Russia was a big threat, right, that NATO would have gazillion, gazillion artillery shells of this caliber, caliber right the reason we don't have the

artillery shells is because there was no incentive to build them because russia did not prevent present any realistic threat to western europe now when did that change rhetorically it changed It changed in 2014, February, when we helped overthrow the government of Ukraine and put in a very hostile government and started making Ukraine a de facto NATO member. That's when all of a sudden Russia became a threat. Not one scintilla of evidence that ever entered Putin's mind to take Crimea or to invade Ukraine until all this went down. Now, as you know, for seven years, the West, in the person of Angela Merkel, François Hollande, and the others, including the U.S., diddled Putin and said, oh, you're working on it, we're going to raise it on time, we're going to get them to stop shelling your countrymen there in Donbass. And it didn't work. And then they bragged about it. We weren't serious.

We were just carving off enough time so we could build up the Ukrainian forces to do what? To do what? To go into the Donbbas and finish them off. And that was February 2022. And you know what happened as a result of that? I believe to preempt the taking of Donbas by a very, very strong NATO-trained, NATO-equipped army on the part of the Ukrainian, Ukraine. Of course, which failed miserably. You and I have been emailing each other over some strange talk from President Biden recently, in which he has articulated the view that as commander-in-chief of the military, he can dispatch troops without congressional consent, without even consulting the Congress.

Unfortunately, under the War Powers Resolution, a statute that, in my view, and I suspect in yours, is wildly unconstitutional, but has never been ruled upon by the courts. And the plain reading of the statute lets him do whatever he wants for 30 days, as long as he can make an argument that national security is at stake. Do you think these are trial balloons for troops on the ground, American troops on the ground in Ukraine? I do not think so, Judge. Raising the question, of course, raises this issue. But I think Biden doesn't want to get his people in Ukraine or NATO involved to that extent. Now, as my friend Phil Giraldi has pointed out a number of times, there are already people in there, covert people, people with different uniforms on. And we can say there are no boots on the ground because they all wear slippers. OK, but they're there already. There would be a difference in kind if they went in there with uniforms. Biden doesn't

want that. Biden would prefer to listen to his advisors say, well, let's do a little tactical nuke to make sure those Russians take us seriously. I have a little vignette here I probably should add here. I was on a long Russian TV Channel One program interview. And one of the questions I was asked is, do U.S. policymakers take Medvedev and Putin seriously when they warn that if their back is against the world, they're going to use nuclear weapons? Do U.S. policymakers take them seriously? That is the question.

I don't know the answer to it because a lot of these people are so arrogant and they're so feeling a sense of impunity uh they've never been held accountable for anything okay so would they hesitate would they would they would they try to do a little technical loop of their own and they realize there's an election coming up. Biden, Hunter, Sullivan, Blinken, the evidence is in. They're all perpetrators of crimes, okay? Sullivan for Russiagate, Blinken for allowing those 51 U.S. intelligence managers to say Hunter's laptop was just a hang on, just all the earmarks of a Russian operation. And then, of course, you have Hunter and Daddy himself.

So these people have a personal stake in not losing. So what will they resort to? That's what worries me. And I think that was the source of the question I was asked by this very, very knowledgeable Russian interviewer. Wow. Terrifying, terrifying stuff. I had a number of other things to ask you. I will save them for the round table on Friday. Ray, you're so good and so courageous. Thank you very much for articulating all of this so forcefully and so clearly. All the best, my friend. Most welcome.

There you have it. You know what's coming for the rest of the week. We have our regulars. We end the week, of course, with our Intelligence Roundtable with Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. Scott Ritter is coming. Matthew Ho is coming. Professor Jeffrey Sachs is coming. And of course, Colonel Douglas McGregor is coming as well. And more and more of you are coming to the show. Since a few hours ago, we did reach the 200,000 subscription mark. My heartfelt thanks to every one of you. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.