Judging Freedom - Why is the U.S. in Syria? w/ Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Why is the U.S. in Syria? w/ Phil Giraldi fmr CIASee 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 Tuesday, August 15th, 2023. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for coming back to the show. Before we get into the latest in Ukraine and President Zelensky's statements and John Bolton's demands for troops on the ground, I want to talk to you a little bit about Syria because you wrote a very interesting piece on the UNZ, that's U-N-Z, if anybody wants to look it up, the UNZ review called What U-N-Z, if anybody wants to look it up, the UNZ review called What is Happening in Syria? So what is happening in Syria? How much of Syria is controlled by the United States military?

And what the hell are we doing there? Yeah, well, that's a series of good questions. The United States has been basically meddling in Syria ever since 2003 when it passed the Syria Accountability Act. And the whole idea has been done uh more recently starting in 2015 uh by occupying fully one-third of the country and it's not just one-third of the country it's the third of the country that is oil producing and that also is the best agricultural producing area in Syria. So the people are literally starving by virtue of that and by virtue of sanctions that were put in place at the same time. And the U.S. has three military bases, we are accusing the Russians of staging an invasion of Ukraine on no grounds. And yet we are doing something much worse because the Russians did have provocation. We had no provocation.

Syria did not threaten us in any way. And yet, we have invaded Syria. We've occupied Syria. And we're stealing their property. All right. Let me make sure I have this straight. This Syrian Accountability Act of 03. So this is circa George W. Let me liberate the Middle East. let me find the weapons of mass destruction, Bush. Was it a declaration of war? No, actually, it was just a pretext, a bit of writing on paper to create a reason to be able to interfere in Syria. And of course, Syria has been for some years an enemy of Israel, which has occupied part of Syria, the Golan Heights.

And the U.S. was in there basically on a pretext to go after the government down there, Bashar al-Assad, for Syria, I'm sorry, for Israel, but also for Saudi Arabia, which wanted to build a pipeline through the Middle East and wanted it to go through Syria, which it wanted to control. So we invaded Syria. We occupy one third of it. We have three military bases there, one of which is an Air Force base. Do we extract any natural resources without compensating the owners of those resources? Yes, we do extract the oil and we put it in tankers and we sell it elsewhere. I saw an estimate today that one hundred and six billion dollars worth of oil has been extracted since 2015.

And they also are having the the agricultural land farm that is exported also. I don't know what the dollar value of that would be, but we're basically doing these things that are the property of the Syrian people, and we're profiting from it. And is the Syrian civil war still going on? Yeah, the Syrian civil war is supported by us in Israel. We actually are claiming that we have troops in Syria to fight ISIS and to fight terrorist groups. But the reality is that we are supporting terrorist groups. Our air base is a center for terrorist groups inside Syria. Israel is supporting ISIS. When ISIS fighters get wounded by the Syrian army in Syria, they go to Israel for

medical treatment. Wait a minute. There are people in American federal prisons for providing material assistance to ISIS, and you're telling us that we're supporting Israel, Israel supports ISIS, and Israel takes care of wounded ISIS fighters. Who's wounding the ISIS fighters? The government side in the civil war in Syria? Yeah, that's correct. The government side is the legitimate government of Syria. And the United States has never had a piece of paper endorsed by the United Nations or anyone else saying that we have a legitimate right to be in there.

But we're in there supporting both militias and terrorist groups. And I might as well throw it to the hopper, the Turks have been interfering in there too. What side are the Turks on? The Turks are on no one's side except the Turks, but they're attacking the Syrians. So we're doing this to steal oil and to please Prime Minister Netanyahu. And also initially just to please the Saudis, but that's no longer in play. So the reason why we're there is we're inscrutable. We're not threatened by this. There's no particular reason why we should be there. And I try to point out in my article that this is nonsense, that

essentially we go around the world saying we have a right to interfere in your government. We have a right to invade your country if we make a decision to do so. And the decision will be solely based on our views. Is there a calculation of how much money we've spent there? I've never seen that. I don't know what those bases cost. I wonder if one were to look at defense expenditures and stuff like that, if you would even find anything on that. Here's President Assad, the legitimate head of the legitimate government of Syria, in an interview with Sky News last week on August 10th. There were no internal demands for the president to depart. It's important for a president to leave or to leave his responsibilities, to be more precise,

when the people demand it, not due to external interference or external wars. When it's due to internal reasons, that's normal. But when it's because of external war, that's called escape. And me fleeing was never on the cards. Who's demanding that he leave? The Americans and the Israelis? Well, the United States has been the leading element in terms of wanting Bashar al-Assad out. There were claims back some years ago, I'm sure you've seen, that the Syrian army was using chemical weapons.

And this triggered a response from Trump and from some others. And it turned out, of course, this was all fraudulent. The chemical weapons that were being used were being used by the various rebel groups that the United States and Israel were supporting. And the whole thing was a fraud. And based on that fraud, we staged attacks on Syria. This was Donald Trump. And they were totally unwarranted. He was getting false information. He never bothered to check any of it out. And he responded with a military strike, which killed a bunch of people. Would the CIA have known that the rebels had chemical weapons and that the rebels were using them as a false flag?

Not only the CIA, but the Defense Department knew too, because they had tracked where these chemical weapons had been fired from. And they were fired from areas that were under the control of the rebel groups that were contacted by the U.S. Is lying the coin of the realm in the intelligence community, whether it's CIA or NSA or DEA, the defense? By the way, what is DEA? Is that all military? Or DIA? I'm sorry, DIA. What is that? Yeah. Well, I would say that lying depends on which level you're looking at. We've discussed this before. There are a lot of honest people working for the US government, but very often, they don't rise to a certain level in the system unless they're saying what the leadership wants to hear.

And that's essentially what it comes down to. The CIA, for example, and the Defense Department both knew that this chemical weapons attack was fraudulent, but they weren't even allowed to investigate it beyond a few hours. So they tricked the president of the United States at the time, Donald Trump, and that trick resulted in his what? Authorizing some sort of an attack? Yeah, exactly. Authorizing an attack by the United States using cruise missiles, and which killed a number of people. And it was based on essentially a lie that with a little more digging, even the White House might have been aware that this thing was a fraud. Recently, President Zelensky gave a talk to his country in which he made it sound,

a matter of fact, that Crimea will be liberated. And here are our plans for the liberation. As absurd as that sounds, I'd like you to listen to it and like you to share your thoughts. Today, I held a meeting on the content of our return policy, specifically regarding Crimea and its reintegration. It is obvious that after the liberation of Crimea from occupation, economic opportunities, personal security for people and a sense of real freedom, which has not been there since 2014, will return there. But all of this should not be just abstract. Every detail of the de-occupation of Crimea should have a specific meaning.

How exactly normal life returns, what exactly this means for Crimea and for all our people. This should be clear to everyone. Step by step, we are making the de-occupation of Crimea more and more achievable and well thought out. De-occupation of Crimea, more and more achievable and well thought out. Nobody on the American side that knows what's going on can take that seriously.

Or does the State Department expect us and the CIA expect us to believe that? As you say, I don't think anyone on the American or NATO side can even for a minute believe that this is true. The balance of forces in the area, considering the capabilities that Russia have in Crimea and elsewhere in the area would dictate that this is just not possible. This is obviously a propaganda-type pitch to convince donors in NATO and in the United States to continue to supply weapons and money to his regime to keep them afloat. Presumably, at some point, he and some of his leading advisors are just going to pull up stakes and get the hell out. But I don't know when that's going to happen.

But he said, this is a con job. And if we thought for a second that somebody like Anthony Blinken really has a conscience, he would speak up and say, this is not our assessment of the reality in that area. That would cost nothing. And it would show for once in a while that somebody in the White House or close to it can speak the truth. Would a statement like what we just ran from President Zelensky have been run past directly directly or indirectly, the CIA before he made it? I'm not sure if it would have been CIA. I have a strong feeling that there are a lot of neocons who are assisting Zelensky, who are really kind of sitting down with him. American neocons?

Yeah, American neocons are helping him script these things and, you know, write what he says and how he says it and what he does. I think it's all very Hollywood. And I think there are Americans there doing this. I'd love to find out exactly who they are, but I have a strong suspicion that this is among his circle of advisors. And beyond that, I would really like to know where he gets his t-shirts. Here's the prince of the American neocons, my friend, I guess we're still friends, so maybe he's not happy with what I called him, and former colleague from Fox News, John Bolton, President Trump's national security advisor for a year who never met a war or never met somebody else's bloodshed that he didn't enjoy seeing. The administration's timid, haphazard approach to aid has fractured

U.S. public support. Mr. Biden has compounded this problem with his insistence that the war is about Wilsonian abstractions of democracy versus authoritarianism. Theories about price caps on Russian oil have failed, and Western sanctions generally remain piecemeal and seriously under-enforced. So he wants more weapons, more troops, should have been more and sooner rather than what we're doing. Well, I hardly would describe it that way. The money that's going to Ukraine, just from the United States, is significant. And there's a lot of chatter today on the media, which I'm sure you've seen, about how the Biden White House is not doing anything for the poor bastards in Hawaii, dumping another $26 billion on Ukraine. Where are the priorities of our government? What do they see

that we don't see? Was there something there in Ukraine that really threatened the survival of the United States? That's the way they're acting and the way they're talking. Do you have a grasp or an idea of how much money we've spent in Ukraine? I mean, the bill that Mrs. Pelosi and Senator Schumer gave to President Biden in the last term of Congress is basically a blank check for $113 billion. Could he possibly have spent all of it or nearly all of it? Because he's now asking for another $24, $26, or $28 billion. I don't think he's going to get it, but he is asking for it. How much has he spent? Do we know without an inspector general checking on how much has been spent and where it goes? Yeah, well, that's the funny part. Of course, nobody's checking where the money is winding up.

The trick with these appropriations is that once you appropriate the money, it's kind of there. And they feed it through the system as they're going along. with these appropriations is that once you appropriate the money it's kind of there and they feed it through the system as they're going along I've seen uh estimates that some uh a hundred billion or so has already gone through the pipeline in one form or another as as materiel or as cash or various things they the the Ukrainian government runs because the United States writes a check every month. And so it's this kind of stuff going on. I would think they're on the on the tape right now for something approaching 200 billion dollars. Wow. 200 billion dollars if Congress has only authorized 113.

So they took 87 billion from some other budget item. I don't even know if that's lawful, depending upon where they took it. We don't know how much money the government has spent since 2005 or 2015, whenever you want to start the beginning of the occupation in Syria. They've all taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. You and I took that oath before you became an intelligence agent and I before I became a judge. The Constitution, among other things, says no money shall be spent from the federal treasury, but that which is recorded in a public journal. I mean, that's a joke. Try and figure out what the CIA has spent. These are dangerous times when the

president of the United States, whether it's George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Donald Trump or Joe Biden, I'm talking about Syria, can wage a secret war, occupy one third of the country, steal their oil, bleed them dry of their agriculture. The American public doesn't even know about it, Phil. Yeah. Well, when is the last time you've seen a story about what U.S. troops are doing in Mogadishu. We're all over the place. And the money comes out of a lot of funds that are kind of secret in terms of any kind of public record coming out on them. I know when I was in the agency,

we employees were constantly hearing about money that was being budgeted for, I remember under Ronald Reagan, whom I admire greatly, Bill Casey was running a secret war in Latin America. And I got involved in that to a certain extent because we were using assets that we had in Europe to infiltrate the parties in Central America. So it's a bad game going on. The founders of this country believed in integrity and open government and that sort of thing, and we've killed it. We've killed it in the last 23 years. When you were involved in what you were just talking about,

did you come across a character by the name of Jack Devine? Oh, I know. I know about Jack. I think I've even met him once or twice. He he was beyond my grade level. But was he involved in Latin America? Because Larry Johnson indicated that he wants work for Jack Devine as you guys were doing whatever you were doing in Latin America. Yeah, I think he must have been because he wasn't working. I was working mostly terrorism issues in Europe and the Middle East, and I don't recall him being around there.

So Latin America would have been an obvious choice. Has the culture of the CIA always been the same? Steal secrets and lie about them? Yeah. Yeah. I think in a way, it depends how you define those two expressions. But lying about it is certainly part of the business. We would call it protecting sources and methods. I asked your friend, my friend, our friend, Ray McGovern, if the CIA spies on Joe and Jill Biden in the White House. And he said, well, if they do, the Mossad does a better job of it. So when Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to Washington next month, will he know ahead of time what Joe Biden's going to say to him because the Mossad has been spying on the White House? I would say absolutely. And I would even go beyond that. I would say that there are people playing both sides of the House within the White House

who would be happy to give those notes and meeting arrangements to the Israelis. Wow. Well, that would be a very serious violation. Look at that fellow, Jonathan Pollard, an American naval officer who spied for the Israelis. I think he was free now, but I think he was locked up for 20 years after conviction. Anyway, Phil, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. I hope you liked what you saw. And if you did, like, subscribe, and tell a friend. We're at 183,000 subscribers.

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