Judging Freedom - Will Crimea be Up For Grabs? w/Scott Ritter

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Will Crimea be Up For Grabs? w/Scott RitterSee 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 Wednesday, August 9th, 2023. Scott Ritter returns to the show. As always, Scott, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I want you to explain to our listeners the saga of Gonzalo Lira. As I understand it, he is an American citizen, but may very well be an asset of the Ukrainian intelligence forces. And the American government doesn't seem to give a damn about him.

Can you straighten all this out for us? Well, Gonzalo Lira is somebody who has a flamboyant past, which is really irrelevant to anything we're about to discuss. He found himself in Ukraine. And when the war started, he started posting, you know, clips of him walking through Kharkov, discussing what he saw, discussing the war, pining on it. And he developed a very active following on YouTube, on his Telegram channel, on Twitter. And a lot of people, you know, followed him because of his critical voice about the Ukrainian government, about the, you know,

the Ukrainian posture in the war. He was arrested in April of 2022. Let me just stop you. Is he an American citizen? He has a joint U.S.-Chilean citizenship. He has passports from both the United States and Chile. Okay. So who arrested him and where and when and why? Well, he was arrested by the Ukrainian intelligence services, the SBU, which is noted for its brutality. They maintain a hit list called the Mirath for its hit list. I'm on it. It's a death

list. The people that are on are people who speak out critically of the Ukrainian government. Gazelle O'Leary is on that list as well. And yet he was arrested and he didn't die. Instead, he was released about five days later. They seized his computers, they seized his telephone, but they allowed him to gain access. He was arrested under house arrest. That means for anybody who doesn't understand it, that you're controlled. When you're under house arrest, you're not free to do what you want. You're released on conditions, house arrest. His conditions apparently allowed him to gain access to a new computer, to start up new YouTube channels, and to begin doing the exact

same thing he was doing prior to his arrest. In the intelligence business, this is the biggest red flag you can possibly imagine. And at that point in time, I said, and I was straight up about it, that he's a controlled asset of the SBU, that nobody should trust this man, because you can't be allowed to continue doing what you were doing that got you arrested but now you're doing it under conditions where you're controlled by the sbu it's clear one plus one equals two there's literally no question about this so we have in ukraine expressing opinions against the Ukrainian government and against American involvement, much as you and I do from the comfort of our homes in America, although you,

of course, have done this all over the world, arrested by the Ukrainian intelligence services, mysteriously released back to his own criticisms, original criticisms, but now as an asset for them. What does that mean as an asset for them? Is he going to begin to propagandize in favor of Ukraine? Is he going to show some dramatic 180-degree change of heart, or is he surreptitiously gathering and feeding to them, SBU, intel that they desire? The role that's being played by Gonzalo Lira is to support Ukraine's ongoing human intelligence collection in support of information warfare objectives. The YouTube channel that he created after his release is known as the Roundtable, and it's become a very popular forum in the alternative media world. People flock to the Roundtable to appear on the Roundtable, where Gonzalo Lira serves as sort of the conductor of an orchestra leading questions.

Now, what's important here is why he's doing it. The British intelligence services have had a document leaked that gives you insight into, Edward Snowden leaked, that gives you insight into what kind of information they're looking for, why that it carries out. And a key aspect to the intelligence collection is behavioral science. Basically, how do humans behave? How do groups interact, et cetera? The roundtable is a petri dish of data collection for assessing these groups, how to form these groups, who's in these groups, how they interact, what questions they ask, who believes what. And you start mapping out the entire universe of the old universe environment, and you're collecting data on belief systems, belief value, and you build aliases that can be interjected in there and start participating in the conversation and then guiding the conversation.

Gonzalo Lira's job isn't to speak in any way. His job is to do what he always did, speak out against the Ukrainian government. But notice, he doesn't bring original content. His job is to serve as an echo chamber of existing beliefs, and then to attract audiences to collect so that the SBU and their British and American supporters collect this intelligence to build a giant behavioral psychology model. It's invaluable in the intelligence service. Mary Johnson, a colleague of mine who disagrees with my assessment on Gonzalo Lira, knows that intelligence service would pay hundreds of millions of dollars for that database, and Gonzalo Lira has given it to him for free. Okay. Should I mock Ukraine's claim to a democracy because of what their relationship is to Gonzalo,

or should I recognize Ukraine is at war? From Ukraine's perspective, it's an existential war, and during war, freedom is diminished. Well, I mean, to answer that question, I would just say, would you allow Tokyo Rose to broadcast from San Francisco during World War II? Pardoned by President Ford. So, well, I mean, that's after the fact. And maybe Gonzalo Lerner would get a pardon. Of course. But the point is.

I wrote a long piece about Tokyo Rose. There were actually seven of them. But I get your point. I get your point. I get your point. I fully understand it. And the answer is no. No American government would allow Tokyo Rose to taunt American soldiers fighting in the Far East. But the other thing I'd like to bring into this is to point out the following.

Because, look, Gonzalo Lira is an American citizen. And you'd like to believe the American government, regardless of the circumstances, would come in and support him. But here's the thing I want to point out. The American government funds the SBU. The SBU would not exist today without American money. We fund it, we organize it, we support it. They have a hit list, the Mirth for its hit list. It's an assassination list. I'm on it, as are many Americans. It's a hit list funded by the American taxpayer. There is a Center for Countering Disinformation, works for the Ukrainian government, works for the president. It is created, funded by the United States. They run a blacklist that they have 78 Americans. There might be more now. I'm on that list. That blacklist is updated every week with updates.

Who's the number one information terrorist in the world? My name tops that list repeatedly. The American government funds that. So don't expect the American government to. I guess judging freedom is not working hard enough. Am I on that list? Well, trust me, you keep bringing me on, you might be. But the point is, the American government's doing nothing about this.

So people are sitting there going, why is the American government silent? Not only are they doing nothing, they're funding it. Bingo. So now you understand why they're not running, sending the cavalry out for Gonzalo Lira. Because they are happy with his silencing or with the situation he finds himself. They're not going to run to his defense. Speaking of disinformation, we're switching gears now, and we'll get back to Ukraine, because you had some very, very interesting commentary on this since last we were on.

The CCD, the Centers for Disease Control, and information terrorism in America. What the hell is information terrorism in America. What the hell is information terrorism from the perspective of the deep state in Atlanta, the CCD? Well, apparently, if you voice an opinion that counters their official narrative, you're an information terrorist. I mean, that's what we're talking about here. Dissent has become terrorism. Dissent, that's what we're talking about here. Dissent has become

terrorism. Dissent, what we normally expect in America, which is civil debate, discussion, and dialogue about difficult issues. That's how we improve ourselves as a democracy. We sit down, we have a free exchange of ideas. But when you have a narrative put out by the government or a government agency, that narrative can't be questioned. And if you question it, then you're not an American citizen doing what American citizens should do. You are the problem. And we tend to define the problem in terms that are the grossly exaggerate things such as information terrorists. We need to understand that the United States government is waging information warfare against we, the people of the United States. Their job is to manipulate data, to shape perceptions, to do anything other than to have a fact-based,

honest discussion about difficult issues. Are we in danger of the American government, directly or indirectly, out of the mouth of an elected official or an administrative agency, declaring people like you or me or Dr. Mercola or RFK Jr., information terrorists, because we dissent on something like the vaccine. We're in huge danger, especially about the vaccine, because that's such a, the problem with the vaccine issue, and I'm not an expert on vaccines, and I don't want people to suddenly think, I know what most people know, which is not very much, but I know this. I know that the United States has made it impossible for us to have a fact-based discussion

about the experiments because they've taken the records and for 75 years, we can't talk about it. I know that anybody who raises the issue, it's silenced, it's shouted down, it gets deplatformed. Deplatforming is a tactic used by the US government directly and more likely indirectly. We know that the FBI has in the past and maybe continues to have interaction with various social media outlets where they are instructed to shut down people who are talking. Oh, Scott, four federal judges in Texas, one at the district court level and three at the court of appeals level, have examined the discovery in a major lawsuit brought there by state attorneys general against Facebook. And the evidence is crystal clear.

I mean, there's an email from Nick Clegg. You remember him? He was deputy prime minister to Great Britain. He's now a mucky muck at Facebook or whatever Facebook calls itself these days, complaining bitterly to Mark Zuckerberg. Get these guys off my back. Get the White House off my back. Get the FBI off my back.

We've got to take this stuff down. These guys are driving me crazy. There's no question that the government, the American government, is attempting to do indirectly what the First Amendment unambiguously prohibits it from doing directly, which is abridging speech because of its content. We're not talking about a political rally at three in the morning in a residential neighborhood where the government's going to regulate time, place, and manner. We're talking about the government suppressing speech because it hates it, fears it, or disagrees with it, which is the exact thing the First Amendment was written to prevent them from doing. Yep. Look, I'm glad you're saying this because, again, I'm just a simple Marine judge, and I took an oath to the Constitution. I've read the Constitution. I will

defend it with my life, but I'm not a constitutional scholar. I'm not a constitutional lawyer. So whenever I have this discussion with people who claim to be constitutional, there's this, Scott, you just don't understand the basics. You don't understand the fundamentals of law. You don't understand how it works. I understand free speech, and I understand when my rights to free speech are being suppressed. I'm glad somebody like you is saying that it is in fact a constitutional issue. This is about the base. And it's where it's not. And I can't say it's worse because there's nothing worse than the U S government suppressing the free speech of American citizens.

But you know, there's a situation with Ukraine where the Ukrainian intelligence services, the SBU contacted the FBI through the legal through the legal attache in Kiev to say, you need to shut down the following Twitter accounts. And then the FBI took that and reached out to Twitter and said, shut down these accounts. So you have a hostile foreign intelligence service that has Americans on a kill list telling the FBI to shut down the free speech of Americans. And I guess some constitutional scholars are going to tell me, well, that's not a First Amendment, right, Scott? You just don't understand.

Let me tell you this. You have a far better understanding of the Constitution than whoever these folks are that have challenged you. Let's get a little closer to Ukraine because I have some clips from President Zelensky that will raise your blood pressure higher than it is now. Is Poland preparing to annex Western Ukraine under the guise of some security purpose? I believe that the Poles and the Lithuanians are in active dialogue about that potential, whether or not they've agreed upon it, whether or not they have agreed upon a framework, whether or not they have agreed it's even viable. I can't answer that question, but I am 100% convinced, and it's backed up with very good evidence, that Poland and Lithuania are in active dialogue about doing just that.

So that's a dangerous situation. What is the nature of the relationship between the Polish army and the 101st Airborne, the 40,000 American troops in the 101st Airborne physically present in Poland? Do they work together? Do they live together? Do they train together? Do they have a common command? Well, they train together, and the Americans are on bases that are co-located with the Polish Army. They have a training relationship. When you say under the same command, there is a NATO command structure, but right now the American troops are in there to train with their Polish counterparts to create a deterrent presence. That is, the number of Americans in Poland are not significant enough to have a meaningful military impact in Ukraine. What they are, however, is enough to cause pause if Russia was ever to consider going into Poland, which Russia isn't, by the way,

but we're there to make the Polish people feel comfortable that we're going to prevent the Russians from doing something that Russia has no intention of ever doing. Let me go to the third rail. Is it more likely than not that if Poland and Lithuania decide to create some sort of a security zone, I'm using government speak, in Western Ukraine, that American troops would be involved? I think it's more likely not to be, because that's not what the United States is. And this is what I think will finally stop the Poles and the Lithuanians, because ultimately, if they make this move into Western Ukraine, it will be without a NATO umbrella.

They're going to try and invoke Article 4 and create a common security problem for NATO, and NATO will extend Article 4 protections, but the United States will say no, and then Poland and Lithuania know that if they go into Western Ukraine, they're on their own. So when the Russians start pounding them, there won't be any American cavalry coming to their rescue. Then why do we have, as much as you can understand it from the Biden side of the equation, 40,000 American boys in Poland, in uniform, on the ground in Poland?

Well, if we're going to call Russia the existential threat that we claim it is, if we're going to claim that Russia poses a threat to Europe, then we have to go through the motions of putting in place forces that are responding to that kind of threat. So that's what we're doing. We're beefing up our presence on the eastern flank, but it's purely a political move. It has nothing to do with genuine military capability. Again, we don't have enough forces in Poland to meaningfully impact the war that's going on in Ukraine. The scope and scale of the violence that's taking place there right now would chew up the American forces in less than a week. Our forces wouldn't survive more than a week or two in that kind of war right now. We know it.

They know it. This is purely politics. What has become of the summer offensive, the spring offensive, Ukraine moving eastward died? Has the summer offensive died? Have the Ukrainian troops even approached the first of the three defensive rungs that the Russian military has established in eastern Ukraine? The counteroffensive is flailing, failing, and the Ukrainians are tragically dying. There's really nothing that can be done to change this outcome, although the Ukrainians continue to try. They have not come close to penetrating the first line of defense or reaching the first line of defense. They're still flailing around in the in the crumple zone, in the flexible defense zone in front of that, even where they had their best chance in Bakhmut, where the Russians, because of the offensive operations that Russia carried out there through the end of May, hadn't been able to build this kind of defensive barrier. And so that was the best chance for the Ukrainians to attack

Russians without this defensive barrier. The Russians have stiffened that line. They're dug in now. They have the minefields. The Ukrainians are going nowhere. And what's happening, what you're seeing right now is that there's a gradual transition on certain parts of the battlefield up north, and I think kubiansk uh the russians have gone on the offensive you know the ukrainians have spent all summer advancing 100 meters 300 meters into the crumple zone russia in less than a week have advanced 11 kilometers towards kharkov the russians are driving it's a very measured drive they're not trying to do the big arrow stuff but they're pushing they they're forcing Ukrainians to divert reinforcements they don't have to that zone, weakening their counteroffensive here.

Ukrainians are on the verge of collapse. They have run out of resources. They've run out of men. They're running out of equipment. They've run out of ammunition. And the Russians, meanwhile, have 100, 200,000 troops they have yet to commit to the fight. That's where we are. I want to play for you a clip from President Zelensky. It's about four or five days old, in which he uses a phrase that I have never heard him use before other than in this clip. Now, it's a computer translation, so it's a little tough to hear, but I think you'll hear this phrase two or three times. I'm anxious to hear your thoughts on it. The phrase is Sky Field. In this week alone, Russian terrorists have already used 65 different missiles and 178 attack drones against us, including 87 Shahids. We managed to shoot down a significant number of them. We will do our best to make the Ukrainian sky shield only stronger. Here in our skies, we can prove that terror is losing. Altogether we can prove it, all partners. The responsible position of each partner in supplying

air defense systems and missiles to them is very important. Complete protection against terror is needed here. Ukraine can win this battle and our SkyShield will eventually guarantee security for the whole of Europe. We are equally eager to see F-16 jets in action in Ukrainian skies as soon as possible. Is this just a claptrap? SkyShield? I mean, we know from the Tashara documents, the documents the government says were released exclusively by him, the documents that the government has never says were released exclusively by him, the documents that the government has never challenged the accuracy or authenticity of, that as far back as March, the Pentagon High Command predicted that by June, three months ago, Ukraine would have

no air defenses. Now we have the president in early August saying we're going to strengthen our sky shield. What sky shield? Well SkyShield is a notional air defense. It exists in the mind of Zelensky and his advisors. You see, Ukraine has received a significant amount of advanced air defense systems from the West, the Patriot missile system from the United States, the IRST from the Germans, NASAM, which is a joint American-Norwegian endeavor, and other things from Spain, from Italy, et cetera. They brought them all in. SkyShield is the idea that they've been brought in as part of an integrated air defense that is linking up not only these different assets, but also the Russian S-300s, the Bukes, and the other Soviet-era missiles. They built this sky shield, he talks about, that's protecting them. And he brags about things.

He says, we shot down this, we shot down that. But the reality is that none of the systems work together. These sky shields, they have to be integrated with central man-in-control. The radars coordinate with one another. They have layered defenses. You pick the system most adequate to deal. That's how it works. It's all point defense with these systems defending one point.

There's no coordination. And the Russians come in and they take out each system. Then they blow the hell out of the target that they're trying to get. That's the reality. But the other thing the Russians are doing, for instance, with Patriot, if they're trying to get. That's the reality. But the other thing the Russians are doing, for instance, with Patriot, if they're not killing the Patriot, then they're causing the Patriot to expend all of their very expensive ammunition. And that's why Zelensky's like, we hope you keep providing us with stuff because he's out of missiles and America needs to provide the missiles,

but we don't have the missiles. We're not making them in the numbers that are necessary. The Ukrainians are firing them at a far greater rate than we can produce them. And so we're eating into our own inventories. And the Russians have been running for the last several months one of the most effective suppression of enemy air defense campaigns in the history of modern war. And the Russians have taken apart this sky shield, which doesn't exist. But even if it did, it's done been taken apart. And the Russians are dominating the battlefield. They're able to hit anything they want when they want.

Ukraine just can't stop it. Here's President Zelensky's latest. This is yesterday, Scott, speaking about the return of Crimea to Ukraine as if it's a matter of fact and going to happen next week. Take a listen. 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 deoccupation of Crimea more and more achievable and well thought out. This is madness, is it not? Well, it's political. To put this in context, last week,

or they just finished up, they wrapped up a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where nations came together to discuss Zelensky's 10-point peace plan. And a key element of the 10-point peace plan is that Russia must return all territories to Ukraine, including Crimea. But in that meeting, what everybody was saying is, that's insane, dude.

It is never going to happen. Nobody bought into it. Indeed, pressure has been put on ukraine to accept as reality the fact that crimea is russia forever and so are four territories they took uh that ukraine is going to have to accept this reality um and so what zielinski's doing is firing back by doubling down on stupid. He is convincing his people and putting a quarter on the table saying, no, no, no, no, no. I'm here. So he gave this ridiculous speech. There's nothing realistic about it. It's just simply, let me tell you one reason why it's never going to happen.

Let's just say hypothetically that the West gave Ukraine the ability to carry this out. Understand that anything that results in Russia losing territory, Russia considers that it belongs to Russia, is by definition a threat to the existential survival of Russia, and Russian nuclear doctrine will kick in, which means that Russia will destroy the entire world. This is why I keep telling people, anybody who sits there and says, I want Ukraine to win, what you're saying is, I want to die, because that's what would happen if Ukraine ever did win and seize these territories, Russian nuclear weapons would destroy all of Europe, all of the United States, because as Vladimir Putin has said, a world without Russia is not a world worth living in. Now, Russia's not threatening

the world with destruction unless the world's threatening Russia with destruction. I mean, we would do the same thing. I have to tell you, if a situation happened where communist China took over Mexico and was making a move to take California, Texas, Arizona, we'd say, that ain't going to happen. That's an existential threat to us. We're going to blow up China. It's just common sense. Right. Scott, I can't thank you enough for your energy and your intellect, but very, very much appreciated by our fans, your fans, who keep growing all the time. Thank you so much, my dear friend. We'll see you again soon.

Thank you very much. Boy, if you like what you just saw, like and subscribe. So we're up to 186,000 or so subscriptions. We have two goals, 200,000 by Labor Day, a quarter of a million by Christmas, 200,000 by Labor Day,

250,000 by Christmas. More as we get it. Phil Giraldi at 4.30 this afternoon. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!