Judging Freedom - Will the Nord Stream Pipeline Blasts ever be Investigated_

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, February 13th, 2023. It's about 3.15 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States.

Good friend of the show, Phil Giraldi, joins us now. Phil, you spent much of your career in the Central Intelligence Agency. You are a notorious iconoclast, disagreeing often with the thrust of the agency and famously with George W. Bush over whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So your background is entirely in the area of what we want to talk about now. Were you surprised when you woke up, I guess it was last Thursday or Friday, and read the report of Cy Hirsch, a person we both know, a famous, highly regarded Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, Navy, in conjunction with divers from some northern European countries, destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline, which linked Russia to Germany for the sale by Russia and purchase by German utilities of cheap Russian natural gas. Were you surprised when you learned this? Well, I wasn't.

I think the assumption has always been right from the beginning that the United States was the agency that carried out this attack on the pipeline. I think when you look at it in terms of motive, when you look at it in terms of capabilities, and when you also look at it in terms of comments by Joe Biden and others saying that they would not allow Nord Stream to come online. I mean, that was pretty clear stuff. I suspected at the same time that they would do work into it, some plausible denial, so that they could always say, oh, no, it wasn't us. So I was not surprised at all to read the article, and I was amazed by some of the details that Cy Hersh was able to dig up.

Tell us about some of the details, and tell us about the involvement of the CIA. I mean, does the CIA do this stuff? Do they have divers like the Navy SEALs do? Do they go underwater and pack pipelines with explosive material and then three months later detonate it? Yeah, they do. Panama City in Florida is where the Navy has a divers base and it's basically co-located with the agency's divers. And think back, remember mining the harbors in Nicaragua? I mean, that was a joint operation. There have been plenty of operations where the CIA has used those kinds of resources. And according to Hirsch, the actual plan that was used to

plant the explosives on the pipelines and detonate them came from CIA. And how did they carry this out? Well, they basically carried it out by using the cover of a naval exercise in the Baltic that NATO was running. And there was a major U.S. ship, I think it was the kirsarge that was part of the exercise and apparently had all these supplies and the personnel that were able to do the diving and to attach the uh explosive c4 explosives uh to the pipes so that's kind of how it was carried out and there was, again, according to Hirsch, cooperation with the Norwegians to use a remote detonator that could be initiated by dropping a seaboy. And the seaboy sent

a signal that told them to control the demolition. What would, well, let me ask you this. Do you know of any instance where the United States government, through the CIA and the military, has attacked the assets of an ally? And not just any ally, an ally that we have several treaties with, Germany. Yeah, that's one of the interesting aspects of this, because, of course, the NATO alliance in and of itself says that any NATO member being attacked, all NATO members have to unite in the defense of that country. I mean, did that treaty contemplate that the attack would come from another NATO member, in this case, the granddaddy of NATO members, the United States. Yeah, that's the point. Clearly, the United States was involved in this attack, and one might presume that Norway was. And I have some additional sources that have suggested that Britain was

very much involved in it, too. So here you have NATO members attacking essentially the resources of another NATO member. Bear in mind that the pipeline is not owned by Russia. Russia has 51% of it through Gazprom, but the other 49% is owned by Germans. And so here we were attacking and destroying, to the tune of at least $10 billion, if it's ever repaired, a German facility. Now, why is it that we haven't heard a peep about this from Chancellor Schultz? We haven't heard anything from the American press. We haven't heard from the left in the Congress. We haven't even heard from the libertarians in the Congress, although Senator Mike Lee of Utah said over the weekend when pushed, if this is true, it's very troubling. We haven't heard from anybody in NATO.

We haven't heard from anybody in Germany. Well, I have this theory that we may not have heard anything from Schultz because Schultz was not in the loop. He was not informed that this was going to happen and exactly how this was going to play out. To be sure, he was at a conference where Joe Biden said that we would not allow this development to take place. But he was not part of the discussion. He didn't say anything. No one asked him anything. To get this straight, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the government's objection to the pipeline is that it was producing boatloads of cash for Gazprom.

Gazprom is owned largely by the Russian government. Therefore, the pipeline was putting a lot of cash into Vladimir Putin's government treasury. The other end of the pipeline was providing inexpensive natural gas for commercial enterprises and for home heating in Germany. Old Joe wanted to put pressure on the German economy to get them to cough up their share of the Ukraine war. I'm doing air quotes around the word share. And he wanted to stop the flow of cash from German utilities

to gas prom. So from Joe's perspective, it's a win-win, even though he attacked an ally and a putative enemy, an enemy, an adversary with which, of course, we've never been at war. Is that a fair explanation of what the hell is going on? Yeah, there were a lot of levels, a lot of peels to this onion in terms of what they were trying to accomplish. The public face of this was that the United States did not want Western Europe to be dependent on Russian energy because that would give Russia leverage over Western Europe. So if the United States really believed in the free market, they would find some way to sell energy to Western Europe that costs less rather than destroying, literally blowing up the relationship between Russia and Germany. That's something that Joe Stalin would have done if the situation had been reversed. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, anybody who views this as anything but

an act of war and an act of terrorism is delusional. This is not the sort of thing, not the sort of way that, how do we put it in Washington, the rules-based international order? Is this what it amounts to when the United States feels it has a stake in something that it wants to turn around? I mean, come on. And sure, there are a whole lot of different issues that emerge from this, but the Germans take one hell of a whack out of this. Tell me. Tell me. Yeah, they own 49% of the pipeline and they were producing so much gas

that they were able to sell it to the Dutch and to the French and to the Swiss. They were making money off it. Tell me about the thought processes in the CIA when an idea like this is being batted around. Would some of them say, wait a minute, you can't do this. This is an act of war. Wait a minute, we're not in the business of destroying $10 billion in assets from an ally. Wait a minute, people are going to freeze this summer if they don't have natural gas to heat their homes. Would those arguments have been made at some level before the decision was made to pull this trigger? Well, the simple answer to that, I think, would be yes, there would be people saying that. And they would also be pointing out that this could cause irreparable damage, not only with Russia, but also with close ally and essential European partner, Germany. I mean,

they would have been saying those things. According to the piece by Hersh, these points were raised, but they were pushed down by the White House people that were working on this commission. And they were basically told, look, the president wants this, and this is what we're going to do. I wonder if there were any Phil Giraldis involved, either in the CIA or the naval seal end, who said, I'm not doing this. This is immoral. It's illegal. It's unconstitutional. It's criminal. By the way, Mr. President, it might be impeachable. Anybody say anything like that? Well, they might have said it privately. And I would think that the Hersh article coming out now, if there is any play at all on it, which of course looks doubtful, it would open a door for people who maybe are recent retirees or people who basically are

willing to go the whistleblower route. And they might say something. I'd love to see that. Tell us about Cy Hirsch. The Cy Hirsch that I know, this is the Cy Hirsch of the My Lai Massacre, of Watergate, of American torture, of CIA surveillance, of a Pulitzer Prize. The Cy Hirsch that I know is almost fanatical about sources. Most investigative journalists only require two. he requires three for every fact. Is this the Cy Hirsch that you know as well? Yes. And in fact, I, at one point in my life, not so long ago, when I was working for a private security company, I would sit down and have lunch with Sy together with other former CIA and Secret Service and FBI people, and we would go through some of the facts that he had unearthed and was interested

in corroborating. And he was meticulous about it, absolutely meticulous about it. When I read something by Sy Hirsch, I understand that you're only as good as your source. And if your source is getting something maybe a little wrong, you might get it a little wrong too. But the fact is, anything by Cy Hirsch, as far as I'm concerned, is solid gold. Why do you think we haven't seen this in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or even my former colleagues at Fox News? I mean, if true, and I believe it's true and you believe it's true because we know Cy and we know his reputation, he's never, ever been proven wrong when he has one of these major investigations. This is utterly profound and, in my legal opinion, probably impeachable, but not a peep anywhere other than on a few websites.

Well, because I think these so-called mainstream media outlets are basically humiliated when a story like this comes out. They have more to gain by taking the government line because the government is a resource for them. The government leaks them information, gives them stories, that sort of thing, and doesn't make any trouble for them. And so they're not interested in rocking this boat. This will require at least one major news outlet to pick up the story and run with it. But I don't see that happening in the current context. All right. Switching gears slightly, about three or four hours ago, the United States State Department put out a bulletin, I guess they have a record of who's there, maybe because of visas, to Americans

living in Russia saying, come home. What? What is that all about? Well, this is the third time they've done that since the conflict in the ukraine began a lot of this is is political they're exploiting uh what they are describing as uh the russian authorities coming down on americans uh i for one would not hesitate to travel to russia right now i don't think americans are in danger um if you if you look at the couple of cases that they would be citing, the woman basketball player, the ex-Marine that's being accused of espionage, I mean, this is a tiny number compared to all the Americans that travel to Russia. And I would further add, I kind of like the way the State Department phrased this, or

the embassy. They said, do not travel to Russia due to the unpredictable consequences of the unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. So, see, it's all on the Russians. And it doesn't mention the fact that the pipeline was blown up by the Americans. And it doesn't mention the fact that the United States has basically been the aggressor in terms of its support of Ukraine against Russia. So Russia has very good reasons to be suspicious of at least some traveling Americans. And if I were to follow that argument even farther, I would say, well, Mr. President Biden, what about Julian Assange? I mean, are there miscarriages of justice in the United States system? Good point. We haven't heard anything from President Putin about Cy Hersh's report.

Is it likely that President Putin knew that the United States did this long before Cy Hersh's report came out last Thursday? It is certain that he knew about it. He knew about it for a number of reasons. The one that's most outstanding was the Russians were intercepting British clandestine communications. Liz Truss, who was then the Prime Minister of England, 60 seconds after the explosions took place, she sent a text message to our Secretary of State. So the Russians heard them, heard them real time, and they knew who did it. Phil Giraldi, no matter what we talk about, it's always enlightening and illuminating. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me on.

Of course. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it, and there'll be more on this. You'll hear from Phil as we get more. You'll hear from Colonel McGregor and Scott Ritter later on in the week, and any other sources that we can develop about how this happened, who ordered it, and why there hasn't been a peep about it, except in a couple of websites in here. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. 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 online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum

flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.