Judging Freedom - Worst Crimes Committed by Federal Gov - Intel RoundTable w/Larry Johnson & Ray McGovern

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Worst Crimes Committed by Federal Gov - Intel RoundTable w/Larry Johnson & Ray McGovernSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You Hey everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, August 18th, 2023. Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson join us for what is now becoming our weekly roundtable on all matters involving the intelligence community today. Does the CIA commit crimes? That's what we're going to talk about. We'll be going back a few years. We'll be analyzing them from their contemporary perspective, and we may even get some predictions.

I want to start before we get into history. Ray, does the CIA commit murder? Well, I think the record is pretty clear whether they're authorized to commit murder or not. Well, let me put it this way. There is a concept called plausible deniability. That means sometimes if you think the president wants you to kill, for example, Fidel Castro, you don't say to President Kennedy or President Johnson, hey, we're going to kill Fidel Castro. Is that okay? You just give him plausible deniability by not telling him, okay? Now, why is the CIA, why does it think it can do these things? It's in the legislation.

It's a really bad piece of law, okay? It says that the director of central intelligence shall perform such other functions and duties as the president shall from time to time direct, period, end quote. That's Gestapo-like, but it's in the legislature. So if they think, even they think the president wants to do it with Lumumba or Castro or somebody else, they go ahead and do it knowing that they will not be held accountable. They have this impunity, which allows them to go ahead and do these things. Torture, for example. Unless you're John Kiriakou and you're going to reveal the torture and the names of the torturers, then you're going to spend two and a half years in a federal prison, right, Larry? Yes. Part of the problem for the CIA is what the mythology presented about the CIA through Hollywood

has not been the actual reality. So, for example, let's take the issue of interrogations and torture. The CIA was never trained to do that because a case officer, they're trained to recruit people. It's like trying to pick up a date in the bar on Friday night. You don't do that by torturing or attacking. And yet, right after 9-11, all of a sudden they decided we must do this. And they brought in some outsiders. And next thing you know, the CIA is involved with actual torture, which historically has proven to be ineffective for extracting reliable information. And so it's really a function of the bureaucratic imperative in the CIA.

Their eagerness to please political masters downtown and to get the pat on the head like a dog eager to go for a walk. They will do things without thinking through, is this right? Is this proper? Is this effective? Let me underscore how correct and how relevant what both of you just said is. As we speak, lawyers for the federal government and lawyers for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are negotiating a guilty plea. The evidence of his guilt is overwhelming. It's a mass murder of 3,000 people. The death penalty is provided for. I happen to be against the death penalty myself for a variety of reasons. We can discuss that some other times, but it's provided for under the law who checks every box as a precondition for it. Why are they negotiating a plea agreement after 20 years of litigation in Guantanamo Bay because they don't want him

and his lawyers to reveal to the court and to the public and to the world what the CIA did to him. Correct. There's a ton of evidence sufficient to convict that has nothing to do with the torture. But because he was tortured under American law, he can tell that to the court, and the government does not want that to happen. George W. Bush, the same idiot that got us involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, must have said to these people, Ray, or given a message to them through George Tenet, torture away away and there'll be no consequences to you. That's right, Judge. Now, Larry mentioned the CIA leader at the time.

His name was George Tenet. He came up through the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He shaved the truth and he did what Cheney, in the first instance, told him to do. And when Cheney said, we're going to torture these guys, and we have the lawyers saying it's okay, George Tenet said, yes, sir, we'll do it. Now, I happen to spend two years as an Army infantry intelligence officer, and I know about torture. I was schooled in it. I was told, as the chief of Army intelligence said, at the time when George W. Bush was saying, we have these enhanced interrogation techniques. General Kimmons, head of Army intelligence, got up at the Pentagon that same day and said, no good intelligence has ever come from abusive practices. History proves that, and the experience of the last two years also show that, period,

end quote. So there was some guts that were shown by the Army. He was dissed by Rumsfeld and put in some of the job. And so that's how bad it was. The last thing I'll say is that Dianne Feinstein, who needs something good said about it right now, was the only one in the Senate that insisted that on the basis of CIA reporting itself, torture was shown to have been unnecessary, that it didn't work, and that the CIA lied through its teeth about its productiveness. Larry, we lost you. Are you still there? I am here. Okay, you're back. You're back. Larry knows this story. When Senator Feinstein took the 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA

torture and told the White House that she was going to release it, at this point Barack Obama is the president. He personally begged her not to. She didn't. She went to the floor of the Senate and put it on the Senate hopper, where under the speech and debate clause, she's absolutely protected no matter what the secrets were in there. My then colleague and still friend Shepard Smith called me up and said, how fast can you read 6,000 pages? I said, what are you talking about? He said, how fast can you read 6,000 pages? I said, what are you talking about? He said, we're going to do the torture report, you and me for an hour, commercial free.

Ah, we did it. It caused a big hubbub at Fox. An hour later, I was in a bookstore. My phone rings. It's a 202 number. And I think it's one of my Fox colleagues in D.C., and the voice goes, now, I know we don't like this guy, but he was great on torture. The voice goes, Judge Napolitano, what you just did with Shepard Smith, we will not be rewarded until you're in heaven. And I said, Senator McCain? John McCain, who, of course, himself had been tortured and lauded us for what we did. That was the only lauding I got that day for that escapade with Shepard in that era at Fox. I want to take you to February 5th, 2023, Colin Powell's infamous speech at the UN, which he would live to regret and denounce,

and a certain familiar face over his shoulder. I cannot tell you everything that we know, but what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling. Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort, no effort, to disarm as required by the international community. Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. The CIA, and it was, of course, was George Tenet over one shoulder and John Negroponte, then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. over the other shoulder.

The CIA, did the CIA fabricate evidence to justify Bush's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Or did he see the true evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction and he did it anyway? We know that he basically dismissed Phil Giraldi when Phil Giraldi said there are no weapons of mass destruction. But my question is, did some people tell in the CIA, maybe George Tenet, tell him what he wanted to hear? Well, yes, they cherry picked. They looked at what they wanted to see. So, you know, my former colleague, Valerie Plame, we were in the career trainee program together. She was a non-official cover officer. She didn't even have the advantage of diplomatic protection.

And she was busily trying to come up with actual evidence that would support what they were looking for and couldn't find it. And so it was a little more complicated. They ignored the intelligence and listened to people who were advocates, political advocates, and then found ways to try to support that narrative. And yet people like Colin Powell are not intellectually stupid. They're not lacking in education. They don't have dysfunctional brains, but yet people with his kind of experience failed to do any kind of critical thinking, failed to do any kind of analysis, and simply went along with the political tide.

And this wasn't just the fault of George W. Bush. He was enabled by a full group of people. It's, you know, in the U.S. mythology, we always like to pin it upon one person. That's the Hollywood in us. We got to have one villain. But the fact of the matter is, like, even Adolf Hitler could not have done what he did without tens of thousands of officials and supporters who enabled that. And we've had the same thing here in the United States. This wasn't the aberration of one man or a small group of people. This was an institutional failure. Ray, in 2003, besides you and Larry and Phil Giraldi, were there other members of the CIA who knew that what Bush and Powell were saying was BS

and was an utter and total pretext to invade Iraq because Saddam tried to kill my daddy, as Bush once infamously let slip out of his mouth? Well, there were five of us that started Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. At the end of January, when we could see that the intelligence served up by our former colleagues, and that really hurts still, was convoluted, was manufactured to justify an unjustifiable war. Now, with respect to Powell, I know Powell. He's from the Bronx. We had a common bond. When I briefed his boss, Weinberger, I used to come about 10 minutes early to tell General Colin Powell, hey, this is what we're going to tell your boss, to the degree I could. It was one-on-one with Weinberger, and he appreciated that.

But he was a cog in the machine. He said before 9-11, Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction. After 9-11, all of a sudden, weapons of mass destruction descended like manna from heaven on the sands of Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had our oil, okay? It was really bad. Last thing I'll say is that our colleague in VIPS, Larry Wilkerson, says that that was the worst day of his life. Is that Colonel Wilkerson who was the number one aide to General Powell for many years? He was chief of staff at the State Department and he was thrown to the wolves. Chinese people prepared a draft and Larry, to his credit, said, that's not going to wash. He did his own draft and he excluded all the BS about Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda. OK, that was the that was the big thing that affected Americans.

OK, ties to Al Qaeda, ties by inference to 9-11, for God's sake, okay? Now, Larry Wilkerson reports, he has written about this, so this is not a big secret, that he had persuaded Powell in a different room from where Tenet was holding sway, ditched that whole part about ties between the sinister nexus that they had in the draft between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. And guess what? They went back to the room, having decided this and having been overheard, no doubt. And Tenek comes in, oh, we got a new report. That report happened to come from Egyptian torture of one of the detainees. And it said, sure, there are ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. They didn't tell Colin Powell that that was where this came from. They said it was legitimate. So it was a combination

of no guts on the part of George Tenet with a overweening desire to please to the degree of manufacturing evidence, in this case, on Iraq and al-Qaeda. And I'll just say that John Rockefeller, who was the Senate chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said when they did a five-year study that the intelligence used to justify the attack on Iraq was, quote, unsubstantiated, comma, contradicted, comma, or even non-existent, period, end quote. What, I ask you, does non-existent intelligence look like? Wow. And of course, there's no legal or even political consequences to that. Let's jump forward. Take a listen to this. We've all seen this before. It's President Biden on Nord Stream. He's standing next to Chancellor Scholz and a German journalist who speaks English is asking him about Nord Stream. If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again,

then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. How will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany's control? We will. I promise you we'll be able to do it. I mean, to this day, Cy Hersh is vilified for telling the truth. Take a look at just a few days after Cy's report came out. The PR flack for the State Department, I don't even know who this fellow is, gets in an argument with one of the reporters because he can't answer the reporter's question. And then we're going to get to the CIA's involvement in the Nord Stream attack.

One of his allegations is that it was taken off. Rather than let this this propaganda be aired in the briefing room. But let me just say it is a fundamental misunderstanding of oversight in our U.S. Congress. Beyond getting his facts entirely wrong, as he has before in very high-profile ways, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to suggest that our intelligence community is not subject to oversight. Anyone who writes that, anything who writes anything like that, should not be believed on any fact that he or she puts forward. No, no, no. She wrote that it was taken off of a CIA and put under military in order to prevent— Our military is also subject to rigorous oversight.

That's my question. Yes, the answer is yes. And the Biden administration putting Ned Price—he's paid the work. I don't fault him. He actually knows intelligence. He had a career in intelligence. And from all I know, he's a perfectly decent, I know people that know him personally, and he's a fine guy. He's just been told what to say. So Ned Price was the PR person from the State Department, didn't want to answer the question.

Of course, the gentleman afterwards was the great Cy Hersh himself. What was the CIA's involvement, Larry, in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline? And could it have happened without either an order from the president or, as Ray pointed out when it comes to the CIA killing people, doing what they think the president wants done, whether there's an express order or not. There was still a way to get this, if you will, off the books, so it would be outside the normal channels of oversight. I would simply note that Sai's report pointed to a base location in Panama City, Florida, and it just so happens that that location is where the CIA's maritime branch from the Special Activities Division and the director, what used to be called the Director of Operations, is located. So coincidence? No. There are, you know, when you get into the world of what they call SAP special access programs

there are units that operate behind additional cover or clearances and they are able to do things that are not normally briefed to members of congress they're outside their knowledge so this is just another example of the president circumventing the normal bureaucratic process, and as a result, really creating greater danger, greater risk for the United States, not less. CIA who balked at George W. Bush claiming publicly that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, is it likely that there were members of the CIA who balked at the CIA being involved with Navy SEALs that just happened to train, as Larry pointed out, in the same place at destroying the pipeline? And beyond that, I mean, what kind of control does the CIA have over German intelligence that shows that everybody else, zip, not a peep. They know damn well what happened. It's amazing. I guess I wanted to address your first part first, but I forgot what it was, frankly. What I'll say is simply that the Germans do know.

My first part of my question was, is it likely that just as there were members of the intelligence community who balked when Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, are there members of the intelligence community who said, we're not going to destroy German sovereign property no matter who tells us to? Okay. I'll have to amend your remark in two ways. And that's why I got a little bit ahead of myself. There were no members of the intelligence community who stood up and said, this is a bunch of BS.

None. The only ones were alumni. And to that, I feel great sorrow. You told us about the general, but that was a generic statement about how torture doesn't work. Hollywood thinks it works, but in reality, it doesn't produce actionable information. Yeah, he felt it necessary to say that on the same day that George W. Bush was justifying enhanced interrogation techniques. But the reality is that nobody under George Tenet and those people, nobody stood up and said, this is wrong, this is not based on any information. And as I said, John Rockefeller found that in a five-year study, which, by the way, the conclusions were bipartisan.

Now, how about now? Are you kidding me? Who's going to give the CIA analysts the let us comment on these kinds of things, except for Bill Colby, under whom I served directly, and he used to let us NIOs, National Intelligence Officers, have a look at some of these cockamamie covert action programs. You want to overthrow the new government in Portugal? You want to bring Salazar back? Well, we have just the crowd of retired generals in the Azores.

They're willing to do that. We found out about that. We told Kissinger, ain't going to work. You better knock that one off. So they don't have that chop anymore. And so I don't believe that anybody objected to what happened when Bill Burns said, yeah, president wants to do it, do it. Larry, last subject matter, because this is expressly prohibited in the CIA charter, and there's no ambiguity in there. Does the CIA today engage with and in domestic law enforcement?

Do they help the FBI? Do they share intel? Do they help local and state law enforcement? Answer, yes. That was particularly played out in the Russiagate. FBI gets the blame for that but there are clear indications that the CIA played a direct role in helping build that case, that false case against Trump and was using intelligence assets and resources. So the

line gets pretty thin because once it started in the 1990s where members of the FBI would be deployed out to CIA headquarters. Members of CIA would be deployed to FBI headquarters. And so there'd be some cross-fertilization. Even though FBI is supposed to do law enforcement, CIA is supposed to do intelligence collection, those two should never meet because what the CIA does cannot be presented in court as evidence. Right. But nonetheless, the CIA has crossed the line, and it's crossed the line with the full knowledge, permission, and encouragement of then President Obama. Obama was directly responsible for this.

Not just, he wasn't some innocent bystander. He was encouraging it. Does, Ray, do foreign intelligence agencies, MI6, Mossad, spy in the United States with the knowledge, consent, and approval or looking the other way of the CIA and the FBI? Of course they do. I can't say that the FBI looks the other way, but certainly the standards of scrutiny on people like Mossad are very different from the Russians or the Chinese. I'd just like to point out that in addition or the CIA. Now there are fusion centers. They get it all and they use it all. We've talked in the past about parallel construction. They get an illegally intercepted thing and they use it. They don't even tell the judge or the prosecuting or even the defense attorney. So it's pretty involved and it's pretty illegal. Gentlemen, I wanted to get to Syria and Kiev and other illegal CIA activities. We'll do it next week. Thank you so much for your time and willingness to discuss these delicate issues with us. The fans love it. I love it. Have a nice weekend. Thanks, Judge. Of course. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. If you like what you saw,

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