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Aug. 26, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:19
* [Must Watch] - COL KAREN Kwiatkowski : US Planned to Invade Russia
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, August 27th, 2024.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now.
Colonel Kwiatkowski, a pleasure.
Thank you very much for your help.
A lot to talk to you about.
Big picture propaganda.
Is propaganda itself an element to be achieved in modern warfare?
It is a part.
It is a part of warfare, and I don't think just modern.
Influencing what people believe, both the other army that you're against or your people back home, the enemy population.
I think propaganda is a key part of battle and conflict and trying to enforce your will on propaganda.
So it is part of it.
Yeah, I mean, it's a very human thing to do.
Our friend and colleague Alistair Crook argues that he agrees with you.
And in the case of Israel, we will get to Kursk and the involvement of U.S. intelligence community in a wonderful interview you recently gave with Sputnik in a moment.
But Alistair argues that an essential part Isn't it pretty clear that he has lost the propaganda war around the world?
He's only got the United States with him.
Yeah, it's obvious.
It's obvious that he's lost it.
He knows this.
I think a lot of people in Israel, people and politicians, they're very, very concerned because, you know, you need...
When you're a little country that's doing nasty things, you need friends.
And the more friends, the better.
The more supporters, the better.
And Israel's down to one.
And that one is the United States, which also has grown enemies.
We haven't created friends in the past 20 years.
We've created enemies.
So we're not popular either.
Neither is our money.
So, yeah, Israel should be very concerned.
And I think they are.
I don't know what the solution is going to be, but they're very concerned.
Karen, yesterday, the United States sent its 500th flight of arms to Israel.
500 flights in nine months of the war.
You can see how vital USAID is to this Israeli onslaught.
So Sunday morning, in the wee hours of the morning, before the sun...
The Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel fired back.
It only went on for 20 minutes and then it stopped.
Here's what Prime Minister Netanyahu said a few hours later in the morning on Friday.
Hezbollah tried to attack the state of Israel with rockets and drones early in the morning.
We instructed the IDF to carry out a powerful preemptive strike to remove the threat.
The IDF destroyed thousands of short-range rockets, and they were all intended to harm our citizens and our forces in the Galilee.
In addition, the IDF intercepted all the UAVs that Hezbollah launched for a strategic purpose in the center of the country.
We are hitting Hezbollah with surprising thrusts.
Three weeks ago, we eliminated his chief of staff, and today we foiled his attack plan.
Nezrala in Beirut and Kamene in Tehran should know that this is another step on the way to change the situation on the north and return our residents safely to their homes.
And I repeat, this is not the end of the story.
Now that was the only source of information that the Israeli public had emanating from Israel, because shortly after whatever happened in this 20-minute period, happened.
And before he made that statement, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government put total censorship I don't know how they can do this in the modern era, but they did it total censorship on reporting what happened in the conflagration Here is our colleague and friend.
Alistair Crook yesterday on this show explaining what happened, cut number 13. One of the reasons we can't give more detail of this is immediately at five o 'clock in the morning, the Israeli government issued an absolute ban on any reporting of any damage or any attacks.
A complete censor was imposed.
On what happened in Tel Aviv, what happened at the airbase, which they also attacked, which is where the drones flew from.
Absolute ban, no reporting, no photographs, no visuals.
And so they put a complete blackout on any news of any damage to any infrastructure, any defense sites, or to the intelligence bases in Tel Aviv.
Does a sophisticated society like Israel tolerate a total ban on news?
Presumably not good news.
If it were good for the Israelis, the government wouldn't put a ban on it.
Yeah, that's true.
Clearly, whenever there's information bans or attempts by governments to shape information, it means that they're afraid of what's out there.
They're afraid of the possibility of They don't like it.
So, you know, we know governments are kind of like criminal elements, really.
They're criminal gangs and criminal gangs.
They fear exposure.
OK, they fear evidence that shows they did something wrong or they're guilty.
So these governments are criminal gangs and clearly he's got it under control in Israel.
But I think many Israelis.
I mean, they're sophisticated people.
They are well-read, and they're internationalist in many ways, including the Israelis that live abroad from Israel.
And so they're paying attention to information.
This idea that he's going to be able to freeze access to information for very long for everyone, it's really a short-term thing, even for the best.
The best controllers, you know, like Netanyahu must imagine himself to be.
Ah, but he has friends in the media, because I'm going to put this in front of my face.
This is the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal, which purports to show an Israeli Iron Dome rocket destroying a Hezbollah missile.
And the same photograph, a smaller version of it, was on the front page of the New York Times.
That photograph of Crane Alistair Crook is a year old.
That photograph was taken in the daytime, and this 20-minute conflagration between Hezbollah and the IDF occurred in the pitch dark of night.
So who does Netanyahu and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times think they're kidding?
It is it's crazy.
I mean they're there They get their information from the same sources.
They march to the same drummer.
But I don't think they're very aware that the rest of the world is very exposed to many bits of information and many alternative narratives.
You know, it really makes them look more foolish than anything else.
And certainly, the American media clearly is not doing its job, unless their job is to do as Netanyahu advises them to do.
If that's the case, they are doing their job, but I don't think many Americans feel that that's what our major newspapers should be doing.
It's a joke on them, really.
I mean, it's a sad state of affairs, and again, this is why the newspapers are so concerned, and the governments that rely on those newspapers to shape their own government narrative, they're so concerned about things like Telegram, like Elon Musk buying Twitter.
They cannot tolerate People actually doing what people do.
The Israeli government is not the only government that did this.
The U.S. did this during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. still hides what we knew about Pearl Harbor, still hides what we knew about 9-11, still hides what we knew about and know about the JFK and RFK assassinations.
There's no limit.
To what these governments, whether they're criminal gangs that purport to be democratically elected, lowercase d, or not, they still continue to hide the truth.
But I couldn't resist this one because we caught them red-handed with an old photo taken in the daytime, and Alistair Crook put his finger right on it.
In your interview, With Sputnik, you were asked if the United States helped to plan the invasion of Russia.
Did it?
Well, I believe that we had foreknowledge, and certainly we know that our equipment and our communications and our intelligence, our surveillance data, is all made available as requested.
If it's sub-regional or targeted data, that information is made available by our government.
To the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian politicians if they ask for it.
So we are involved in Ukraine, basically like the pig is involved in breakfast.
We are in it.
We are part of it.
So, yeah, I'd be very, very surprised if we had no foreknowledge.
And I think that it was something that they cleared with military.
Military leaders and strategists, even in the Pentagon, who the Pentagon said, oh, no, we were surprised.
We didn't know anything.
We're waiting to see what happens.
Yeah, I bet they are.
But, you know, yes, clearly we're involved in it.
Go ahead, Karen.
We're also involved in it with Americans.
I mean, we have American mercenaries and American volunteers and other NATO military on the ground participating in this Kursk invasion that happened, I guess, a few weeks ago.
Yeah, so there's no way we are not a part of this.
And this game that we're playing that, oh, it's all Ukrainian.
We give them all these weapons and we tell them, oh, don't do this, don't do that.
But it's really the final decision belongs to Zelensky.
That's our policy because, you know, we respect Zelensky.
Give me a break.
We will, if you don't mind, make a mini-cut.
We'll post that on videos, which sometimes do go viral.
And we mentioned Telegram.
You can't overlook the fact that the president, chair, and principal owner of Telegram was just arrested in Paris because the French and the Americans can't stand.
What is articulated freely on Telegram.
And Chris reminds me that in a recent interview with my friend and former Fox colleague Tucker Carlson, the Telegram founder, said that the U.S. government has been spying on him for years and even recently attempted to hire away his chief engineer who refused to leave.
This gets back to what you were saying earlier.
Governments hate and fear the truth.
And they don't want people talking about the truth.
That's right.
Dimitri Symes, Scott Ritter, Pavel, name escaping me, forgive me, the founder of television.
Correct.
Correct.
Does any of this surprise you, Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski?
Well, the desperation of these governments does surprise me a little bit because generally they like to go slow and silent.
If they can, in inhibiting free speech, inhibiting communications that they don't like.
You know, for years, the NSA spied on Americans, but people didn't know that.
People didn't think about it, so it wasn't an issue.
And then Snowden relayed to everybody that, oh, yeah, yeah, that's happening.
Not only is it happening, it's a major target of NSA mission, and they have many customers in the government that want that information.
Then we say, oh, well, the government does that.
They spy.
So we've kind of accepted it, but they like it better if we don't talk about it.
And when they arrest guys like Pavel Durev, there's almost a billion users of Telegram around the world.
And they use it for a lot of different things, sharing information, business, all kinds of things.
But those billions of people, that's a desperate move.
An unfortunate thing that they've done because backing away from that cannot, there is no good outcome here for the government that arrested for either the French, for Macron, or for the Americans who were behind it.
And there's no doubt the Americans and the Israelis are driving this because there's two things you can get on Telegram wonderfully and really in an uninhibited, direct, honest way.
And that is video of what's happening in Ukraine.
And video of what's happening in Gaza.
These are things you get on a daily basis if you want to see them.
They're out there.
And it's commented on.
So it's self-checked by others.
It has that self-correcting mechanism that decentralized systems have.
Anyway, Netanyahu doesn't like it.
Biden doesn't like it.
Harris doesn't like it.
Macron doesn't like it.
But once they've taken for six days or five days, I don't know how long they're going to keep Or maybe they'll charge him and throw him in jail.
But once they do that, getting out of it, it's a lose-lose situation for the governments.
Because they are either evil, free speech-hating, unfair organizations, which we know them to be, or they made a terrible mistake because they are listening to bad people.
And by that, I mean Netanyahu, Zelensky, you name it.
They want it finished.
But there's no good win out of this.
So that's why I think it stinks and reeks of desperation on the government's part.
When you go do something, you need to have not only a plan B, but you need to have an exit strategy that works for your interests.
And the government doesn't have that when they arrest people like this.
And we saw this.
We saw this to some extent.
With Julian Assange.
Very, very difficult for the governments.
Once they had committed and made their point that they can't tolerate WikiLeaks, they can't tolerate journalism, and they went after this guy, how long did he have to stay?
How long was he in prison between the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh?
15 years almost?
But that wasn't necessary.
But they had no exit strategy.
They had no political exit strategy that would save government face.
And they don't have one with Pavel Durev either.
And this is a sign of government desperation.
Do you and your intelligence community veteran colleagues openly acknowledge, and do any of your colleagues still in the intelligence community acknowledge, That this incursion into Russia absolutely, positively could not have happened without the knowledge, consent, approval, and preparation provided by MI6 and CIA?
I think the assessment is that it could not have happened without American and, of course, British help.
At the very minimum, intelligence.
But also, we, the Americans, the DOD, the people working with Ukraine, We're watching them almost as closely as the Russians are.
So this idea that, oh, the Russians weren't prepared for this, but they could have been because troop movements were happening.
Who was looking at those troop movements?
The Americans were looking at the troops.
NATO was looking at the troop movements.
The UK was looking at the troop movements.
So we certainly were aware of it.
Secondly, Zelensky is a person who I think actually He is also exceptionally desperate.
The time frame, the length of time for his political survival, that window is closing.
He knows it and everybody else knows it.
So that drives desperation.
And part of it is the U.S. election, but also part of it is Germany isn't going to give him any more aid.
You know, NATO's broke.
So, yeah, we definitely had a role to play here.
And also this whole war, don't forget, you know, we know, you know, but Americans need to understand this entire activity in Ukraine against Russia.
It was driven by the United States, particularly the United States State Department, under, let's name him, Obama.
So, you know, this is an American agenda item.
Do you think we're not watching, we're not participating?
Take a look at this headline from a piece by Politico.
Ukraine uses Korsk's success to press Biden on lifting weapons of restrictions.
Ukraine's invasion of Russia has flipped the gloomy narrative on the war and Kyiv is using its battlefield success, I'm reading this literally, to launch a new pressure campaign on the U.S. to lift the last restrictions on the use of long-range weapons inside Russia.
Our friend and colleague Matt Ho takes this one step further and believes that Zelensky and company now think that Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump, and all they have to do is stay alive until after Election Day, because no Trump is going to come in to pull the plug.
She's going to come in and give them as much or more than Biden has been giving them.
And all of this was behind the Korsak invasion.
What do you say?
Yeah, I mean, clearly the Korsak invasion was done to shift a dynamic, because that dynamic is not good for Ukraine, and the coming dynamic is not good for Ukraine.
America is losing interest.
NATO can't afford it.
So how do you shift that dynamic?
Well, a very desperate invasion and a very unimportant part of, well, I shouldn't say unimportant, because there's a nuclear power station there, but a small little piece of Russia they invaded very rapidly.
People say ingeniously, perhaps.
But they can't hold the property.
They've already been pushed back.
It also didn't have the tactical response that they expected, which was that it would take the pressure off other parts of the front as Russia surged forces in to fight them off in Korsk.
So that didn't work.
But the political thing, keeping Ukraine alive as an agenda item.
Just until November 5th, you know, so they can rest easy if Kamala is elected, and then it'll be over if Trump's elected, that kind of thing.
It's possible, but it's also incredibly stupid.
And what is at risk here?
Well, we already kind of know, even if we didn't predict this, we can see what's happening.
What's happening is Russia is not interested anymore.
In negotiating.
Russia has the military upper hand.
Russia is proceeding to the west.
They are continuing the slow slog westward.
And they are taking property that very likely they won't give back.
So as they do that, what do we have in Poland?
Well, Poland's getting fed up with Ukrainian refugees.
Poland's getting fed up with having to share NATO investment and U.S. investment with Ukraine.
It's a black hole.
Nobody wants to invest in Ukraine.
American weaponry being stored and maintained and prepped for battle in Poland?
He will if he has to.
I think the Russians seem to be holding off from doing that.
Keeping this thing as extremely controlled and constrained.
They don't want to make it more than it needs to be, it seems like.
But yeah.
I mean, if there's long-range weapons, they have to defend their country.
And, you know, it's funny because countries have a right to self-defense.
And we say, oh, Ukraine has a right to self-defense.
And we say, oh, Israel.
Israel has a definite right to self-defense.
They can do whatever they need to do.
And, of course, Israel sets the example, right?
They'll fire missiles, you know, a thousand miles away in defense, in the name of defense.
So, yeah, Russia will have plenty of world support.
If it comes to that.
But it seems like they're trying to hold off.
Here's the adult in the room.
Russian, you know, I'm going to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Earlier today, Karen, in a clip that we call The West is Looking for Trouble, cut number 14. The West does not want to avoid escalation.
The West, how we say in Russia, is looking for trouble.
It is very important to understand that we have our own doctrine, including doctrine on the use of nuclear weapon, which, by the way, has been adjusted now.
And American representatives are well aware about it.
Should that be chilling?
The Russians have adjusted.
Their standard operating procedure for the use of nuclear weapons?
Yeah, but we caused that.
I mean, didn't Biden just in March do a secret, you know, readjustment?
Right, right.
According to Matt Ho, this readjustment allows for three nuclear confrontations at once.
One with Russia.
This is incredible.
One with China and one with North Korea.
I don't know if this was leaked because they somehow think it's going to help Vice President Harris against former President Trump, or if this is really their prudential thinking circa April of this year.
But it was just leaked right around the time of the Democratic National Convention.
Yeah.
It could be.
Maybe it was leaked by somebody who's really concerned that we're going to destroy the world for political reasons that are really something that should be entirely limited to Washington, D.C. Instead.
Washington, D.C. is interested in destroying the planet in order to retain Democratic Party power.
That's possible.
But, yeah, the Russians have adapted as well they should.
And really, these strategies have been shifting because, you know, the United States has been pulling away for years from any limitations in any way.
So because we're not talking to anyone, we're not communicating, we're forging our own path ahead, that necessarily drives anybody else with nuclear weapons to pay close attention and to adapt accordingly and to expect that everything else in the world stays the same while one country, the most important country, the United States of America, makes a decision and precedes someone.
They feel like, well, we'll just, we control everything, so we'll just do this and that'll happen.
And they have no idea how the world works and how people work.
It's Israel.
Is Israel losing the propaganda war internationally?
Oh yeah, no doubt about that.
That's been happening now for a long time.
I think maybe they truly thought that the Gaza operation would not last as long as it has, that they could quickly massacre, exterminate, move Palestinians off of Gaza.
And that it would be over with very quickly.
Because if you think back to December and January, you know, there was, you know, we're so close to a ceasefire.
We're almost done.
We're almost done.
Well, they weren't almost done.
They're not almost done now.
It's not working out as they planned.
And as the time goes on, the lack of control of the optics is just exploded.
They have no control of the optics.
Now, in America, they do.
But we're their only ally.
So, you know, the people around the world see this.
You know, people aren't.
In fact, the best thing that they ever did for the BDS movement, which is to avoid economically supporting Israel by not buying Israeli-made products, the best thing they ever did for that was invade Gaza, because that's exploded.
That is a permanent fixture now, globally.
Nobody wants Israeli stuff.
Nobody.
Karen Kwiatkowski, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for your time and for your analysis.
We hope you'll come back again next week.
Okay, sure enough.
Thank you, Judge.
Of course, all the best to you.
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