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Sept. 18, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
30:23
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern : Weekly Intel Wrap
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, September 19th, 2024.
It's the end of the day.
It's almost the end of the week, but it is time for our Intelligence Community Roundtable with my dear friends and colleagues who always do double duty here, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.
Larry, I'll start with you first.
Do you think that it was the Defense Department I
mean, we all believed.
That the intimations from Secretary Blinken, that Biden and Starmer would sign off on this, and then Biden changed his mind and was not happy about doing so.
What do you think happened?
Yeah, no, it was a complete dramatic reversal last Thursday.
On Wednesday, all the leaks that were coming out of both London and Washington.
In Washington, it was Congressman Mike McCaul, a Republican.
Who was saying basically, yeah, the green light's been given, Ukraine's going to get the launch of the missiles.
And out of London, the same message.
Putin made a statement the next day that if you do that, it will be an act of war.
And that was, you know, repeated both by Ambassador Nivenzia, Russia's ambassador to the UN, Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, Deputy Foreign Minister Rybkov.
They all made it very clear, very plain, that not only Europe, but the United States would be hit, that Russia would consider this an act of war.
Well, Friday, everybody was singing a different tune, and Biden didn't look happy at the meeting, and he may have been miffed because he got boxed into a corner, but the word is that the Department of Defense has weighed in heavily.
People are really surprised that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was this smart and was able to recognize how much danger this would create.
But apparently enough of the officers spoke up and said, hey, you know, we can't afford to go down this road because it's a road that will be a dead end for us.
Ray, I know you're not fond of Secretary Austin because of his reputation when he had stars on his shoulder.
But here he is.
So this is cut 14, Chris.
Here he is giving a very interesting response.
Now, this is before the end of last week.
This is while Blinken and David Lamme, the British Foreign Secretary.
And Mike McCall, the Republican head of the House Armed Services Committee, were all intimating that permission was coming.
Austin took a different approach.
Cut number 14. President Zelensky has repeatedly requested for these long-range attacks inside Russia.
Even allies agree.
So what is stopping the United States from giving the go-ahead?
I don't believe what is stopping the United States.
I don't believe one specific capability will be decisive, and I stand by that comment.
I think Ukraine has a pretty significant capability of its own to address targets that are well beyond the range of ATACMS or even Storm Shadow, for that matter.
And as we look at the battlefield currently, We know that the Russians have actually moved their aircraft that are using the glide bombers beyond the range of ATACPs.
So this is an interesting argument, but again, I think for the foreseeable future, we're going to make sure that we remain focused on helping them do those things that enable them to be effective.
in defending their sovereign territory.
A couple of questions, Ray.
This is the public Lloyd Austin.
Might the private Lloyd Austin have said to the president words sharper, like, what are you, crazy?
You want my guys and gals to be killed over this?
and that's exactly what would happen.
Second question is, where is the head Where is American Intel on all this?
First to Ray.
American Intel, I'm sorry to say, plays no role in any of this.
We forfeited our military intelligence analysis capability way back under Director Gates, who gave it to the Pentagon.
So let's focus in on Austin.
As you correctly pointed out, that was before all this went down.
We already had instructions, I think, from General Brown and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders around the world.
Look, this is really crazy.
The game ain't worth the candle.
And besides, how many storm shadow missiles are there?
How many scalp missiles?
How many attacks?
Very few.
Do you think this would have any effect on the war?
So why?
Why would you do that?
And then, of course, two hours before Stromer, Prime Minister Stromer, knocked on the White House door, the press spokesperson for the Pentagon, General Pat Breyer, said precisely what Austin had said two days, three days earlier.
We said, look, the Ukrainians have a lot of wherewithal here to do whatever they want.
There's nothing going to change this struggle.
There is no silver bullet, as Secretary Austin just said recently.
So let them deal with what we already gave them so that they can approach negotiations.
Pat Ryder's words, okay?
Then Stromer comes in, and he's disabused of the notion that Biden will approve it because Biden finally overruled Blinken and said, all right, the other thing is Sullen, his national security advisor.
We know from a pretty good source that talked to the London Times that he was key in all this.
That he weighed in and said, no, Blinken is wrong.
The military is right.
And between Sullivan and the military, they changed the president's mind.
And thank God for that.
So, Larry, the president was furious.
And he revealed his fury.
I don't know if that's a sign of his mental state or the decision had just been made and he hadn't yet...
He had just made the decision he hadn't yet...
You know him.
We're the United States of America, for gosh sakes.
We can do anything.
He fancies himself another Churchill or FDR, more like LBJ.
But is this a permanent decision, or are they going to change their minds in a week?
Or are they going to change their minds as an October surprise if Vice President Harris sinks in the polls?
I wish Biden had an intact mind to change.
That's the problem.
He really is so advanced in his dementia.
He's doing what he's told.
And one of the hallmarks of that kind of dementia is you become so much more emotional and not able to mask your feelings.
It's just a very sharp, dramatic outburst.
What's going to happen between what's unfolding in Israel and the rout that is being inflicted on the Ukrainians, there is a likelihood that you're going to see a major war erupt in the next three to four weeks before the election.
That's what I think Sullivan and Austin and others, they're trying to keep that from happening.
But I think it's going to be out of their control.
And so the Brits may do something in defiance of us as the situation becomes more desperate.
The Ukrainians, I've got a source that flagged to me, the Ukrainians right now are getting advice from the Brits to withdraw out of Kursk the best they can right now.
And use the excuse or the pretense that they're getting ready to rebuff a Russian invasion from Belarus.
So we'll see if there's anything to that.
Can these British storm shadows, Larry, reach deep into Russia, and can they be fired without the use of American satellites I'm not sure exactly what the Americans have to do, but there's some American link in there, is there not?
Or can the British do it on their own?
No, no.
The British actually have made quite clear that they're going to rely upon U.S. satellite intelligence in order to program the geocoordinates for those missiles.
As far as their distance, I think they've got a range of about 300 miles.
Is that deep into Russia?
You know, if you look at the entirety of Russia, no.
Well, that can't reach Moscow, can it?
Yeah, it's not going to reach there.
But again, this is more for political gesture.
It's not going to inflict any kind of lasting or strategic damage to the Russian military capabilities.
And therefore, it's going to be an irritant.
Ray, is Russia prepared to fight a war against the United States?
Russia is prepared.
The last thing he wants to do is precisely that.
And so I think we can count on Putin to be very discreet here, be very measured.
As he looks at the situation, he's in control of the situation.
He's in the catbird seat.
He decides how fast those Russian forces go beyond The places there in Luhansk and Donetsk and how fast they go to the Dnieper.
He's the one that decides whether they kill all those Ukrainian soldiers that went into Kursk or whether they round up half of them as prisoners having already killed the first half.
In answer to the first part of your question to Larry about, you know, is this going to change?
Can Biden change his mind?
Well, Pusheen has to be very worried about that.
I mean, look, how many times has he changed his mind?
It depends on the last person he talks to.
Now, the blessing here is that when Stomer went back and they said a lot of talk, well, our Brits would do this themselves, but the latest is no.
The British say we wouldn't possibly do this on our own.
And besides, as Larry explained, there's proprietary stuff in those missiles that only the U.S. can authorize use for, otherwise they don't have a chance of getting through all the aircraft clutter.
So what I'm saying here is there are some people, primarily Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, And some of the crazies in NATO are saying the same.
Luckily, NATO is very divided on this, and the U.S. is calling the cards.
For the dance, and I would say for the next week or so, before Blinken gets Biden aside and says, no, no, we've got to do this, I think we're okay.
We dodged a bullet, and I think we should rejoice that the military is finally having the cojones, the guts, so to speak, to stand up and say, look, this is crazy.
How many missiles do you have?
What?
Why did you go into Kursk and sacrifice your best troops?
My God, don't support these guys anymore.
Larry, take a look at this full screen of a quotation from the Speaker of the Russian Duma, Vashoslav Volodin.
This is earlier today.
For those who didn't get it the first time, what the European Parliament is calling for leads to a world war using nuclear weapons.
A, does NATO, B, does the American establishment take that seriously?
No, absolutely not.
I watched Ben Hodges showed up on Danny Davis' program yesterday.
And it's important to watch Hodges.
I mean, the man is literally out of touch with reality.
and says incredibly stupid things that are just provably false, but believes them.
And one of those things he believes is They're just bluffing.
They'll never use nuclear weapons.
Now, and it'd be one thing if that view was confined to someone like Hodges, but it's not.
I think it's reflected in the thinking of senior military leaders throughout the Pentagon, Department of Defense, and in other parts of the U.S. government, and other elements in the intelligence.
what about Mr. Nyet?
Means Nyet, who then was the U.S. ambassador to Russia and now is the director of the CIA.
Does he understand that Hodges and company are off the wall and the Russians are serious?
General Hodges, by the way.
Go ahead.
Bill Burns, the head of the CIA, is a wind sock, okay?
He'll go with whichever way the winds are blowing, the prevailing winds, okay?
I'm sure he supports the military in this because the military has won, okay?
Now, he told the president in July of last year, Putin already lost.
He had his armed forces.
The inability to do anything was laid bare for the whole world to see.
That's what he told the president on the 3rd of July.
The president repeated that in Helsinki.
So what is Bill Burns?
He's not a player here.
He just kind of goes with the prevailing winds.
Now, with respect to the nuclear aspect, it's very serious because, you know, the British and the U.S., they just kind of feed on each other.
They're both trying to be the toughest guy, you know, on that side of the world.
And you have the British way out in front, for whatever reason, trying to get their Storm Shadows approved.
And in the U.S., there's a lot of generals that see the same way, okay?
But the reality is that there are British civil servants who know which end is up.
And one of those was a previous ambassador to Washington.
He was also a national security advisor to prime ministers.
And what he said is, look, You know, you could say Putin is bluffing, and he's bluffing, and he's still bluffing until he stops bluffing.
What are you going to do then, okay?
That's the question, okay?
Now, Putin doesn't have to bluff.
He's in the catbird seat.
He's winning, okay?
And so who has why is he doing this business about saying we have We have really the small ones.
We have the better ones than the small ones.
And we've exercised them even with Belarus.
Why is he saying all that?
In my view, he's saying all that because he wants to remind the likes of Blinken and Sullivan, look, don't even think of using small nuclear weapons.
We have them too.
We have them in Belarus.
We have them ready to go.
So if you have some sort of grand plan before the election to use one of these real small things half the size of Hiroshima, forget about it because we have them too.
I think it's a deterrent sort of thing.
I think it's just trying to warn these people because they might get it into their head to follow the advice of the kind of people that Larry was just describing who really don't take seriously these warnings.
Larry, in the past three days, the Israelis have injured more than 3,000 Lebanon civilians and members of Hezbollah, doctors, lawyers, nurses, medics, shopkeepers, children.
About 50 people were killed by these exploding mobile devices.
I don't think they were iPhones.
I think most of them were pagers.
There were some other secondary explosions that were different devices.
How effective, if at all, is this as a military technique?
Yeah, it's completely ineffective.
All it is is terrorism.
This is mass terrorism on the part of the Israelis.
There's no difference from Israel doing that and, say, Hezbollah putting a car bomb next to a cafe in Tel Aviv that's frequented by military personnel.
They detonate it.
They may kill some of the military personnel, but they have no way of knowing which ones they're going to kill.
And also in the process, they'll kill and maim civilians that are completely innocent.
Now, if Hezbollah did that, the West would be outraged, and we would rightly so be condemning it.
Well, Israel now has cemented its status as a terrorist state.
Because once those pagers are distributed, you don't know who has it.
And in fact, it killed children, one little 10-year-old girl.
It'd be one thing if you were doing this in a targeted fashion, you know, to send it to one particular leader and you know that it got into his or her hands and you could identify the fact that they had it and then you set it off.
Okay, you know, that would be in the, I'd put that in the category of all's fair and love in war.
As long as you're, you know, a targeted killing of someone that you think is trying to kill you.
Okay, that's the ugliness of war, but at least you had some confidence of who did it.
What Israel did, not only was it a terrorist attack, it was a stupid attack because they originally said they planned to do this as like a Pearl Harbor on the day that they were going to invade Lebanon, but they were afraid that it had been compromised, so therefore they had to go ahead and do it anyway.
And once you do it, it's now that entire tactic.
Technique is completely compromised.
And then it sets off a whole chain of reaction and backlashes, you know, the investigation of how did Mossad set this up?
Who were the people involved?
And then, you know, it ends up exposing some intelligence capabilities that, you know, Mossad had carefully cultivated.
Now that's dead.
They can't use that anymore.
Ray, MI6 and CIA say they knew nothing about this.
Are their denials credible?
It's hard for me to say, Judge.
I would not consider them credible.
I'd lean toward them being not credible.
I do think that this is a tactical setback for Hezbollah.
How are they going to communicate with one another now?
Even Nasrallah, if I remember correctly, two days ago said, well, this was a tactical setback.
Now, we know the Israelis have them.
We also know that the U.S. has them.
They have things like they can regulate your car and make it go 100 miles an hour and have it crash into some place, like what happened in California with one prominent journalist who was writing things that the deep state didn't like.
So these tools, there's one toolbox called Vault 7, and as soon as Julian Assange divulged that, that's when they plucked them out of the embassy.
And put them in the maximum security prison.
Vault 7 is a set of, you wouldn't believe, family jewel type things, like what the Israelis just used, like taking charge of a car, like having something in your TV, listening and watching everything you do while you're in your bed, okay?
And not knowing that's going on.
So what I'm saying is these tools are so precious in the mind of people in the deep state, CIA especially, that they'll use now and have used, as the Israelis look at it, and maybe Biden and Lincoln, oh, successfully.
Well, that takes the lead off another category of weaponry that I hate to say.
That the United States paid for this terrorism.
But before that, here's the best efforts of a reporter to get Admiral Kirby to address this.
Cut number one.
If a state actor was involved in any way in what took place in Lebanon, is that acceptable behavior by government?
That's a great hypothetical, Trevor, that I'm simply not going to engage.
So that's not the case, that it was a state actor?
I have nothing more to add on these incidents.
I understand the question.
I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals or speculate about what did or didn't happen or who might be responsible.
Is there any current intelligence assessment as to who was responsible?
I'm not going to get into intelligence estimates and assessments from here either.
How do you read that, Larry?
Israel did it.
He knows it.
It's a terrorist act.
You know, if we're going to be serious, you know, we've pretended and been deceiving the world that, oh, we're really keen on fighting terrorism.
Since 9-11, we've got this global war on terrorism.
And then what do we do?
We go into Syria and we fund, arm, and train Islamic terrorists.
And now we have one of the biggest benefactors of U.S. largesse.
It's carried out a mass terrorist attack on civilians.
Justifying is, oh, we're killing Hezbollah.
You know, the bomb going off at a funeral wounded civilians.
The 10-year-old girl is dead.
There are at least 44 dead out of this.
And all it accomplishes is further enraging Hezbollah to seek revenge.
So it doesn't cause Hezbollah to go, oh, we're going to sink back into our holes and hide.
No, they're going to escalate.
And Israel's already escalating as well by moving troops to the border.
This thing is going to blow up.
The war is expanding there, and it's going to get worse in the next week.
So, Ray, two questions.
One, can one argue morally that the Americans paid for this and we are complicit in terrorism?
And two, is Netanyahu going to get his wish of American ground troops fighting alongside of the IDF trying to move Hezbollah out of Lebanon?
Well, the Israelis are rich enough to pay for this stuff themselves.
It could be that they got some technological help from the people who built Vault 7, but we don't know that.
Now, with respect to how the Israelis will look at this, who was it that told President Biden to say, oh, that bullet that hit a senor Eiji right behind the ear and killed her instantly, oh, that was a ricochet.
That was a ricochet, and it wasn't intended for her.
Biden said that, okay?
That's before he said something stronger.
Lincoln, at the same time, said, well, they're going to let the Israelis investigate, okay?
So you're a Mossad guy, and you told the CIA contact, look, tell the president it was just a ricochet.
It's crazy on its face.
I checked this out with my ballistic expert, Larry Johnson, okay?
It doesn't work that way.
Now, what am I saying here?
Well, a couple of days later, the Osan says, you know, the Americans, they're going to do what they're going to say when we tell them.
They're going to not do anything, not even when an American citizen is shot in cold blood with guns.
So let's go ahead and do this thing because it's about to be divulged, perhaps, you know?
In other words, they don't take us seriously.
So in answer to your real question, what is America going to do?
Well, I'm more hopeful now, given...
And there have been two generals, really high-level generals, U.S. generals going to Israel last week, and I think they're saying, look, you guys, if you want to blow this thing up, you're on your own.
We're not going to come in if you perpetrate a wider war.
And that may be why they're doing this limited war.
Just 3,000 people here today, just 12 killed.
That may be what Mossad and Netanyahu have decided to do for the nonce.
I don't think, I don't know whether our military will give the go-ahead for that.
And they had a nihil opstat.
They had the choice of saying no to Biden on this Ukraine thing.
I hope they continue to have the cojones that they have.
When is the last time you heard somebody say Nihil Obstat?
That is a phrase used by a bishop when he approves a Catholic religious book saying there is nothing in here objectionable.
And he stamps it Nihil Obstat.
And, of course, that allows the author of the book to say it's an approved Catholic.
Let me do some correction or refinement.
So I just checked the distances from the Kursk region to Moscow, 400 miles.
Storm Shadow travels 155 miles.
There you go.
So when we talk about, quote, deep into Russia, deep is whatever you want to call 155 miles for the storm shadow.
I think the...
But still, none of them had the capacity to really reach Moscow.
Well, what was Zelensky looking for?
Hypersonic?
He would like anything that would hit Moscow.
And we're not going to get that.
But the J-Sams, they have about the same distance as the ATACAMs, except they're launched from an aircraft.
And that means you put the F-16 up.
Got it.
Thank you.
Coming up at 5 o 'clock Eastern.
Which is midnight in Moscow, the inimitable and always worth waiting for, Pepe Escobar.
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