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Oct. 2, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:23
Phil Giraldi : Assassination and Its Aftermath.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024.
Our dear friend Phil Giraldi joins us now.
Phil, always a pleasure.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I don't think we have spoken since the assassination of Nazarullah, and we certainly haven't spoken since the Iranian response.
Does it...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a murder 5,000 miles away, which then took place.
They clearly committed a federal crime and a state crime by doing it.
No law enforcement agency will harm a hair on his head here in the United States.
What's your take on this?
Yeah, precisely just as your take.
I mean, the fact is Israel, and particularly Netanyahu, commit crimes with impunity.
And these are big crimes, assassinating heads of state, It's a crime against humanity.
It's a war crime, depending on how the context is.
In this case, I would call it a war crime.
And the fact is, they get away with it time and again.
And what probably really bothers me about this, these things are done.
To create a sense of power in those carrying out the crime.
That's one thing.
But the other thing is to muddy the waters in terms of what's going on to make it look like Israel, in this case, is doing something effective to defend itself.
I mean, this is nonsense.
You can go through history and you will find very few cases.
Of where eliminating, certainly in recent history, eliminating a head of state or head of party or something like that really has a major impact because these groups, particularly in the 20th century and before, are multileveled and multifaceted.
And they draw on a constituency that is able to replace the person fairly quickly.
So the whole thing is kind of a game being played.
I'm wondering if it's going to lead up to something like an October surprise?
Well, is the death of Nasrallah himself a significant military loss for Hezbollah?
Or just a cultural, religious, spiritual, public relations loss?
Well, I would think it's more the latter.
It's going to have definitely a military or an ability of Hezbollah to respond to what the Israelis are doing.
This will be kind of, shall we say, mixed for a while as the dynamics of how...
But the indications are that in spite of the pager incident, Hezbollah has developed several multi-layered communication systems which should be functional.
And the people who were not killed are people that are really working on the ground level of the Hezbollah defense plans.
So that expertise will still be there.
Thank you.
Would the U.S. have known about this ahead of time?
The United States intelligence services know that Benjamin Netanyahu, from somewhere within New York City, it's unclear if he was in his hotel room or in some Israel Yeah, they would know that.
They would have certainly had his telephone tapped as well as the phones of his associates.
And so they would have known that.
And of course, also indications that everything that's been done So the United States provides the intelligence, provides some of the technical capabilities that Israel lacks.
They couldn't carry out some of these things without relying on the United States for support.
So is it fair to conclude that CIA probably DIA, you can give us a little bit more about that, and probably MI6 helped Mossad and the IDF murder Nasrallah.
Is that a fair conclusion, Phil?
I think it would be a fair conclusion, yeah.
See, in the world of intelligence, there are a lot of ways to find things out, and it's not always straightforward.
In the case of a guy like Netanyahu in New York with a highly tense situation developing in Lebanon, which the United States claimed to be wanting to cool off, they would have been tapping.
If they were not tapping his phone, they'd be doing other SIGID things where they'd be tracking.
Developments in terms of preparations being made in Israel to launch this attack and also in terms of communications levels peaking in certain areas.
There are a lot of smart ways to do this.
And so I strongly believe that the U.S. would have known about this in advance if and beyond that may have even collaborated in it.
Now, I got to stop for just a second.
Sometimes the viewers...
Phil, there are as many comments about Rupert over your right shoulder on the Queen Anne chair than there are about what you and I are talking about.
Rupert has a PhD in minding your own business.
Very clever.
Well, the cat just walked through the room, too.
Yes, the cat just walked through the room, and I guess the two of them get along.
What is the DIA?
Does it work with the CIA or are they competition?
They have sort of different turf carved out in terms of what they focus on.
But the argument is always that they collaborate in terms of the final products that go through the Office of National Intelligence and that sort of thing to give a product that brings I've always been suspicious of that because there is certainly a sense of competitiveness among these organizations.
All right, so DIA is what?
Defense Intelligence Agency?
Of course, they would be more focused on purely military aspects, whereas the CIA would be focused more so on political.
Secret wars, private wars, coups d 'etat?
Well, every intelligence or most intelligence components that operate in the world environment have an element, a paramilitary element.
It is generally the way it's packaged, that exists to, on occasion, carry out what one is frequently calling wet work.
They have it.
The agency had it.
It was pretty much dormant until 9 /11.
I remember that most of the paramilitaries were actually stationed at a base in Williamsburg, Virginia.
And so they weren't necessarily bumping off any of the locals.
But they came out of the closet, as it were, after 9-11 and have been a fairly active element ever since.
Now, DIA, of course, relies on military components like Delta and others that carry out that kind of thing.
That's their active arm.
Indirectly, but ultimately to the President of the United States, not to Congress, and obviously with no transparency.
That would be a fair comment.
Although, again, how these things play out is always a little bit cute in terms of, you know, who clears what with whom and what the levels of understanding are.
And this has gotten increasingly that way, again, ever since 9-11 with the pandemic.
So the reason I'm asking this is, can, or that's the wrong word, should CIA or DIA agents that facilitated the assassination of Hassan Nazarela be concerned that they might be prosecuted for a war crime someday?
Who knows which way the political winds could blow?
Well, I would respond to that, that I agree with you absolutely.
I think these people should be aware of that, and they probably are aware of that.
But the fact is, how many American presidents who carried out illegal assassinations of individuals overseas are in jail right now?
None of them.
The ability to prosecute a senior U.S. government official, like the head of the State Department, the head of the CIA, or a president or vice president, is nonexistent.
A Spanish magistrate has indicted George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes.
They're obviously not in jail.
They can't travel to the EU because it's an EU wide arrest warrant that presumably would be served on them and executed if they made the mistake.
Yeah, that's correct.
And of course, there were concerns on the part of...
he might well be arrested.
I think that was a bit overstated, but that's what they were concerned with.
Did the envoys...
Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk encourage Israel to invade Lebanon.
Do you know that?
That's being reported.
I don't know if that's the case, but certainly these two individuals are both completely pro-Israel, and so far as that's possible, and are hawks.
So I'm not surprised if that's the case.
If I were the president, I would do an investigation, and if I discovered that this was true, I would fire them immediately and take steps to try them and imprison them.
Except that they're doing the president's bidding insofar as they can divine what's in his head.
He's fanatically pro-Israel, no matter what Israel does.
So I guess they feel they have some comfort.
Hochstein is an unusual...
And McGurk also has a unique background, having worked for Republicans and Democrats.
I think he goes back to Barack Obama and worked for Donald Trump as well.
Well, it's also alleged that Tony Blinken is a dual national.
The Secretary of State of the United States of America is a citizen of a foreign country?
That's being claimed in some circles.
And there's some historic relevance to that in terms of his stepfather's connection with the state of Israel, with Israel's top spy at that time, and elements like that that don't quite fit.
And one kind of questions how Here's President Biden's opinion of the effectiveness of the Iranian missile barrage that attacked Israel last night.
Cut number 22. A few words about Iran's missile attack on Israel today.
At my direction, the United States military actively supported the defense of Israel.
And we're still assessing the impact.
But based on what we know now, the attack appears to have been defeated and ineffective.
And this is testament to Israeli military capability and the U.S. military.
I'm also a testament to intensive planning between the United States and Israel to anticipate...
Well, we don't know yet.
Let's wait until we get some more authoritative indications of what the actual damage on the ground was, because several of the reports are suggesting that one Israeli airbase was very badly damaged,
possibly even to include some airplanes on the ground, and there were other suggestions that Among the 200 missiles that were fired, a number of them were probably hypersonic, supersonic, that could evade the Israeli defenses, and they too got through and hit their targets.
And the suggestion was that the Iranians were sending a signal that, all right, this was a few missiles, we can send 200 of them.
Or we can send them in waves hour after hour.
This might be a message that was being sent to the Israelis and to the United States.
But we don't know that yet.
It's too soon.
And what the real damage was, we don't know.
And I do take note of the President of the United States sort of gloating at his role in defending Israel in this thing.
Israel has been the aggressor.
In all of these situations recently, and now suddenly when somebody strikes back, you know, they're the bad guys.
Here's more gloating with no mention of help from the United States.
Cut number three.
This evening, Iran again attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles.
This attack failed.
It was thwarted thanks to Israel's air defense array, which is the most advanced in the world.
And which was paid for by the United States taxpayer.
He could have added that.
Yeah, and he's, of course, speaking, his is a political message.
So it's basically to tell the Israeli people that he's defending them and protecting them.
And it's funny if you read the New York Times and everything in the aftermath of this, they're saying all of this...
I mean, that's the New York Times basically playing its own game in terms of defending Israel.
But it struck me as an odd kind of thing.
Okay, we've been attacked by 200 missiles based on what we did.
that we didn't have to do.
And now you're saying it's a success because they didn't all hit their target.
Well, well...
Here's the response in Gaza, on the streets in Gaza, as the Muslims are coming in.
Oh Oh Oh Oh Allah wa ta'ala!
Allah wa ta'ala!
you Thank you.
No surprise there.
Switching gears, Phil, Julian Assange recently spoke out and articulated an indictment of the CIA.
There are some things in here that I did not know about, although Aaron Maté tells me that all this stuff was publicly known.
It's about two minutes long, but I'd like you to listen to it and give me your thoughts, please.
Cut number two.
We revealed the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.
CIA director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.
It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo's explicit direction, the CIA Drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian embassy in London and authorize going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information.
My wife and my infant son were also targeted.
A CIA asset This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former U.S. intelligence officials speaking to the U.S. press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.
The CIA's targeting of myself, my family, and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression.
Such repressions are not unique.
What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to to judicial investigations in Spain.
Does any of this shock you?
Does the CIA do this kind of stuff that he's characterized?
Well, it doesn't, unfortunately.
Although I would argue this has, again, been a product of what the CIA has become after my time in it as a result of 9 /11.
The terrorism scares that were drummed up at that time.
Everyone was becoming the enemy.
We were out to get everyone.
The world was against us if they were not emphatically for us, as George Bush paraphrased it.
I think that there's a lot of evil in the U.S. government that has been able to manifest itself.
And I certainly heard a lot of these tales before they were as described by Assange as we were going along with him in prison.
I was picking up on various sources that were telling me this is kind of what's coming up next.
Would the director of the CIA himself order the murder of a foreign national civilian?
Sure, the director of the CIA would order it, just as President Obama used to meet with his senior intelligence officials every Tuesday morning and draw up a list of Americans who were overseas, who were a threat and should be assassinated by the United States.
The Ollakis, the father and son, were two examples of that in Yemen, and I'm sure there were more than that.
So we have the President of the United States authorizing murdering U.S. civilians without any due process.
And this guy is still walking around and pretending to be a great hero.
It's devastating what has become of the American government.
The Al-Awlaki case is well known.
The father was born in New Mexico.
The son was born in Virginia.
They were never charged with a crime.
They weren't violent.
They didn't have weapons on them.
They were followed by a CIA team for the final 48 hours of their life, and they were sitting in an open-air cafe having tea when an American drone evaporated them.
And when the media, mainstream media, of which I was a part at the time, pressed the attorney general for the legal authority for this, He sent it to NBC News only.
NBC, of course, sent it to the rest of us.
It would have flunked a first-year law school exam.
It equated the evaporation of the Alaki father and son to the police shooting at a bank robber as they're chasing him when the bank robber is shooting at them.
There was no comparison.
But that was what the government claimed was its legal authority to murder these two Americans.
Wouldn't the CIA have second thoughts about that?
Wouldn't some agents say, I'm not doing it?
I'm not going to kill these guys?
Sure.
And I know quite a lot of those people who are disgusted in terms of what their service back in the Cold War has turned into.
And to what kind of monster the CIA has become.
But let's face it.
The CIA is part of the government.
All this stuff is authorized.
And essentially the government has become a monster.
And now we're confronting an election in which either of the major parties, whichever one we vote for, if we choose to vote, we are unleashing a monster.
Which is going to create habit for the next four years.
Very little indifferent in terms of how they're going to do it.
They're going to unleash Israel.
They're going to possibly be going to war with Russia and China.
And if this becomes a nuclear war, we're all going to be dead.
I'm sorry to say, but that there's a very strong argument to support what you just articulated.
Now, Rupert has left the Queen Anne chair, Phil.
I hope all is well.
Well, he and the cat are by the door.
Okay.
Thank you, Phil.
Always a pleasure, my dear man.
No matter what we talk about, look forward to doing it again next week.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
All the best.
Bye-bye.
Coming up tomorrow, Thursday, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, 9 in the morning, Ambassador Charles Freeman, 12 noon, all times Eastern as usual.
Max Blumenthal at 1 o 'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 2 o 'clock, and of course worth waiting for at 3 o 'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.
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