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Oct. 20, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
33:39
Scott Ritter : Secret Documents; Attempts to Assassinate Netanyahu
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, October 21st, 2024.
Scott Ritter will be with us in just a moment on the significance of the intelligence leaks of documents showing the Israeli plans to attack Iran and the significance of somebody's attempt.
To assassinate Prime Minister Netanyahu.
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Scott Rader, my dear friend, welcome to the program.
Always a pleasure to be able to pick your brain.
Thank you very much for your time.
On Friday of last week, a drone apparently struck the house, may have gone in through the window of the house, a weekend home of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Was this a serious attempt to assassinate him or a message?
I think it was a message.
It was a serious attempt.
My understanding is there may have been up to three drones that had been dispatched on that.
Two of them were shot down.
But again, we're going off of information that we don't know the source.
You know, this could be a red flag.
This could be whatever.
But if the information is accurate, I think three drones were launched.
Two were shot down.
One made it to the target.
These weren't drones that were designed to deliver massive Explosive blasts.
I mean, if somebody had been on the receiving end, I think they probably would have killed them.
But this just looks like it was sending a signal and a message that, you know, we know what you did, killing Nasrallah, and you're on our list.
I want to play for you a clip from President Erdogan, who's expressing his condolences.
To the family of Sinwar, who of course was assassinated last week by the IDF.
And then I will play you the American government's version of this.
Cut number three.
After my brother Ismail Haniyeh, the last elected prime minister of Palestine, I also pray to God to have mercy on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who was martyred recently.
Today, I once again salute, with respect to all the leaders and members of the Palestinian resistance, who became legendary not only with exemplary struggle, but also with their martyrdom, and the heroes who watered the lands of Gaza with their blessed blood.
Now the Biden administration version of this.
From Matt Miller at the State Department, cut number two.
Moss and other terrorist groups will try to present Sinwar as some kind of hero for the Palestinian cause.
But I think it's important that everyone remember the actual facts, which is that Senwar was a brutal terrorist that didn't just terrorize the Israeli people, but that ruled Gaza with an iron fist before October 7th that brutalized Palestinians in Gaza, that tortured Palestinians in Gaza, and then unleashed a conflict that has been responsible for the death of more than 40,000 Palestinians.
So I would hope that anyone that's considering thinking of him in any favorable light at all, Does this crackpot have any idea what he's talking about?
This guy would know heroism if it hit him in the face.
I don't think he's ever done a heroic thing in his life.
I don't think he's ever done anything that requires an ounce of courage.
This is a man who stands up and spews lies.
Distorts truth, and that's his job, and that's what he's doing here.
Look, you know, there's the old saying, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
So certainly from the perspective of the Israelis and the United States government, Senwar was a terrorist.
I have no problem with somebody calling him that.
I won't disagree with it, but I understand why people would say that.
But to question this man's courage and dedication to the cause that he died for.
You know, when you introduce this, you said he was assassinated.
No, he went down fighting.
From what I understand, that he had been out in the streets for 18 days, leading his troops, going out there fighting.
This is a man that the Israelis said was hiding in a tunnel, surrounded by hostages and his family, running scared.
Now, this is a man who was out in the streets leading his men in combat against the Israeli occupier.
And in the end, he died.
I mean, they got caught in a building, tank fire.
You know, missile fire, and they sent in a drone, and he, you know, his last, and you've got to understand the injuries this guy had at the moment when that drone showed up.
One arm blown off, one leg nearly blown off, the other arm mangled.
His body's in shock, and yet he still picked up a stick and threw it at the drone in a final act of defiance before the Israelis came in and killed this man.
And remember, the man that they killed was gravely wounded.
So, you know, one might call that murder.
As opposed to coming in and, you know, taking him captive, which is something they could have done, but they didn't.
They murdered him.
But this man went down fighting.
And again, it's heroism.
I recognize heroism wherever it occurs.
Even in my enemies, you recognize that your enemies fight bravely, etc.
Regardless of who you think is Senwar, you have to acknowledge that he fought bravely until the end.
And so to call him anything other than I don't think he's done anything, any service to his country that would put him in a place where he could be heroic.
So, you know, that's my 10 cents on that.
What is the significance, militarily or geopolitically, if any, to Senmar's death?
Look, when you have somebody of significance who has a personality that has taken hold, even before his death, he was considered by many Palestinians to be legendary in terms of his resistance.
This is a man whose biography is amazing.
Remember, he was born in the camp.
People tend to forget that.
His parents lived in Ashkelon, right across in what is now Israel, but back then it was Palestine.
His parents were evicted from their home as part of the 1948 Nakba, driven out along with 700,000 other Palestinians into an open-air prison camp where Senwar was born.
He is a child of the camps.
He was raised in the camps as a prisoner, and this is a man who said, we're not going to do this anymore.
He was captured by the Israelis, and they put him in prison, but before he was captured, he ran the Security Service.
Now, you know, Miller criticized this, you know, torture, brutal.
Israel puts spies in, insinuates spies.
And how do they get those spies?
For instance, the women spies.
They'll arrest the women.
They will rape the women, film it, and then say, we release this film to your family who will kill you in an honor death unless you do what we want.
So they blackmail.
They take men in.
They rape them homosexually, film it, put them out there and say, we'll put this out.
So they insinuate these people in there.
To spy on the Palestinians, to murder the Palestinians, to set them up to be killed and otherwise abused by the Israelis.
And Sinwar came in and cleaned that up.
Now, you can question his tactics and all that stuff.
It's a cruel world, etc.
He cleaned it up.
That's why the Israelis hate him.
They arrested him.
They put him in jail for 22 years.
He wrote a book there while he was in prison.
He learned about the Israelis, and he got freed in, I think, 2011 in a prisoner swap.
And since then, he's been focused on You can say what you want about October 7th.
It was a military assault against the Israelis that beat the Israelis like a sick little puppy on October 7th and 8th.
Accomplished what it wanted to, which would draw the Israelis into Gaza so they could act like Israelis do.
Commit genocide, collective punishment.
The whole world has turned against Israel.
And for the first time ever, the concept of a Palestinian state is on everybody's lips.
This is because of Senwar.
You may not like a Palestinian state, you may not, but this is what the man did.
To call him a terrorist is absurd.
He is a freedom hider in the cause of Palestinian statehood, and if you don't judge your enemy correctly, you'll never defeat your enemy.
Sun Tzu said you have to know the enemy like the back of your head clearly Matt Miller in the United States doesn't know their enemy because if they're calling Senwar a murder a thug and something else they're going to get whipped because They live in a dream world if they don't think that what Senwar started on October 7th resonates positively in the minds of many people around the world.
Is there a replacement from him who is likely to be just as tenacious and courageous and dedicated to the cause?
Absolutely.
When you think about the Palestinian cause, Sinwar was one of millions of children of the camp.
There are others like him out there with similar experiences.
The cause is a just cause.
It wasn't Sinwar's cause.
It was the Palestinian cause.
It is the Palestinian cause.
And there are other Palestinians out there who possess just as much charisma, just as much courage, who will emerge as the leader.
Hamas is an idea, an ideology.
The Israelis have acknowledged this.
There are some Israeli generals who say we'll never beat them because you can't defeat an ideology.
And so the Hamas cause will produce leaders that will be every bit as capable of Sinmar.
Sinmar, for some time now, has been saying he's a dead man walking.
He's waiting for the Israelis to kill him.
He knew what his fate would be.
You can't rise to this level and get this much of a profile and live when the Israelis put the target on you.
But killing one man does not eliminate a cause that resonates in the hearts of millions.
Talk to us, please, Scott, about these two documents that were released on Telegram.
They have all the earmarks of being official American top secret documents.
Real documents.
I mean, the way they're structured, the code words, the way they're laid out, this looks like a U.S. government document.
What's interesting, it looks like a U.S. government document that the Israelis aren't aware of.
We're monitoring the Israelis.
So this is a document that's produced within American circles to advise American leaders about what Israel's doing, because Israel's not talking to us about what they're doing.
A couple interesting things out there.
They're talking about specific weapons types, munition types.
Which would give the Iranians invaluable intelligence on how the Israelis plan to attack.
If you know the weapon, you know the range of the weapon, you know the attack profile, so you know the aircraft, you can start doing range arcs out there, finding out where they're going to be doing their refueling, where they're going to be launching their attack, and you do your patrols.
This is devastating for the Israelis in terms of their attack.
They talk about covert drones, again, giving away capabilities.
They talk about nuclear weapons, which is interesting because the United States treats the Israeli nuclear weapons threat as if it's real, as opposed to the Israeli official policy of deliberate ambiguity.
This is a devastating document for the Israelis.
And I believe it was deliberately released because the United States does not want Israel to attack Iran.
So this was an effort done by somebody in the U.S. government with permission or without permission to derail the Israeli government.
Whether they're successful or not, we'll find out.
Will this be a setback for the Israelis?
surely they're not going to carry forward what the plans articulated in the documents now that the whole world has seen the documents, are they?
As I said, it gives The Israelis would have to go back and take a look and maybe extend the range of the airplanes to get them out of predictable launch points, either released from a longer range or coming closer.
They'll take a look at their munitions mixed to see if there's anything more.
But the interesting thing is that it gives specific numbers of weapon systems, which tells the Iranians about targets, and then they can prioritize.
So if you know the Israelis are going to hit, they have 60 weapon systems, that's 60 targets.
It just gives the Iranians a lot to go on when it comes to time to plan or try to predict what the Israelis are going to do.
It doesn't prevent an Israeli attack.
It complicates an Israeli attack, and I'm sure that they're furious.
To the United States about this, but tough luck.
mean I think this is a signal to Israel that you're not America you're not one of us you're not part of our team especially when you behave in a manner that is detrimental to our strategic posture in the world today and is really attack against Iran would be devastating for the United States economically and for the Biden administration politically because it would get us involved in a regional war you know less than 20 days out of an election where
I mean, what makes Donald Trump's message resonate greater than getting into a war that doesn't need to be gotten into?
So, I think this will help the United States put pressure on Iran, I mean, on Israel, and we'll see.
But Netanyahu, he's acting not in the interest of Israel, but in his own personal political interest.
And so, you know, Trying to get in the head of Netanyahu's Mission Impossible.
If you don't mind, well, let me ask you a couple of technical questions, and then I want to ask you to comment on what others have told me.
So my understanding from you is this is not a document that was produced by what Mossad revealed to CIA.
This is a document produced by what CIA learned by surveilling Mossad and IDF.
Is that correct?
Based on the classification level, top secret, and then there were some things in there that I'm really not allowed to comment on, I mean, in the public, but I'm not going to mention it, that is based upon surveillance.
That's not based upon liaison activity.
So some of this was shared with the four remaining members of the Five Eyes, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Some of it was labeled no foreign person can look at it, including the Five Eyes.
Now, do the Five Eyes know that the United States doesn't share everything with them and sometimes keeps information strategically from them?
Absolutely.
Look, during the Gulf War, I went to, we called it the Gypsy, but it was the Joint Imagery Processing Center where all the imagery, And when you walk in, you have one level where you had your, you know, your Canadians, your British, your, you know, I don't think we had anybody else.
Maybe the Australians had somebody in there.
But that's where, you know, the five eyes were.
But then you had the inner sanctum, which was American only because there were systems that we had out there that we don't share with anybody but ourselves.
And so, and the other thing about no foreign is, it's basically about protecting, A source of information.
For instance, if you notice, there was someone that said released Great Britain.
So we may have received intelligence because the British are doing a heck of a lot of monitoring out of Cyprus.
They're doing stuff out there.
And the British may have given us intelligence.
And the British have their own little, you know, protected sources.
And if the British shared it with us on the understanding that only the United States could have it, then that would become no foreign dissemination of this specific intelligence.
Do the IDF and Mossad know that CIA, DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and MI6 spy on them, even though we are supposedly lowercase a allies?
Of course they know and they do things.
For instance, if they...
So they're sending a signal, hey, this is what we're doing.
But they also are very clever.
If they know what we're monitoring and they don't want us to be catching on, they'll do deception.
and so they will put things out and that's one of the things I have to point out here is that we don't know if what was Maybe the Israelis were testing, put things out there to see if there would be a leak.
The Israelis know that we leak like crazy.
So these documents, even though they're real, there's a whole bunch of reasons why, rather than just jumping and saying, this is the Ten Commandments coming down from Moses, to take a pause and say, How did these documents get produced?
Why did these documents get produced?
How did the intelligence come about?
I'd have a whole bunch of counterintelligence guys going through Israeli past practice, looking at patterns of behavior to make sure that they're not deceiving us by doing something, knowing that we're collecting it to try and get our analysts and our policymakers moving in this direction, and then they do something else.
So your friends and colleagues on this show have the following views.
Alistair Crook says, quite simply, this was released by somebody who wants to prevent World War III.
Ray McGovern says it was released by an Edward Snowden whistleblower type, and he hopes that the person is on his way to Moscow.
Larry Johnson is of the view that it was an official release by somebody who legitimately had this I don't think it's a Snowden type person.
Snowden came out with everything.
So this is a very targeted leak of information.
The thing about having an official government person do it, and again, I don't want to get in too much in this, but When documents are produced at that level, there are things in the document that will indicate who had them, etc.
That's the way it used to work.
my understanding still works that way so there will be something about that document where the computer has done something so that when
So, if this person did that, then there would have to be a, they would have had to produce a clean document or something of that nature or something, because it's going to be investigated.
This is, if an official person is going to do this, you don't release those documents.
First of all, you're doing damage to the United States.
Those documents give away sources and methods.
They damage intelligence relationships.
It's a really bad document to give away.
You can give a briefing to the Wall Street Journal or to the Washington Post or the New York Times where you release that same information, but you don't package it in a way that does damage.
So I believe that this is a person that wants to stop the war, and they acted on their own volition.
And I think this is a person that will probably be discovered and will be arrested and charged with, you know, violating the law.
Because that's what this is.
It's a violation of law.
I know why they did it.
And I can't say that I'm against them doing it.
But as a former intelligence person, that dog releasing that document did a lot of damage, a whole bunch of damage that goes beyond simply trying to stop Israel from it gives away.
You know, overhead, I don't want to, again, it just gives away capabilities that are highly protected and should never be given away.
There's a better way to release this information than releasing the documents, which tells me this was more of an amateur effort to stop a war as opposed to something official.
Are the Israelis preparing to attack Iran in a substantial way?
There's no doubt about it.
The Israeli military, like any military During the Gulf War, Israel was actively preparing to send in multiple brigades of combat forces into western Iraq, backed up by helicopters and military aircraft.
They had a plan ready.
They had the troops ready.
But they never executed that plan because of the political pressure put on them by the United States.
But the Israeli military was ready to do that.
There's no doubt in my mind that the Israeli military is ready to attack Iran once the order is given.
That's their job.
Their job isn't to get political.
At least not the people who are planning it.
The political guys are the ones who are telling the boss, hey, when you do this, things are going to happen.
We can't defend.
It's going to be a mess.
You may not want to do this.
But when they're told to prepare to do something, they have to do this.
So there's no doubt in my mind that the Israelis have prepared several options.
You know, plan A, plan B, plan C. Mr. Prime Minister, these are the options we have to execute the operation that you've told us to get ready to do.
Do you think that the United States of America is ready to, I've got to strike that, the Biden administration is ready to back up this invasion of Iran irrespective of the natural and probable consequences to the United States of such a maneuver by us?
No.
I don't know what they're going to do if Israel attacks.
But I have a feeling that the United States, we're going to do everything we can to tell the Iranians we had nothing to do with this.
Because if our fingerprints are on this, understand that it is the death sentence for thousands of Americans.
They're very vulnerable right now in the region.
They're in bases that can't be protected from Iranian missiles, and the Iranian missiles will hit them.
And this time, it'll be done in a way that is designed to generate casualties.
And depending on how this attack is done, Overflight of Saudi airspace, things of that nature.
And depending on what target mix is going after, this could basically disrupt Middle East oil production.
And that's the end of the economy.
And Biden, again, understands this.
When he says he doesn't want Donald Trump elected, I think he means it.
He personally believes that Trump is going to be bad for America.
Why would you then throw away the election, you know, if you personally believe that?
If Iran is attacked by Israel, it will very much seal the fate of Kamala Harris in this election.
It'll be over, done.
I mean, she's not doing too well right now anyways, but this will be America going to war.
She's the vice president.
She'll be blamed.
This will be the economy going to hell.
She's the vice president.
She'll be blamed.
And I think Biden will also, he can't let the Israelis think that they can do things that will harm America and get away with it.
So I think that we're looking at, you know, the real potential of consequences if Israel goes through with this attack.
We're not going to be a part of it.
But doesn't Netanyahu believe that he can do whatever he wants and the United States will continue to give him whatever he asks for?
I think Netanyahu is getting briefings from people.
Some of them are saying what I'm saying.
Others are saying the opposite.
The United States can't afford not to back Israel.
Politically, the cost of not backing Israel will be far worse than the cost of failing to back Israel is far greater than the cost of the others.
So he also, remember, Netanyahu is a man who's And he thinks he's his own expert.
He thinks he knows America better.
And listen to what he says.
He has very little regard for us.
He says that we're Israeli puppets, that he's bought us, that he owns us, that, you know, they bought all the Congress, Congress will do it.
And he believes this.
He believes that Congress in the end will do what Israel wants him to do because Israel's invested literally hundreds of millions of dollars into buying this Congress.
He believes that the pro-Israeli lobby has such an iron grip on the American mass media that it'll be impossible to generate extensive negative press about Israel.
So this is a man who has his belief set and he will do what he believes.
And again, this doesn't come down to U.S.-Israeli relations.
This comes down to Benjamin Netanyahu's ability to stay in power and avoid being evicted from office, arrested, put on trial for corruption, and spend the rest of his life in jail.
That's what we're really talking about here.
And he's willing to sacrifice everything to keep that possibility from becoming an eventuality.
Is the resistance in the Middle East finally united?
As a result of all of Netanyahu's decisions and all of the IDF's slaughters?
The axis of resistance has always been united.
They've been doing escalation management that frustrates some people, and they misread that to say they're not really behind the Palestinian cause.
They're not willing to go all the way.
But remember, if this war blows up between Israel and Iran, we won't be talking about Palestine anymore.
We'll be talking about global energy crisis.
We'll be talking about, you know, the potential of nuclear conflict.
We'll be talking about a whole bunch of other things that isn't talking about the creation of a Palestinian state.
So the resistance has always been united in the creation of a Palestinian state.
And the way you keep the focus that has now been put on that away, on that problem, is to avoid creating bigger problems.
So the resistance is there.
The Arab world, though, isn't the resistance.
The resistance is Iranian-led.
There's a handful of actors in there.
But, you know, the rest of the Arab world, they're not on the side of the Palestinians.
And I think sometimes, you know, people lose sight of that, that the Saudis were celebrating Senmar's death.
The Saudis are not...
The Jordanians aren't in favor.
The Egyptians aren't in favor.
None of the Gulf Arab nations are in favor of this.
So when we speak of resistance and solidify, remember that it's only the Iranian-led resistance.
The rest of the Arab world is not on the side of Palestine.
If Israel attacks Iran and the United States aids Israel, what is the man in the Kremlin thinking?
I think we're seeing the Russians have been on the sidelines trying to work this out diplomatically.
But as Lavrov said and Putin has implied, Russia's not going to be on the sidelines forever.
At some point in time, Israel's crimes against humanity rise to the level where Russia will become directly involved.
And we're starting to see that, this relationship with Iran.
Providing Iran with weapons, the diplomatic backing, Russia won't support an attack, we'll condemn an attack.
I think we're, you know, Russia's not going to go to war for Iran.
This isn't that kind of alliance.
But Russia and Iran are strategically aligned, and this is very important for both.
When we speak of the economics, there's a corridor, a north-south corridor starting in St. Petersburg that runs to the Iranian port of Chabahar that is very important for the Russians from a global geopolitical perspective, and they want to preserve that.
So I think you're going to see Putin and the Russians becoming far more involved in this, and they're not going to be neutral.
They're going to be involved on the side of Iran and the Palestinians.
But will they be involved militarily by supplying weaponry or troops?
Well, they are providing weaponry.
The question of troops is a tough one.
You know, if you go back in history, you'll see, for instance, in the Korean War, there were Russian pilots, Soviet pilots, flying in the Korean Air Force.
During the Vietnam War, Russians were manning the air defense systems.
During the Yom Kippur War and in the War of Attrition leading up to that, there were Russian pilots manning the Egyptian MiGs.
Iran wants to incorporate, let's say Russia provides SU-35 fighters, advanced generation 4 plus fighters.
If Russia provides these fighters, the Iranian pilots aren't up to speed.
It takes six months to a year to transition into a new airframe, especially one that's of that complexity.
So there's every reason to believe that Russia might be providing pilots during this interim period to make that aircraft combat capable and ready to use.
Now, the same thing applies with the S-400 service-to-air missile that Russia has provided to Iran.
Unless Iranian crews were in Russia training on the S-400 and ready to fall in on that system, Russia would have to provide an amount of technical advisors on the ground working the radar, working the system, making sure it's done right.
So Russian forces could be in harm's way in any Israeli attack against Iran.
Scott Ritter, thank you, my dear friend.
I wanted to talk to you about Ukraine, but I've had you on enough for today.
I appreciate all of your insight, as always, and I hope we can see you again next week.
All the best.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, at 2 o 'clock, on all of these topics, Matt Ho, and at 3 o 'clock, Karen Kwiatkowski.
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