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Oct. 21, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:28
Ray McGovern : US Aid to Israel is Illegal
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, October 21st, 2024.
Ray McGovern joins us in just a few minutes on what is the significance of the intelligence leak of documents showing Israeli plans to attack Iran.
And why isn't anybody pointing out that every penny of aid to Israel violates federal law?
But first this.
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Ray McGovern, my dear friend, welcome back to the show, as always.
It seems like we were on about five minutes ago with Larry Johnson, but I know that was before the weekend.
In your view, did Hezbollah try to assassinate Prime Minister Netanyahu by dispatching a drone aimed at the bedroom of his weekend home, or were they just trying to tell him a message that they can do it if they want to?
I think it's the message.
They probably knew where he was, and he wasn't at his beachfront home.
So, yeah, it's no more nor less than Hezbollah, as Iran did earlier, showing what they're capable of.
And they are capable of pretty much pinpoint accuracy.
I noticed that some of the Israeli people are...
I don't think so.
I don't think so at all.
That would be a dangerous thing to do.
If you could tie Iran specifically to this, that may be another matter.
but they're really blowing that up out of proportion.
I don't...
I'm not familiar with them at all, but Alistair Crook this morning said he believed that the drone was self-directed, that it had in it a computer chip which had a picture of Netanyahu's house, and once the drone saw the house, it was directed directly at it.
I didn't know that drones were that sophisticated.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Well, I'm not surprised either.
I'm not sure about this particular one, but always go with Alistair on these things, and you can't be very wrong.
What do we know about, and what is the significance of the release of top-secret intelligence materials concerning the United States' awareness of the Israeli plans to attack Iran?
Judge, these were extremely sensitive documents.
They were dated the 16th, so that would be Wednesday.
They were around and on Telegram channel on Friday, the 18th, and nobody wanted to deal with it except websites and Twitter people like me.
Twitter, not Twitter.
So it was sort of suppressed because it was so dynamic.
Now, what did it show?
It showed Israeli preparations to take off with a major attack on Iran, and these were preparations monitored by US intelligence, the most sensitive collection means that require the most sensitive classification directives.
Now, one of the things was that these were all made available to Countries, but you had to be white, okay?
The five I's, U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Part were only made available to the U.K. They classify each paragraph.
And so there's lots of room for people feeling resentful.
And why do they keep that from us?
But the more important thing is that whoever did this, in my view, was a classic.
Whistleblower.
Dan Ellsberg, the whistleblower pro-exhalant, always said, in my presence he must have said it about 20 times, don't do what I did.
Don't wait until it's too late to affect a war or the widening of a war.
Do your leak in time to prevent what's going to happen.
Now, I don't know if this person This leaker was listening to Dan Ellsberg or not.
But he or she certainly knew the significance of this.
And what better way to try to stop this, I say try, to reveal to the world that we know exactly what the Israelis are doing.
We are not bridling them in in any way, as a matter of fact.
Our president late last week saw fit to say, in answer to a question, do you know what the Israelis are going to do and when are they going to do it?
He said, yes and yes.
So, bottom line, the U.S. is fully complicit in whatever the Israelis choose to do.
That's a really dumb thing to be at this point, because the one last point here is escalation dominance.
Okay, now that's a fancy word.
What does that mean?
Well, that was coined by Obama, and it means that when you go up the escalation ladder, one country usually exercises dominance.
In other words, it can end the thing at some point.
Now, Israel does not have escalation dominance.
Neither did Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, okay?
So if Israel doesn't have escalation dominance, well, they're in for big trouble.
If and when the Iranians decide to reply to whatever attack is coming from Israel, and also we know that there are U.S. forces stationed all around that part of West Asia.
I would not put it past the Iranians to have their sponsored access of resistance take off after U.S. bases in Syria or in Iraq or in any number of places who are very vulnerable.
They do not have escalation dominance.
Oh, I think so.
Yeah.
I mean, the Iranians know a whole lot.
But these were for the most sensitive U.S. sources.
You can tell by the classifications.
I won't read them out to you.
But they were top secret in various code words, okay?
And one of the code words, as I said, was release only to the other four eyes.
Those are the four white guys that I told you about, okay?
One was just released to the U.K. So, yeah, we know chapter and verse what they do.
They'll have people on the ground and all kinds of collection devices.
Iran has putatively great coverage, but whether they have that kind of detail, I doubt it strictly.
And so, you know, one can say that this leak really damaged Netanyahu if he goes ahead with this plan.
Because here's the thing, Judge.
What else?
What else do the Iranians know as a result of this leak or others like it is what appeared on that tele.
The Iranians know a hell of a lot about what's coming.
Will it come anyway?
God knows.
Maybe even God doesn't know.
Netanyahu makes that decision.
What are the Five Eyes?
The Five Eyes will come after World War II.
World War II, there were the five English-speaking white nations, the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and they have privileged access to all SIGINT.
Those are signals, intelligence, virtually everything is shared, as is indicated in this case.
So these people are all complicit, most of all, of course, the United States, because these are U.S. sources.
They're not phony, as far as I can tell.
So I do attribute it to a patriotic leaker.
Somebody who said, maybe if I do this on time, like Ellsberg kept saying, I can prevent a major war in the Middle East.
And he or she go ahead and did it.
When I asked Alistair why would somebody do this, he looked at me and said, maybe they wanted to prevent World War III, which is a profound, concise argument.
How obvious, or that's the wrong word, how apparent is it to you as an intelligence community professional for your adult life that this was a leak from someone on the inside?
Someone who legally had access to this leaked it.
This is not an outsider hacking in.
No, the documents are such that it had to come from authentic inside sources.
I read them both very carefully.
I don't see any other option.
Somebody on the inside said, my God, if I release this to the public, could that stop a war?
And they decided to go ahead and do it.
How many human beings would have legally had access to these two documents?
Oh, I would think only about 300, Judge.
These things go all around the world.
The FBI and the Pentagon will be at it for two years now trying to figure out what the distribution list was.
Even though this was of the highest classification, once it gets into command centers and all other manner of central places, it gets distributed even to some units on the ground.
So in answer to your question, my guess would be...
This must be.
A lot more secret than those.
Yeah.
These are prepared, in this case, by NGA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, okay?
They're the ones that monitor and analyze all the intelligence coming from satellites and other overhead.
At one point they say, now, we can't really tell from our sources, namely imagery.
And we're talking not only about photographs or images, but radar, multi-faceted.
I mean, these satellites can do a hell of a lot.
Everybody knows that, okay, including the Iranians and the Israelis.
So this stuff comes, and it gets prepared, and NGA puts it to the Pentagon, and they say, well, okay, we're going to release this to only the people that we want to know, okay?
And the other thing is, well, let's see, what was I going to say?
Well, it's circumscribed in its diffusion, but everyone in these five eyes has full access to it.
And I guess what I was going to say is even there in this text, it says two things that are important.
One is it acknowledges in a clear way that Israel has nuclear weapons.
That they haven't moved them.
Thank goodness, they say, but they do have nuclear weapons that they haven't moved.
And the other thing is that we, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, warn you that we can't tell when this is going to happen.
That's got to come from other sources like the CIA or NSA from intercepted conversations.
So don't blame us if it's a surprise.
Turn to those other agencies and figure out how they can put their input, so to speak, into this riddle, because this is important.
I don't know what's going to happen, but the pressure on Netanyahu now from these disclosures, not so much from, you know, from Blinken and Nod and Sullivan and Biden, but, you know, the Israeli military says, my God, look what they know.
And that's the only part of it, probably.
Are they going to go ahead and do escalation of a major kind when they do not enjoy escalation?
Dominance?
I don't know.
It's still an open question.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, I guess, was so angry he didn't make a public statement in front of a camera, but he did release this relatively brief statement, which we have on the full screen.
Israel will listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interest.
Why do you have to say something like that?
Because the whole world knows he'd have no options if the United States didn't pay for everything.
Well, I think that statement came before these documents were released.
That's one thing.
The other is that he's trying to be the big guy here and say, look, we're going to make our own decisions.
That's a consistent theme in his utterances.
The U.S. is not going to tell us what to do.
And, you know, Biden and we can hide behind that, say, oh, my God, you know, we can tell them be nice and they won't be nice.
We tell them not to attack.
Well, give me a break.
The U.S. does have preponderant influence within the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, and with high politics in Tel Aviv, but not so much with Netanyahu, who has his personal reasons for continuing this thing, and clearly is hell-bent on doing that.
The only thing that could stop him is for Biden to wake up.
Or our military to wake up and tell Biden, look, this is a fool's errand.
We wish we had told you this about Ukraine because Russia had escalation dominance.
Now we know because the Iranians have demonstrated it, they have escalation dominance.
Where do you think this is going to stop?
Bibi's going to be calling you up and saying, please come to our rescue.
He's going to fully expect that you will have no other option in these last two weeks before the election.
Be prepared for that, Mr. President.
We think it's a lousy idea.
I'm pretty sure that's what our military is telling not only President Biden.
But also the Israeli military.
And if the Israeli military gets that message and goes to Netanyahu and says, look, we can't depend on the Americans and we're overextended already, maybe Netanyahu will pause before doing worse than he has already done.
Will the release of these documents impair?
The ease with which CIA and Mossad or Defense Intelligence Agency and IDF communicate?
Or are we so intertwined with them that the release of the documents will not interfere with or impede that free communication, bilateral communication?
That's a really good question.
I think it's the latter.
It's too intertwined.
It's too close.
It won't really interfere.
That wouldn't prevent Bibi Netanyahu from taking off after the U.S. and not telling the U.S. exactly when he's going to unleash his forces against Iran.
He could easily say, look...
So, you know, we wanted them to be surprised.
And look what we did.
Look what we did.
We run off after If Prime Minister Netanyahu for whatever reason chooses to mislead the White House or be silent wouldn't MI6 CIA We know what they know from these leaked documents.
They're dated Wednesday, if I didn't see that already.
So it's pretty up to date.
What do they know anymore?
I don't know.
Presumably there are people talking to the Israelis, but are they being straight with them?
I doubt it.
In other words, this could be a magnificent, so to speak, Surprise, for which they don't ask permission or even tell us about, but prefer, as is their standard, to ask for forgiveness after it, when we are, with two weeks of the election, pretty much faced with a choice.
Do we abandon our ally?
You know it's not an ally.
Do we abandon our best friend?
Do we abandon only democracy?
Do we abandon Israel or not?
That's a tough choice.
Biden should try to prevent having to make that choice, but he probably doesn't have enough influence with Netanyahu.
I want to take a step back and look at big picture for a minute because of something that you've said.
You have, on a couple of occasions, not just today, but on other days, Do you believe there is some racial animus in the Zionist hatred and persecution of Palestinians?
It's not only Zionist, it includes Zionists, but let's face it, this thing was an artifact of World War II.
Now they've been sharing intimately with one another all kinds of Sagan.
It signals intelligence since World War II.
If you just look at them, okay, or look at NATO, for God's sake, what's the distinctive characteristic?
Well, it's that they're all white.
How does that distinguish them from other people in the world?
Well, the majority, the vast majority, are people of color.
I've been saying this for years, but this is a really noxious divide between people along racial lines.
Do I think it's real?
Of course I think it's real.
And during Vietnam, you know, James Baldwin wrote a beautiful letter to Angela Davis, and what he said is, As the lily white West thinks it's a work its will on the rest of the world, it's going to go ahead and do that, and we are the casualties.
Right now, the Vietnamese are the casualties.
Yeah, I think there's a racial element in it.
It can be overblown, I suppose, but if you look at it, Look at the faces of the Five Eyes.
And then look at what's convening tomorrow in BRICS, in Kazan, in Russia.
And you'll see that most of the people in the world are on the other side of this issue.
Most of the people in the other world are people of color, and the Global South and the rest of them are rising in importance and economic power, and that's the destiny.
It's not going to be possible for President Bush to say, it's not going to happen on my watch, because it has already happened.
Would the United States offensively attack a country that poses zero?
Well, of course, we did that with Iraq.
We knew full well they had no weapons of mass destruction.
We knew full well they had no ties, that is, Saddam Hussein had no ties with Al-Qaeda.
We put that notion around so that we could associate Saddam Hussein with 9 /11.
It was very, very clever.
Before we attacked Iraq, About 70%, if memory serves, of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11.
Worked like a charm, but only works for so long.
One important aspect of this, Judge, is it's becoming clearer and clearer to me that of those three factors I've cited by that acronym I built, oil, O for oil, I for Israel.
L for the logistics of the permanent military bases that we coveted in Iraq.
By far, the most important of those three was the Israeli influence on our decision-making.
And I have people like General Scowcroft and Nishanyahu himself sort of admitting that in a very clear way.
Look, we make these decisions and we influence the U.S. to do this so that we had nothing to fear.
From Saddam Hussein, well, that worked for a while, never works in the long term.
Why is it unlawful under federal law for the United States to be giving military aid to Israel?
Well, there are two reasons now.
One is that the most recent revelations document the fact that the U.S. intelligence knows that Israel has nuclear weapons and they have them on the kind of missiles that can reach Iran.
That's just recent.
But before then, it was an open secret.
The only reason we couldn't acknowledge it That's in the Nonproliferation Treaty.
But even before that, we knew quite well that Israel had nuclear weapons, and the Arms Export Control Act, Act of Congress, forbids any country to give aid to another country.
In violation of the NPT.
Israel is not a member, of course.
And, of course, in violation of U.S. law.
U.S. law providing that the aids we give such a country should not be used for aggressive actions.
Now, Tony Blinken flicked away.
The advice of two, at least two of his major directorates, which said, look, the Israelis are violating international law with the arms that were given them.
They're starving the people in Gaza, and they're using these weapons to bomb the hell out of their neighborhood.
So, you know, under the law, we really shouldn't be doing this.
And Blinken went and testified to Congress and said, we have no indication that the Israelis are violating that law.
And Congress, of course, sat back and said, oh, phew, thanks, Tony.
We were hoping you'd say that.
Wow.
Thank you, Ray.
Thank you very much, my dear friend.
I expect in the days and weeks we'll learn more about what the government knows about the person who leaked these documents, probably a hero somewhere, whose heroism probably won't be recognized until it's too late, but we'll see.
Let's hope that he follows the example of Ed Snowden and has friends in very influential places that can spirit him out of his difficulties into a place where he won't be hung, so to speak.
Thank you, Ray.
All the best, my dear friend.
We'll see you at the end of the week with Larry, as always.
Thanks, Judge.
Sure, have a great week.
And the aforementioned Larry, Larry Johnson at 11 o 'clock, will be here at 11 o 'clock this morning.
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