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Oct. 22, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:25
Phil Giraldi : Unseen Costs of US Support of Israel
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024.
Phil Giraldi joins us now.
Phil, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
As I was telling you, I'm a little wound up having just finished 25 minutes with the great George Galloway on his show from Kazan, Russia, from which he is coming.
You have written, from which he's reporting, You have written a fascinating piece about the latest American aid to Israel, and some of it is a head-scratcher.
I mean, what the U.S. has done.
These particular THAAD, T-H-A-A-D, an acronym for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense Missile System that the United States is giving Israel.
Hasn't Israel boasted for years?
That it has the best missile defense system in the world, commonly, or on the street, called the Iron Dome.
Of course, it's not an Iron Dome, but they refer to it as that.
And if it does have that boast, and we are sending materials over there that cost over a billion each, is the boast true?
Well, yeah, Israel has been boasting for many years that it has the world's best air defense system.
And that's an empty boast to a certain extent, because the reality is that you judge a system by how well it defends against your enemy's weapon.
And as we recently saw with the Iranian strike on Israel, that 97% of the missiles got through.
So, you know, that's a bit of an empty post.
And to me, this whole thing with that is mysterious in a way.
I know you've had a number of people on your show talking about it and what's behind it.
To me, it's all a question of motive.
Who is it actually who came up with this decision?
Whose brain came up with this one?
It's a guarantee in some ways that if Israel provokes Another Iranian attack.
And the Iranians feel compelled to respond.
This could get very messy very fast.
And each has 100 U.S. troops.
I would imagine they have some national security clearance.
I mean, because they're getting information from an American satellite about where the missile is, and then they're configuring the THAAD so that it goes up and strikes the missile.
As Larry Johnson and Scott Ritter have pointed out, the THAAD is configuring.
Now we know there are a minimum of 200 troops there.
Are they there as sitting ducks, commonly called in your profession, tripwire?
Well, that's, of course, again, we get back to motive.
What is the reason for having them there?
Are you going to sacrifice American troops, basically, to start a war that was unneeded in the first place?
I mean, this is quite incredible.
The whole thing is crazy.
I don't know what the actual purpose is, and I think those of us who are speaking to it or about it are speculating at this point.
But, you know, is this a plan by Netanyahu to actually start a war and to drag the United States in with him?
I'm afraid of that.
Do you think that Joe, I mean, I'm asking you to get into Joe Biden's brain, which if you could do, Would make you a very, very wealthy man.
But do you think that Biden even knew when he offered these things that they come with American troops?
He had to know that.
And let me point something out.
These are not the first American troops to be stationed in Israel.
Yeah, the United States maintains a strategic stockpile in Israel, and this has been the case for a number of years.
And this is all kinds of weapons that Israel is free to help itself to, but these are there basically for U.S. strategic purposes if needed.
And these weapons are stored in a number of warehouses at bases, military bases, in Israel.
And the guys who have the keys to the warehouses are American troops.
And this has been a little, you know, like a little secret, a big secret for a long time.
And this stockpile, I can send you some information.
On the stockpile and how it works, but we at one point in the recent past took out of one of the warehouses 200,000 rounds of 155 artillery and we sent it to Ukraine.
So this is an active center for American war making in that part of the world.
Boy, has this been authorized by Congress as far as you know?
It sounds as though American troops are not temporarily there, but are permanently there, are living there in order to protect these caches of weapons.
Well, the setting up of the stockpiles has been actually authorized by some congressional legislation.
The troops are kind of a go-along.
I mean, you know, if you have American weapons in a warehouse sitting in a foreign country, you're going to have some people there as a security measure.
And so it's not exactly like it's a huge number of American soldiers, but they have been there and they have been there for some time.
Since we spoke last, Phil, a number of interesting events occurred.
The Israelis killed...
And the Hezbollah sent two drones, one of which apparently, though the Israelis won't tell us what happened truthfully, Exploded in Prime Minister Netanyahu's bedroom while he and his wife were not there.
Let's start with Senwar.
How significant is it that he is dead?
Is this a setback to Hamas, or is this, as Max Blumenthal says, his martyrdom is an incentive to Hamas?
Yeah, I would agree with Max on that.
This is an incentive.
He's a martyr.
He died fighting.
These are all kinds of pluses, depending on where your mindset is and where you want to go with it.
So I would say that.
And another thing to point out about that is our good president, Joe, what's his name?
Yeah, him.
He's now boasting of the fact that the United States Now, does that mean the United States is now in business of helping foreign countries kill leaders, political leaders of other countries, and we are the ones that are enabling the process?
I mean, my God, this thing just gets deeper and deeper and deeper.
Right, right.
Well, we all know that the United States is responsible for the death of Colonel Gaddafi.
Mrs. Clinton famously, Secretary of State at the time, saying, we came, we bombed, he died.
Now, he didn't die in the bombing.
He died a horrific death.
It was publicly butchered, as those who follow this know.
Whether the CIA informed the butchers where he was, who knows?
I mean, does the CIA, does American intel do things like that?
Tell certain countries, that guy you're trying to kill, that's where he is.
Did the Mossad rely on CIA to know where to drop those 2,000-pound bombs in order to kill Nasrallah in Beirut?
Yeah, we don't know, of course, and it's very possible.
And I would point out in the case of Gaddafi, to mitigate it a little bit, I mean, it was a phony war in that it was another one of these wars that are kind of cooked up for no particular reason, I guess, just to see if NATO could do it.
And so they were practically at war.
So the use of intelligence to locate a foreign leader who was orchestrating the defense would be considered legitimate by some.
But the fact was, of course, as you say, instead of taking this guy prisoner, which they could have done, he was killed by militiamen, as I recall, in an extremely brutal fashion.
And, you know, we have a hand in this.
The blood is on our hands.
Has Israel succeeded in defeating Hamas?
Gee, I hope not.
I would have to say no, because Hamas is still active.
The Israelis are still taking casualties, although they don't reveal too often how many in their offensive against them.
And I think the resistance by Hamas, as we mentioned before, serves as an inspiration for people, for the Palestinians.
They're friends who are sick and tired of the brutality that Israel has been exercising in its occupation of what once was the state of Palestine.
And hopefully it will be again in the future.
Here's someone who disagrees with you, and knowing you as well as I do, you will welcome and embrace that disagreement.
Chris, cut number 16. Israel has achieved most of its strategic objectives when it comes to Gaza, all with the idea of making sure that October 7th could never happen again.
In the space of a year, it's managed to dismantle Hamas' military capacity.
It's destroyed a bunch of its arsenal.
It's eliminated its senior leadership, including, most recently, Yahya Sinwar.
This has covered the cost, great cost, to Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Now is the time.
To turn those successes into an enduring strategic success.
And there are really two things left to do.
Get the hostages home and bring the war to an end with an understanding of what will follow.
Ambassador Freeman says that Tony Blinken is the worst, this is pretty low considering Hillary Clinton is in this category, the worst Secretary of State in the post-World War II era.
But what did you think of that nonsense?
Well, he wouldn't know a strategic objective if it hit him in the butt.
I mean, this guy is so ignorant and is so much, again, Israel's lawyer on all this.
Of course, there are a lot of Israel's lawyers, including the president of the United States.
But Blinken is a particularly dense idiot in all of his pronouncements.
And I would put him in the same category as Kirby and Miller.
Right.
That's a pretty...
Is Israel an ally or a friend of the United States?
Ally means that you have to have a technical relationship which defines what the limitations are in terms of or what the limitations and also the obligations are in terms of the relationship.
Israel cannot become an ally of anyone.
Because it has no defined borders.
Its borders are, by design, constantly expanding.
So you can't say, well, when you cross the Jordan River, that means you're being attacked because Israel aspires to be itself beyond the Jordan River.
So it's not an ally.
And if it's a friend, why has Israel, in spite of the fact that it's taken us for $20 billion, Since this war began, rejected every overture, no matter how, you know, kind of fawning made by Biden and his crew.
Netanyahu has rejected every single thing that's come up.
So where's the friendship?
Where's the alliance?
Where's the relationship?
Have you had a chance to examine The two pages of American intel, which were leaked at the end of last week, in which your former colleagues reduced to writing their understanding of certain truths and preparations on the part of the Israelis vis-a-vis the Iranians.
Yeah, I have looked them over.
It's not really my area of expertise, but obviously this shows preparations being made by Israel to attack Iran.
Now, again, the big question really is, who leaked these documents?
What was the motive?
Because every player in this has a potential motive.
You know, where is this going to go?
And I am still fairly convinced that Netanyahu has promised to attack Iran several weeks ago and within three weeks, which takes us just before the election.
We'll probably do something like that, if only to provoke a response from Iran, which could either influence our election.
Or create a situation on the ground in which the United States has to come in to defend our best friend and ally in the entire world.
Is Israel our best friend?
No, Israel has done nothing but damage to the United States for over 50 years now, since the USS Liberty and before that.
You may know this fellow, Sir John Sowers.
Former head of MI6, the British Intelligence Service.
Here's his comments.
Now, he said this after the documents were released.
I don't know if he was aware of what was in the documents, but I'd like your thoughts on what he said.
And then there's something else, very unique, very profound, but mentioned matter-of-factly in the documents that I want to address with you.
But first, Sir John, cut number 13. The defense minister perhaps got ahead of himself when he implied there would be some form of intelligence operation, some form of cyber operation against Iran.
The Americans have clearly...
The Israelis might see an opportunity to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.
obviously one of our biggest concerns has been Iran's slow but gradual process towards acquiring nuclear weapons.
But in order to strike these nuclear facilities, which are deep underground under meters of concrete, they need the weaponry that only the United States
pursuing that road so of course will not please lindsey graham or john uh bolton But what do you think that is by not striking nuclear facilities or oil refineries?
But what do you think about what Sir John just said?
So what are they going to attack?
The cities and kill a lot of civilians?
Well, according to this, or according to what he said, military facilities.
So they'll attack the Revolutionary Guard bases and that sort of thing.
That would be what he'd think.
Well, that makes a certain amount of sense.
And again, the logic and motive elements and all these things going on, to me, this stuff is still quite elusive.
And it depends really who is doing the leaking and what was the idea behind it, or who is, you know, making these plans.
I mean, it's not even clear to me 100% that these documents might not have been tampered with by someone.
Might they have been a subterfuge?
Might Netanyahu have been in on it in order to give the Iranians a false sense of security or a belief that A is going to be attacked, whereas in reality they're going to attack B?
Could be.
And of course, that would make a lot of sense in terms of the kind of thinking that's going on in the Middle East right now.
There was a reference in these attacks to something that you have raised many times on this show, and it was just raised matter of factly.
Before I get to it, as background.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
These documents reveal that American intel spies on Israel, correct?
Okay.
The offhanded reference in these documents was to something Always a bit surprised when that surfaces.
It has, in fact, surfaced a couple of times in the past in Congress and that sort of thing, but never...
And this time it sort of casts a light on it.
I know and you know that U.S. government officials, by this I mean federal government officials, and that includes Congress, are instructed that they are not allowed to say anything.
About Israel having a nuclear arsenal, and yet now we see it in a document that clearly intelligence agency employees must have, many intelligence agency employees must have seen.
So it's kind of interesting, and of course it all impacts on the Lehi laws that essentially forbid.
It's a country that's not signed the nuclear non-proliferation agreement to get military assistance from the U.S., and by extension, military equipment or supplies and stuff like that are forbidden.
So this raises an interesting issue, and I would love to see maybe Tom Massey or someone like that pursue this and see where it goes.
I'm not going to hold my breath and see if the Justice Department intercedes to try and restrain the – this would be incredible – the Defense Department from sending arms to Israel on the grounds that federal law is violated thereby.
I mean, this administration, which is filled with perpetrators of genocide, could hardly care about federal law that interferes with their political rights.
designs.
Am I right, Phil?
Oh, absolutely.
This administration is totally...
They seem to be brain dead on a certain level.
Tone dead.
Tone deaf.
They're carrying out mass murder.
They're doing it with their eyes wide open.
I cannot imagine an American administration sinking this low.
Although I've been surprised in the past.
But this goes well beyond, we're talking about maybe 200,000 Gazans dead.
And still counting.
And we keep shipping the arms to them.
I mean, this is incredible.
What are the unseen costs?
To our obeisance to Israel.
I don't mean the $20 billion.
Anybody can add those numbers up.
But what other costs have you been able to identify and articulate in your long career in the military and in the intelligence communities watching what Israel has done and how it has received Yeah, that's the problem.
Whatever Israel wants, the U.S. government does.
And there's a political price to pay for all this.
I still remember in my youth, when I was a student in Europe and when I was in the army in Germany, that Americans were liked and respected.
That's not the case anymore.
I remember going back to Europe after 9 /11 and after George Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and said, "We're the sheriff in town and you're with us or against us." We were pretty much disliked, but now we've aced that.
We've gone far beyond that.
If people in the world were polled on who they hate the most, Very sad state of affairs, Phil.
But thank you for your candor and for your analysis, as always, my dear friend.
We look forward to seeing you again next week.
All the best.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Of course.
Coming up at 4 o 'clock this afternoon, Aaron Maté.
But also, let me advise you of this program.
Sunday morning at a restaurant in New York City called the Tudor City Steakhouse.
You see it there on the screen, 45 Tudor City Place, which is East 42nd Street over by the UN.
A lot of people that you know, Randy Credico, Jimmy Dore, Dennis Fritz, Danny Haifong, Jeff Norman, Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
Yours truly and the great Scott Ritter will be participating in panel discussions on the wars in Israel and Ukraine and the loss in America of the freedom of speech.
It's not very expensive.
It's a lovely restaurant.
There's a nice brunch that starts at 10 in the morning.
The program goes from 11 until 1. And I know at least the programs that I will be participating in.
We'll take questions from the audience.
So if you're in that part of New York City on a beautiful autumn Sunday morning, please come and join us.
We'll see you at 4 o 'clock this afternoon for Aaron Maté.
We'll have a full day tomorrow.
I'll tell you about it at the end of Aaron's show.
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