All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 7, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:52
CMD CMSgt Dennis Fritz : How Neocons Tricked Us.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, November 7, 2024.
Chief Dennis Fritz joins us now.
Chief Fritz, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you.
Will a Trump Department of Defense be any different from a Biden Department of Defense?
Well, Judge?
That depends who he puts in charge of the Department of Defense.
And I will tell you, there's some talk of a couple, I don't necessarily say they were neocons, but neocon sympathizers that are being looked at to go into the Pentagon.
And what I will say to that is that former President Trump, now elect Trump, has stated that he learned from his past mistakes in putting together a cabinet.
Now, he's talked about debate.
And if he should put some neocons or neocons sympathizers in there, that'll go against what he's been stating to us.
So my hope is that he won't make the same mistake as he did with John Bolton, if you will, hiring him as his national security advisor, a known neocon, and try to go in opposite direction of someone that will talk about more of a peaceful solution in the world than going to war, that war is the answer to everything.
So my hope is that he will listen to his own advice and make better choices, especially if he thinks that, hey, you know, war is not the way to do things.
It's a waste of money.
And why are we over, you know, killing people in the Middle East?
As he stated when he ran the first time, he called them stupid wars.
And I must say, I actually agree with him.
Well, if he...
Well, you're exactly right, Trump.
I mean, Trump.
Wow.
You're exactly right, Judge.
Chris has to make a microcut of that, and we'll play it over and over again.
Yeah, yeah.
We got to have fun with that one.
Yeah, exactly.
But listen.
But to the issue of people like Senator Cotton and Secretary Pompeo, that this would be John Bolton revisited.
Exactly.
And so I'm trying to take him at his word, which is hard to do, that he said, hey, I will not make the same mistakes.
You know, he talks about it all the time.
Look how he's attacked, you know, the Cheneys, especially Liz Cheney, and, you know, especially her father, who he calls a warmonger.
And so my hope is that he would change directions.
And hopefully, you know, there's some folks that in his inner circle that don't agree with the policy that we have in the Middle East and our undying and unwavering support of Israel.
So, you know, hopefully there'll be a lot of debate before he announces a cabinet.
And that's when we can, you know, take a look and say, OK, what direction we're going ahead.
So right now, I couldn't tell you until, you know, the transition team start leaking out information or slowly, you know, information starts coming out other than the two.
Does the DOD do whatever the president orders?
Or are there subtle ways?
To enhance or resist?
All you have to do is go back and look at the last Bush administration.
The Vice President's Office, and I saw this firsthand, the Vice President's Office and the DOD was actually, honestly, running the national security policy, if you will.
The Vice President's Office and the DOD.
That's Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Not George W. Bush.
We're running the National Security of the United States.
Is that what you learned firsthand from your years in the Pentagon?
Absolutely.
And he's throwing at the late Scooter Libby, who was the front man.
He spent a lot of time over at the Pentagon.
Wow.
Well, did they have a way of going...
Would he even know that they were enhancing or dialing back?
Judge, they had a way of persuading President Bush.
I will tell you this.
There are different agendas for going into the Iraq War.
And I will tell you from everything that I saw and read inside of the Pentagon, President Bush truly believed in democracy.
He thought that was the way to world peace.
And there were some, Wolfowitz being primary, that convinced him that going to war would be a way of getting peace in the Middle East.
As Rumsfeld used to say, he had to use the bully pulpit.
And so they convinced him.
Now, with that said, they would also get their agenda.
Like I said, there were three different agendas.
You know, I don't believe he was a true neocon, but he believed in the barracks of exceptionalism.
And I've read a lot of his work inside of the Pentagon.
And one thing about Rumsfeld, he believed, I think I alluded to this last week, he believed in preserving official documents.
One, because of the fact he wanted him to go to the National Archives.
and two, that was his way to remember what was said by who and when was said.
And so in the reading of a lot of, uh, His reasoning for going to war and pushing President Bush at the time was he believed in American exceptionalism.
He believed that we were getting blamed for being no peace in the Middle East for governments we were holding up.
So I'm assuming he was talking about Egypt and Jordan because we were paying them handsomely for their peace treaties with Israel.
Also, then you had the other faction.
You had the Wolfowitz and Fife.
And their sole reason, and I stand on record of saying this, was the sole security of Israel and doing whatever they could to take out Hamas and Hezbollah, who they thought were the true enemies of Israel.
And then, as I stated earlier, you had President Bush, who really believed that a democratized Middle East would bring Israel.
Did George W. Bush believe that?
He really felt that.
And all you have to do is read some readings from Doug Fyfe.
And in fact, Doug Fyfe became upset at him because if you go back, Bush really admitted to that.
And that was one of the reasons why Doug Fyfe should say, hey, we can't go to war just so we can have democracy in the Middle East.
And that's why they had to find justification and reason for going to war.
But that was really George Bush's reason.
It wasn't about retaliation for his father or anything like that.
His whole reason was, And so how did they sway him?
Well, President Bush, that could be your legacy as the president that finally brought peace to the Middle East and democracy.
Obviously, that failed.
Chief, over your left shoulder is your book, Deadly Betrayal, the foreword in which was written by our dear mutual friend.
Who's a regular on this show and will be on later today, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
Why did you write that book, Chief?
Judge, as mentioned to you last week, when we decided that we were going to go into Iraq, I just didn't understand why.
The intel wasn't there, and anybody I talked to on the Joint Staff, who was the staff for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, You know, they were telling me they were not seeing the intel.
You were working in the Pentagon at the time, correct?
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
We're not seeing the intel that said that Saddam, Iraq, had weapons of mass destruction.
And so as I stated earlier, that's what drove me to retire.
I just couldn't see myself sending troops off to a war that I didn't believe in and didn't know exactly what was going on.
And I got to tell you, I truly believe in divine intervention.
Because as I stated to you last week, I got pulled back into the Pentagon.
You know, some folks said, hey, look, this is your experience because I didn't last too long in the private sector.
I think three months in a job and it just didn't, you know, fit me.
And there were some folks heard that I was out there looking, hey, we needed you back in the Pentagon for your experience.
Now that divine intervention was, I never realized I'll be working on a project in Doug Feist's office.
And then when I saw...
Judge, 4,500 military men and women lost their lives in a war based on a lie.
Now, me, as a leader, I had to write that book because as I went around, another thing you need to know about me too, Judge, for the last 10 years of my time working as a contractor for the government.
I oversaw the Wounded Warrior Program for the DOD.
Not the Wounded Warrior Project, which is a non-profit organization, but the actual sanctioned DOD Wounded Warrior Program.
And as I talked to the number of wounded men and women at Walter Reed, both the old Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., and then they merged, both the Navy and the Army merged and went out to Bethesda, the old Bethesda Naval Hospital, and merged it as the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at Bethesda.
I talked.
To a lot of the men and women, they had no idea why they went to war, especially when no WMD was found.
And I thought that was a disgrace.
How do we send our men and women who volunteer to, quote, quote, defend our country when we send them off to war on a lie and they had no idea?
Just like the public.
They were thinking, oh, we went over there for all.
Oh, we went over there for revenge for the president's father.
We went there for Halliburton.
They had no idea.
And that is a disgrace.
Larry Wilkerson wrote the foreword.
Did he get to see the unredacted version before he wrote the foreword?
He's got a top-secret security clearance, or just the redacted version?
He saw the entire version.
Okay.
What was redacted?
What was the Pentagon, or whoever orders these redactions?
Well, Judge, the most important thing, they didn't take away my message, but they redacted such things.
Many people have said that this war was about all.
Well, it wasn't the primary reason, but it was a subset of us going to war because of the fact there were people coming to the inner side of the Pentagon.
As you know, Cheney had some some dealings with.
And there were folks coming inside the Pentagon and saying, wow, if we go to war with Iraq, that could be a boon to our economy.
That could be a boon to us going into Iraq and having mining rights and setting up oil fields.
Well, some of those names were protected because they were so-called private citizens.
I wanted those names to be known because they had access to the Pentagon.
Yeah.
Other things.
This is big, too.
And you can probably relate to this.
Death, when you go to war, you're going to have a lot of deaths.
And at one time, the Pentagon was killing.
In fact, I don't think they had allowed the press to even shoot body bags, to be quite frank, coming into Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
And one of the things they were redacting, I talk about in the book, about in 2008, Judge, we were losing more men and women in Afghanistan than Iraq.
Why was that?
Because as I said it in one of the chapters, Afghanistan was a throughway to Iraq.
The war on terrorism gave us the justification to go into Iraq and Assyria, as I mentioned last week, and as well as Iran as last.
And they were hiding the numbers of those that were being killed as part of the redactors, too, because there were more people dying in Iraq than in Afghanistan.
Other things that they redacted.
Which would probably give admonition would probably cause people like historians and the press to ask questions.
Dates and times of meetings.
You know, that was part of my footnote.
You know, hey, that was my point.
So you wrote the book 10 years after this happened, 20 years after this happened.
How can the date and time of a meeting still be a national security secret?
Hey, Judge, I will tell you this.
I had some inside support that was questioning that too.
You know, why?
Once again, you know, lie and deceit.
It's almost like when I wrote the book, because in fact, when I found out why we actually went to war, you know, things I've always wondered, you know, who killed JFK?
Was, is a question you get asked often, and I don't know what you believe, was 9-11 an inside job?
Did OJ do it?
You know, our government still concealed things from the public.
And in this case, I can tell you.
That those redactions, there's nothing in there that I considered, you know, classified.
They should have been, first of all, some of the things should not have been classified at all.
And they should have been declassified years ago.
But it's still to hide deceit.
When I ask Colonel Wilkerson about this later today, I expect he'll agree with everything you just said.
Well, Colonel Larry Wilkerson and I talk all the time.
And when you were talking about something else, you could probably ask Larry about as well.
When I mentioned about the Pentagon and the Vice President's office nudging President Bush at the time to go to war, they were running circles around Larry's boss at the time.
There was a lot of things that the Secretary of State didn't know at the time of what the Vice President's office and the Department of Defense were doing.
And so, you know, as Larry and I had conversations, and really, to be quite frank, before I even decided to try to get my book published, I talked to Larry.
And what really made me publish it, I was surprised there were certain things that I shared with Larry that being the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State, he was not aware of.
That was surprising to me.
So that tells you how the SEC DEF and the vice president's office were not only nudging President Bush to go to war, but they were keeping it from certain things they were doing.
I saw memos that went to the president and that was coordinated by the vice president and SEC DEF that the secretary of state was not aware of.
This culture of war, is it unique to just one political party or is it generally shared by the DOD and State Department?
I used to think that the Republican Party was the party of war.
And now, as we all see now with today's events, it's just not the Republican Party.
The Democratic Party has been infiltrated by neocons as well.
I first saw that in Victoria Nuland.
And realize, wow, what is happening here.
So it's just not, you know, restricted to the Republican Party.
And I just think it's a.
a This started back all the way to 1990.
They've had a long-range strategy.
It first started out with the Republican Party.
That's how they came about.
They all came.
They were Democrats at one time who, when they saw Reagan's policy towards They ran over to the Republican Party.
So they have genes from the Democratic Party who they've slowly migrated back to the Democratic Party.
And so I think that whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, that you have this mindset of the neocon doctrine.
of America controlling the world at all costs, even when it means using our military weapons Is this the nexus between the financing of the disastrous fruitless war in Ukraine and the financing of the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon?
Is this neocon mentality the nexus, or is it broader or narrower than that?
Well, let me just answer that this way, Judge.
As I mentioned, this neocon strategy goes all the way back to 1991.
Wolfowitz was in the Pentagon in 1990, and he was one of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, if I remember right.
And he's the one he came with what we call defense policy guidance.
And what that was then was the start of American exceptionalism where And who we were looking at at the time was the Soviet Union.
Now, all of this, whether it be the Ukraine war or our strategy in the Middle East, all of it ties in together.
As in any organization, you're going to have different factions and different agendas.
But the overall early agenda of the neoconservatives was world domination and, oh, by the way, That included an eye on Russia.
As we've stated in the past, we told Gorbachev that we will not expand NATO.
You've heard, and you've said it, and a number of other people have said it before.
I remember being on a couple of CODELs.
One with Steny Hoyer, and then one with the late Lloyd Benson.
Right, so what's a CODEL?
A trip?
Yeah, a congressional delegation.
Right.
And we were over in Europe.
In fact, sometimes we kept running to Secretary Baker at the time.
And the same message was, if we are able to unify East and West Germany, we will not expand NATO.
But guess what?
We did.
That was part of the neocon strategy.
And listen, for your audience, you know, I try to break it down so we all use our own critical thinking.
After that, we did everything we could to poke our finger into...
We won the Cold War.
We're the strongest nation in the world.
Instead of trying to make peace, we were just poking it in the eye of Russia at the time.
And so all of this is tied in together of our world dominance to be able to control the world.
For example, Russia and Ukraine.
As you know, Russia gave us a red line.
Hey, do not expand NATO.
One of the answers.
It gets close to our border.
Now, back in May of 2003, my organization, the Eisenhower Media Network, we put out a paid ad into the New York Times.
That's May of 2003, and you all just can look that up.
And we said the United States should be a force for peace.
And we provided a map.
And we showed that if the United States was surrounded by Russian assets as the way they are in Europe, let's say, for instance, if Russia had nuclear weapons, We will lose our minds as we did in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We will lose our minds.
And so that's what we've been doing to Russia.
We have no empathy for any other country's national security interests.
It's only that we care about world dominance.
So it all ties in.
You have different factions.
Dennis, this is scary stuff.
These attitudes must prevail today, whether you're a liberal Democrat like Tony Blinken or a conservative Republican like Tom Cotton.
These attitudes prevail, and they're bilateral.
It's the war party.
It doesn't matter whether you want Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
Judge, can I just make one point on that?
That's why I say it about different factions.
Each one of them have their own agenda.
If you look at Tony Blinken, he has an agenda of Israel.
Then you have others that have an agenda with the Ukraine as part of the overall aspect of dominance over Russia, to try to weaken Russia.
And the sad thing about it, we're using Ukraine.
We are killing their people and their infrastructure just so we can have world dominance by weakening Russia.
Let me just give you an example.
Like I said, I always want our audience to be able to do critical thinking.
You've heard Lindsey Graham before and say, as far as the Middle East, oh, we're fighting them over there.
So we don't have to fight them over here.
That's a fear tactic.
But yet we're killing people over there just so we can have world dominance.
Likewise in Ukraine.
We're fighting them over there.
They're fighting on our behalf.
Well, yes.
I mean, they're actually telling the truth there.
We're using Ukraine.
Dennis, thank you very much, Chief.
Dynamite.
dynamite stuff, I'm going to go through much of this with the Much appreciated.
I hope you'll come back and visit us again next week.
Take care, Judge.
Thank you.
Of course.
All the best, my friend.
Coming up later today at 1 o 'clock, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 2.30, Aaron Maté.
At 5 o 'clock, the aforementioned Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
▲
Export Selection