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Nov. 22, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:53
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern : Weekly Wrap
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, November 22, 2024.
It's the end of the day, the end of the week, our happy time.
It's time for the Intelligence Community Roundtable with my two dear friends and collaborators who always do double duty, sometimes triple duty, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.
Guys, welcome here.
I want to discuss three topics with you today.
One is the poignant historical event.
Incredible turning point of tragedy in American history, with the anniversary of which is today, which is the assassination of JFK.
I also want to discuss the indictment and arrest warrant issued for Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And I want to discuss the extraordinary weapon that Russia fired at Ukraine and the reason for it and the inane response.
By an admiral of the United States Navy.
We'll start with Netanyahu.
Is there any doubt, Larry Johnson, that the evidence of genocide with which he is charged is overwhelming?
It's beyond a reasonable doubt.
There's as much evidence against B.B. Netanyahu as there was against Adolf Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust.
It's at that level.
And while the numbers are significantly smaller in terms of what Netanyahu has done, nonetheless, it's been a deliberate effort on his part to murder, destroy the Palestinian people.
And to pretend otherwise is just to ignore the facts on the ground.
They're engaged with active starvation.
They're bombing That's what people in the West need to understand, particularly in the United States.
Some of these are Palestinian Christians.
He's doing it just because of their ethnic, the fact that they're on this land and that they are not considered Jews.
And so that is the very definition of genocide.
So, Ray, the system here is a little different.
There's no presentation before a grand jury.
There's an application before three judges.
There's no prosecutor who writes the indictment.
The judges write the indictment, and the indictment is accompanied by an opinion.
I read the opinion.
It could have been written by Larry Johnson.
It touched on all the things that Larry just said.
And it is essentially the willful knowing intention slaughter of people based on their ethnicity.
The slaughter occurring by violence, starvation, denying them food, shelter, clothing, and medicine.
And yet, Ray McGovern, the United States of America will say, oh, forget about it.
The Israelis and the Americans didn't sign the Treaty of Rome.
The court doesn't have jurisdiction.
Everyone else has universal jurisdiction, everyone who signed George W. Bush in retirement ran into this.
He was scheduled to make a big speech in Geneva before an AIPAC-related group.
And when he heard that people already served papers on him for his role in Iraq, he had to cancel his trip.
Same thing happened to Rumsfeld.
So immediately speaking, he can't travel.
That is Netanyahu or Gallant.
You know, there's no provision that I know of that allows the UN or anyone else to descend by helicopter on Tel Aviv and snatch him out of Israel.
And that's sort of too bad because I don't know exactly what other enforcement mechanism there might be, Judge.
You probably know better than I. You know, Larry Ray used a very interesting phrase.
That the American Justice Department claims, which is universal jurisdiction.
We have, of course, kidnapped Mexican generals for accepting bribes from Mexican cartels in Mexico, kidnapped them or lured them here, charged them, tried them, convicted them, put them in Florence, Colorado for the rest of their lives when the whole thing was committed in Mexico.
There is nothing to prevent.
Other than force resisting, nothing legal to prevent Brussels from descending upon wherever Netanyahu is and capturing him and delivering him home.
Wouldn't that be gratifying to the people who have suffered at his hands?
Yeah, the only thing they lack is actually personnel with the capability of doing that.
You're probably right.
You know, you'd have to have, you know, a special operations team of some quality in order to do that.
And it would be definitely viewed by Israel as an act of war.
What's really sort of sickening is now, you know, when the ICC brought down this bogus charge against Vladimir Putin for child trafficking, which is nothing of the sort.
Man, the United States is so happy with the ICC.
We love the ICC.
But now that they've indicted Netanyahu and Gallant, who actually have the blood of women and children on their hands, who have murdered women and children, not like the Israeli false story, the myth that Hamas beheaded babies, which they never did.
They've actually...
And yet now the United States is, this is outrageous.
We need to shut down the ICC.
So again, once more, it exposes the complete hypocrisy of the United States when it comes to our so-called international rules-based order.
As long as we like the situation, we're good with the rule.
If we don't like the situation, it's a no-good rule.
Ray McGovern, who killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy?
Well, it's pretty clear to me that it was what we call now the security state, the deep state, a combination of the CIA, the military, parts of the FBI knew about it.
It's all pretty well constructed in this book called JFK and the Unspeakable.
It was a turning point in world history, in my view, because Kennedy was out for peace, not only with the Russians, the Chinese, with everyone else.
He saw no reason other than to seek peace, and he had been chastened six months earlier, six months before his famous speech.
He had almost been responsible for ending the world.
He and Nikita Khoshoff, okay?
That's a pretty damning experience.
Chastened by that, he reached out to Khoshoff and said, "Look." We want the same things for our children.
There's actually no reason why we can't find means to cooperate.
And one thing that is particularly relevant to our discussion these days, this is what he ended up saying, one sentence.
Above all, said JFK, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers.
Nuclear powers must divert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.
To adopt that kind of course in a nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy or of a collective death wish for the world.
Now we're closer now than we ever were.
Even in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In my view, it's more close because of a possibility of an accidental, preemptive move by one side or the other that thinks the other side is about to launch.
But it's very, very dangerous.
And so here we have JFK telling us 61 years, 62 years ago, 61 years ago, 62, that this is what we must avoid.
Above all, and this is what Biden, after being vice president to a fellow named Obama, who honored this and did not threaten Russia by doing the kinds of things that Biden has in Ukraine, this is what Biden's legacy will be to us.
Let's hope we can escape the worst over the next two months.
Larry, do members of the intelligence community No.
I've actually never had any kind of discussion about that at all, beyond people raising questions about why is the information being hidden?
And I can come up with a variety of reasons.
Some, you know, Ray may be correct that the documentation points to a CIA role.
There's also those who have said that what the CIA has is actually information on organized crime, that the cooperation, collaboration between the Italian mob and the Jewish mob, you know, Meyer Lansky and those guys.
When Robert F. Kennedy was going after him, he wasn't just going after the Italians.
He was also going after the Jewish mob.
So there's also that as a possible element.
So, you know, it's one of those things that whenever the agency's trying to hide something like that, it's not because they're trying to protect a sensitive source.
I mean, let's be honest about this.
When this happened, I still have vivid memories of it, but I was seven years old.
Okay?
So, I'm at 69 now.
I guarantee you, nobody who was actively involved in that plot is probably still alive.
Right.
At all.
Right.
Larry, Ray quoted so poignantly JFK's very rational views on nuclear weapons.
Those views are decidedly at odds.
With this lunatic Admiral Buchanan, who yesterday made a statement, you gotta believe he's a two-star, you gotta believe the four-star that he works for, and maybe the Secretary of Defense that he works for, and maybe whoever is the President of the United States now are making decisions in Joe Biden's name, approved this nonsense that Admiral Buchanan said, that America is prepared to engage.
Tit-for-tat in a nuclear war with Russia.
What kind of an insane statement is that, Larry?
That's just somebody who's completely ignorant about Russia's capabilities and our own capabilities.
You know, what Russia demonstrated yesterday with this medium-range, intermediate-range ballistic missile, I'm going to be precise the term that Putin used.
And, you know, Judge, we need to sort of clean up the language when talking about ATACAMs, Storm Shadow, and Scalps.
Please do.
The ATACAM missiles are short-range missiles.
They're not long-range missiles.
190 miles.
Yeah, maximum.
When you go to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Within that treaty, there are two classifications.
There are the moderate-range missiles, which travel between 500 and 1,000 kilometers.
And there are the intermediate-range missiles, which travel between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
So that's up to 3,000.
420 miles.
What was this thing that was fired yesterday?
It was intermediate range.
That's what Putin was making a specific mention that it was intermediate range.
And remember, Donald Trump walked away from the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty in 2018.
And I think we have a crusty old Irishman on this show that was around for the actual negotiation and signing of that.
You may want to have Ray weigh in on the beginnings of it and what really the implications of this now are because Putin has said basically, okay, the original reason for the INF was Europe was scared to death that Russia could hit them and that treaty eliminated the threat of a missile that could hit Russia, could hit Europe.
Yesterday, Putin unveiled it.
Hey, baby, we're back.
Ray, tell us about the treaty.
Well, it was 1987.
I was still on board, active duty at the CIA, when Gatabashev said to Reagan, look, we have a measure of trust now, and we don't need those damn medium and intermediate range missiles in Europe, for God's sake.
That only gives each of us about 10 minutes warning.
Let's get rid of them.
We got the ICBMs for God's sake and we got no ABMs to speak of.
So, you know, there's a mutual, there's a deterrence out of all that.
And Reagan came to us and he says, huh?
You think he's serious?
We said, try it out.
Well, long story short, 1987, that was concluded.
And for the first time and maybe for the last time in history, a whole class of Medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles was destroyed in place.
They had the missiles.
They had the warheads ready.
They were all destroyed under mutual inspection.
We went to Russia.
Scott Rudder was the first one on the scene at this wonderful beach resort of Votkinsk in the middle of Siberia.
Two years he spent there making sure that those Russians did what they promised to do.
And we had Russians in the United States verified.
That was done.
We eliminated all those missiles.
That was 1987, okay?
And then Trump, maybe because Bolton told him to, said, we'll get out of that.
2019, right before Trump left, yeah, we're out of there, okay?
Why?
Well, it's not clear why, but of course, the military had really nice missiles that we wanted to do that would have violated the treaty.
And now we're in a fix where Putin makes a point of saying it was Trump.
It was Trump that got out of this thing, which is interesting because he's not giving any quarter here.
And he's also saying, look, not only the Americans and the British with their storm shadow, but...
In other words, he's saying, look, all you NATO people, even though you're not firing these things, you are part of an alliance that is liable for retaliation, and that applies not only to Britain, it also applies, technically speaking, to the United States.
It probably won't come to that, at least not yet.
But that's the new nuclear doctrine, and that really hasn't been discussed very much.
I got that from Gil Doctorow, who went through it with a fine-tooth comb and warned me about this new provision that nobody's talking about.
Larry, why the hell did Trump walk away from this?
because Bolton and Pompeo talked him into it?
Yeah, I think they saw it as a way to...
Build up a new line of business for the military-industrial complex.
And their alleged excuse was, well, Russia's violating it.
Well, they never challenged them under the protocols of that agreement to prove that they were in violation.
And I think it really had to do with the defense industry here in this United States wanted to get into the business.
Here's the problem, though, Judge.
The Russians have now deployed this intermediate-range ballistic missile, which is MIRVed.
So it means it's got multiple warheads.
They're independent re-entry vehicles.
so you get four or five on on one of these missiles and they can disperse and that and that's what we saw last night or yesterday with with these Now, these had conventional warheads on them, but they could also put nukes on them.
And this was more a message, I think, to Europe than to the United States, per se, because these intermediate-range ballistic missiles can hit every single country in Europe.
And that's going to wake him up today.
I think Keir Starmer may be looking, you know, he may have to take his underwear to the dry cleaners because he's going to probably need to change a pair.
Wow.
Is there any question in your mind, Ray McGovern, about that this extraordinary weapon was fired in response to the American use of Atacums into Russia and the British use of Storm Shadow into Russia?
Putin demonstrating how serious he is and how powerful he is.
I would have interpreted it that way, but I didn't need to interpret it.
Putin said precisely that.
You know, what's missing in all of this is a general appreciation that the Russians are ahead of us in this kind of missile ring.
Putin describes this as a test, you know, a test of a weapon they just developed.
And it was a successful test.
and we have other weapons like that and we're going to test them as well if you don't knock it off now you all know that next year it And the Germans said, "Oh, sure enough, Joe." And Schwarz was asked why.
He said, "Well, the Americans decided to do this." And we said, "Okay." I mean, that's backfired in Germany now.
That's probably not going to happen.
This is one reason that's not going to happen.
The Russians are demonstrating the sophistication of these MERVed, medium-range missiles, MERVed, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, okay?
That's what happened.
And you know what?
Ted Postol tells me that Zelensky had to know, even just from the photography, that these were not ICBMs.
And yet he put out the word initially that these were ICBMs.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Not necessary, not used, and of course, not true.
Larry, I don't want to get personal with these two names I'm going to throw at you, and I certainly don't want to get into their personal backgrounds.
But do Marco Rubio and Pete Heggseth understand what the two of you have just explained to the audience?
No.
They don't.
They'll view it as potentially...
You know, we may be a bit behind, but we're going to show those Russians.
You know, they don't get it.
And, you know, it's unfortunate that they are so blind in their ideology that they're not able to step back and just take a rational look at this and recognize that, you know, Russia didn't come to this overnight.
They have been developing this and moving.
Once Trump walked away from the deal in 2018, Russia said, okay, we need to start preparing for the future.
And then everything that they're seeing and hearing from the United States was one of threat, not one of diplomacy, not one of conciliation, not one of saying, how can we cooperate?
It was always about, you're going to submit to us and do what we tell you to do or else.
And Russia's like, no.
We ain't playing that.
No way.
Does Europe understand this, Ray McGovern?
You know, the politicians who have risen to positions of power in Europe are not the most sensible or the most well-educated people.
There are people at ruling circles, so to speak, who understand this.
Let's hope that this will jar them into realizing that Europe is behind.
That in this case, the U.S. cannot protect them, really.
I go back, you know, a couple of years, and we go to about 10 years ago, and Putin is saying, look, we need to put a lid on all this stuff, and you're putting new missile replacements in Poland and Romania.
What's that all about?
Oh, it's about ABMs to protect from ICBM from Iran.
Well, Iran had no ICBM.
Iran agreed to limit these things.
And then Putin said, "What now?" And they said, "Well, it's none of your damn business." And in one very poignant discussion with Western journalists, he says, "Look, We're going to build all manner of other things.
At his State of the Nation address in 2018, Putin did a show and tell, for God's sake.
He showed five new Missiles that were developed over the preceding years, and they showed how one goes on to the South Pole, you know, the one goes in the ocean real close to the United States.
In other words, he showed what they were capable of.
Now it's coming.
These are still test missiles, some of them, but they work, apparently, because they work really well in Dnepropetrovsk at that arsenal where they used to produce missiles themselves.
Gentlemen, it's been a terrifying week.
Thank you very much for working so long and so late.
Much appreciated.
We have a short week next week, but of course our Monday will be as usual with Ray at 10 in the morning and you at 11, Larry.
I trust you can still make it even though it's a holiday week.
Thank you, guys.
Thanks for everything.
Have a great weekend.
Thank you, Judge.
You too, Judge.
Of course.
And coming up on Monday at 8 in the morning, Alistair Crook.
At 10 in the morning, our dear friend Ray Johnson.
At 11 in the morning, our dear friend Ray McGovern.
And at 11 in the morning, Larry Johnson.
Not the first time I've confused them.
It's a deep affection for both of them.
And probably some of our other regulars in the afternoon.
Thank you for watching.
Have a great weekend.
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