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Dec. 2, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:11
Ray McGovern : Taking Russia Seriously.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, December 2nd, 2024.
Ray McGovern will be with us here in just a moment on taking Russia seriously.
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Ray McGovern, my dear friend, welcome here.
Thank you for that lost interview which we played.
To great delight and fanfare over the weekend.
My favorite comment from one of the viewers was, Reyes007.
Does the United States take Russia seriously, whether before or after the Oreshnik missile was fired?
Well, before is easy.
The answer is no.
United States Question is, what will they do now?
Many times in the past, Putin has said, will you listen now?
Now we'll listen.
Well, at Astana, And let me just cite a couple of sentences because it's really quite germane here.
Please do.
The Bushnik system has no equivalence in the world.
The system deploys dozens of homing warheads that strike the target At a velocity of Mach 10. The temperature of the impact elements reaches 4000 degrees Celsius, okay?
Consequently, everything within reach, the explosion's epicenter, is reduced to elementary particles, turning everything into dust.
Okay, the missile is capable of destroying even heavily fortified structures.
And those located at significant depths where Zelensky is hiding now.
Lastly, but not leastly, the Ministry of Defense, says Putin, and the general staff of the Russian army are currently identifying targets for strikes within Ukraine.
This may include military installations, defense industry sites, or decision-making centers in Kiev.
All the more so since the Kyiv regime has repeatedly attacked us again with these longer-range missiles.
So the Russians are feeling pretty smug about all this.
The TV programs last night, my friend Gil Doktorov tells me, the question was, what should the Russians do now with respect to the West?
And the answer was, hands up!
Hands up!
What's going to happen?
Well, the key here is that more Ukrainian installations are going to be struck, and not necessarily NATO ones, although there are NATO officers, as we know, at many of these installations within Ukraine.
The die is cast.
Putin is not kidding around.
The question as to whether Sullivan and Blinken will listen now, I still don't know, Judge, but hopefully they will listen.
I mean, will General Keith Kellogg, who's President-elect Trump's emissary and was talking over the weekend on Fox about defeating Russians, will he listen?
Will Mike Waltz, who is President-elect Trump's national security advisor and made similar comments 10 days ago, will he listen?
Does American intel know?
The answer is yes.
And as you know, Ted Postol has pretty much verified that from a physics point of view.
You mentioned Kellogg.
Months ago, there was this Kellogg-Fred Flights proposal, which actually...
In other words, if Kellogg and flights are permitted by Trump to go down this road, there's not an awful lot of distance between a ban on Ukrainian entry into NATO forever or for 10, 20 years or something like that.
That can be talked about.
I don't think the Russians are going to give up on that easily.
But, you know, the other things are, it's a sensible and realistic starting point.
I made some notes on it here.
Putin's terms in June of 2024, this year, well, it's not an ultimatum.
They don't care about territory.
And most of all, in my view, If you believe what Biden said in Blinken and Sullivan, that the Russians are going to go into Poland and the Baltic states, well, here's a golden opportunity for Trump to say, okay, I got the Russians to agree not to attack Poland, not to attack the Baltic states, actually not even to go west of the Dnieper River.
How about that?
He could say that with everybody believing that earlier Russia had that intent.
Do the American neocons, whether it's General Kellogg or Mike Waltz, whether it's Tony Blinken on his way out or Jake Sullivan on its way out, whether it's Joe Biden, probably doesn't have serious thoughts about this any longer, or Donald Trump, do they really believe that Iran is a serious threat to the national security of the United States of America?
Do they honestly believe that?
No.
This is all Israeli fairy tales, and our position on this is dictated solely by Israel.
I want to say a word about Kellogg.
Now, I like the fact that he's almost as old as me, Judge.
That means he fought in Vietnam.
He knows a little bit about...
So I have some hope that if he's given his head with the flight's Kellogg proposal, there's room to negotiate there.
It would be different if the Russians really wanted to go and take over all Ukraine.
They don't.
if they want to take both, but they don't, okay?
That's the big road.
Does General Kellogg understand that?
Oh, I believe he does.
Yeah.
And Fred Flights, his right-hand person, does.
I mean, these people are pretty smart people.
And as they say, it all depends on whether Trump is adroit enough to say, well, all right, I can play this game.
I can rhetorically say, we won!
We prevented Putin from going to Poland and the Baltic states.
You know, it's kind of a no-brainer from a rhetorical point of view.
And Putin doesn't want to go.
I believe Putin doesn't want to go any farther than the Dnieper River, and then there's the makings of a deal so long as Russia's security is ensured, which has not been the case for the last decade.
What is the state of affairs in Syria today, and what is the Russian-Syrian connection?
Judge, it's really interesting.
You know, we decided after we got bogged down in Iraq, and after we messed up Libya forever, and we said, oh, the next on the list would be, the next on the neocon list would be Syria.
Now, they had that revolution in 2011.
We took advantage of that.
That's we.
Western intelligence services.
And we cultivated moderate rebels.
Moderate rebels.
They used to be called Al-Qaeda or Al-Nusra.
Now they're called, I wrote it down here, Hayat Tachir Al-Sham or HTS, sort of an inversion of Harry Truman.
HST, HTS, okay?
So it's the same group, okay?
Now they've been trained.
As a matter of fact, you know, there was this really embarrassing situation where General Lloyd Austin, at the time head of CENTCOM, was asked to testify to what happened to that $500 million that we invested in training these moderate rebels to do our bidding in Syria.
He testified before Congress.
I don't know if you have that clip or not.
We do.
We do have the clip.
Let's run it.
And then you can comment on it.
What he says is truly absurd, and the absurdity of it was called out by then, I believe, Senator Ayotte of New Hampshire.
But here's a clip from 2015.
It's the same Lloyd Austin, but he's a four-star general, and he's wearing his dress blues.
It's a small number, and the ones that are in the fight is, we're talking four or five.
As I see it right now, this four or five U.S. trained fighters, let's not kid ourselves, that's a joke.
So the United States of America, through the military and the CIA and other means, spent a half a billion dollars to train four or five people.
Is that true?
Yes, it is.
I mean, this is sworn testimony before Congress.
I was struck at the time that he didn't seem to be embarrassed, you know?
The attitude is vis-a-vis Congress, the Pentagon.
So what are you going to do about it?
Yeah, you gave us half a billion dollars.
Well, you know, we have four or five moderate rebels still in the fight.
What are you going to do about it?
So it's complete disdain for Congress's oversight duties.
Nothing happened.
Kelly, yep, she didn't follow through.
And Austin, as a reward, as a reward.
Became Secretary of Defense.
My God.
And obviously nobody from the CIA was interrogated.
You can't look up how the $500 million was spent, even though the Constitution says no money shall be spent from the public treasury except that which is recorded in a public journal.
Where is that public journal, Ray?
Well, it was earmarked for this express purpose.
Overtly, publicly, okay?
One of the other things in that one clip, which wasn't included, is the acknowledgement that Austin's intelligence at CEDCOM was being investigated by the Pentagon Inspector General because more than 50 analysts said he was bending the intelligence to make it seem good for the president, which he was, okay?
The Pentagon investigation went for two years and ended up in nothing.
And then, you know, it's really, really interesting how Lloyd Austin just was left right off the hook, no holding him responsible.
And, of course, you see him on duty now as Secretary of Defense.
Bring us up to date, please, on the latest happenings.
In Syria involving Iran, involving Russia, involving the United States, and involving the Israelis.
Well, it's quite a mix.
What we have is right after the truce or ceasefire, whatever you want to call it, between Lebanon and Israel.
I'm not quite sure that Hezbollah agreed to it.
Then we had this massive use of these same Moderate rebels who are not moderate by any stretch of the imagination.
They're trained by Western security sources, and they made a big offensive against Aleppo.
They seized most of the city.
It was a shock because the Syrian troops there are mostly conscript.
They were taken by surprise.
It was a little embarrassing.
However, the Russians are in the fray.
They entered in 2015.
Putin pulled Obama aside at the UN on the 29th of September 2015 and said, look, we don't buy the notion there are moderate rebels, okay?
We're going into Syria with our own armed forces, with our own aircraft.
Why don't I suggest that you have...
And they worked 11 months to get a ceasefire.
The ceasefire was a referendum to Putin and to Obama.
They both blessed it, okay?
And then nine days later, the U.S. Air Force bombed, fixed Syrian army positions.
End of ceasefire.
It was the U.S. Air Force that was running things in those days.
And Kerry pretty much admitted it.
It was pitiful performance on the part of Kerry.
He confessed later that this was the most confusing complex of issues that he ever dealt with in his public life.
And so the interviewer said, well, why did you think he could get a ceasefire?
He said, well, I thought we could, sure, we could align the forces the way we want, but we couldn't do it.
Hello?
Another manifestation of this exceptionalism where we can align the terribly complicated forces, and Kerry had enough memory to memorize these forces, about seven of them, and to say, you know, in the end, I failed in trying to align these forces.
So now they're back at it, and they're trying to prevent any arms getting in through Syria into Hezbollah.
But it's very, very dicey, and I think my guess would be that between Russian bombing and a reconstituted front by the Syrian army, these people will be dealt with.
It will take a while, but they will be dealt with, and Hezbollah will still get enough arms to keep doing what it has been doing.
Add to this mix turkey.
Well, turkey is...
I mean, the Russians are...
Turkey is doing this for its own purposes, of course, but it's a major player here.
They have a Kurdish problem, okay?
And they don't want any Kurdish republic or any Kurdish groups gaining strength in southern Turkey, and so turn them into Syria.
Let the refugees go back into Syria.
It's really so cynical that it's worthy of a Blinken or a Sullivan sort of operation, but Erdogan is in trouble deep now with the Russians and with other people who thought that Bashar al-Assad was safe for a while.
I still think he's safe, but it's going to take another struggle to get these folks out of Idlib and out of Aleppo.
So Turkey is either in BRICS or has made an application to join BRICS.
Is it actively, aggressively fighting against Russian military forces on the border?
Yeah, I would say their chances are much less, given what Erdogan has done over the weekend and the last few days.
Say again?
Their chances are much less of getting into BRICS.
Right, right, right.
I think the Chinese are also up in arms.
I guess when I ask this question to our dear friend and colleague, Larry Johnson, he'll say, hey, Judge, can you spell O-I-L?
That's part of it.
It's more a strategic thing, in my view, with Israel really wanting a safe space in Syria.
And, you know, way back when, you know, back in 2013, after Putin had pulled Obama's chestnuts out of the fire, allowing a situation where Obama would not have to make overt war on Syria, Well, the Dio-Cons were up in arms and they were just distraught because they were deprived of their war.
Now, at that time.
They said, "What's your preferred outcome in Syria?" And one of them said, he was a previous consul general in New York, he said, "Look, Jody, it's a little embarrassing to say this, but our preferred outcome in Syria is no outcome.
As long as the Sunni and Shia are drawing blood from each other." That's just fine.
It doesn't look pretty, but as long as they're doing that, Israel has no problems with Syria.
Chaos is what we want.
Now, that made the front page of the New York Times lead article on the 6th of September, 2013.
Look it up.
All the censors must have been out in East Hampton sipping martinis or so over the Labor Day weekend, but it got in there.
Look it up.
It's an amazing sort of admission by the Israelis that, look, we want bedlam in Syria.
That makes us feel secure.
Is there adversity today between President Assad's government and Prime Minister Netanyahu's government, or is it the Israeli perception or propaganda that Assad is arming Hezbollah?
No, Assad has well, Hezbollah bailed Assad out about a decade ago.
I mean, the Alawites and the Shia are very close.
Some of them think they're identical.
So, yeah, I mean, Netanyahu fears this, but Assad is playing defense now, and he's had to play defense ever since 2011 when the U.S. started their covert operations there.
And in 2013, they thought they had...
They thought they had a mousetrap into an overt war against Syria.
And I tell you, Judge, I was at the top of the CNN building when all this went down.
And I opened the door in October.
This little fellow's name was Paul Wolfowitz.
The next to him was Joe Lieberman.
It looked like a funeral.
It had just been announced.
Just been announced.
No need for a war.
No, really.
They had no pastel ties.
These were black ties, and they were all very morose.
And they said, oh, my God.
Oh, no, we're not getting a war.
This was neocondom right there.
I had an interview with BBC earlier on, and they didn't notice me staying on here.
But it was really quite revealing how irate they were and not being able to get their overt war on Syria.
Obama wasn't strong enough to close down the covert war, which also cost billions of dollars.
Where is the CIA and where is MI6 in Syria today?
Not physically where, but where in this conflagration?
Well, you know, it doesn't really matter.
They both follow instructions from the government.
The instructions are support Netanyahu at all costs.
We've got to make sure that the world is safe for Netanyahu.
And with the Biden administration going out on January 20th, they want to leave a legacy where they have gone the last mile, not only for Netanyahu, but for Ukraine as well.
And there's a lot of mischief there.
I think both Russia and the Syrians are wise enough, having been through this before.
To hold their serious fire and see what happens when Trump comes in.
And see what happens when Trump comes in.
Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend.
Great analysis.
Thank you for the clip of then-General Austin, which we would not have but for you.
And thank you again for that great lost interview over the weekend.
We'll see you at the end of the week with Larry Johnson.
All the best.
Thanks, Judge.
Of course.
And the aforementioned Larry Johnson coming up at 11 this morning and at 4 this afternoon, the inimitable Scott Ritter.
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