All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 23, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:02
Israeli Military: 'We Can't Destroy Hamas Tunnels' - With Guest Phil Giraldi

Despite Israel's political leadership claiming that only the complete destruction of Hamas in Gaza is acceptable, its military leadership is increasingly vocal about the difficulty - or impossibility - of that task. As the US continues to get drawn deeper into the expanding regional war, what are the goals and what is the endgame. Former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi joins today's program.

|

Time Text
U.S. Involvement in Israel-Gaza Conflict 00:15:35
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is away for today, but thankfully, I won't be handling the show alone because we have a very special guest.
Those of you who go to Ron Paul Institute conferences, you will recognize this next guest as someone who gives extraordinarily insightful talks to the group.
And I'm talking about retired CIA counterintelligence officer Phil Giraldi joining us from Virginia.
Phil, good morning.
How are you?
I'm fine, Dan.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me on.
Thanks so much for joining us.
It's been a while.
It's been too long.
But, you know, things are deteriorating in the Middle East.
We talked about on yesterday's show how Biden was asked if the bombing was working in Yemen.
He said no, but we're going to keep doing it.
So there you go with that.
The U.S. is getting more and more involved in the Israel-Gaza war.
We saw today that the U.K. is getting more involved.
They're sending surveillance drones over and increasingly seem to be the only two countries that have a taste for it.
France is not that interested in dealing in the Red Sea, but nevertheless, we seem to be drawn more and more into it.
So I wanted to just talk a little bit more about this.
A couple of articles that we'd noticed.
One appeared in the Libertarian Institute website.
But essentially, they're all similar, which is this sort of tension between the military and civilian leadership that's emerging in Israel, where the political leadership like Netanyahu and the people around him, some of the more extreme figures, they believe that they've got to take this war to the end.
They've got to kill every last Hamas soldier, and they've got to take over Gaza.
And the military is saying, we can't do it.
It can't be done.
We can't clear out the tunnels.
It's not going like we thought it would.
So we're 100 and some days into it, Phil.
They don't seem to have reached any of their goals in terms of clearing out Hamas.
They've done a pretty good job of wiping out civilians.
I think 70% of the people they killed were women and children.
However, going against soldiers has not been as effective.
How do you see things now, and how do you see what kind of a progress report would you give the IDF at this point?
Well, it's kind of interesting because there's a bit of breaking of ranks going on.
For the first time, you're seeing some military officers when conversing privately or semi-privately with their colleagues admitting that this is a no-win situation and even recommending that somehow a ceasefire should be called and everyone should move to negotiations.
So this is coming out.
Now, on the other hand, of course, you have Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has a strong motivation for continuing this war for as long as he can, because as long as the war continues, he's going to stay out of jail for corruption.
He was on the verge of getting convicted when this war started, which is an interesting kind of thing to be thinking about.
And the fact is that Netanyahu is pushing obviously the other direction.
And Ben Gavir and Smotrich and all of the other extreme right-wing characters that he's put into his cabinet are also quite openly speaking about getting rid of the Palestinians, whether that will mean just pushing them out somewhere or killing them.
They clearly don't care one way or the other.
So this is kind of an interesting thing going on.
And then, of course, there's even the movement inside Israel of the people who are worried about the hostages because clearly they're having no success on getting the hostages.
They've killed more hostages than Hamas has.
And the fact is that they have had no success.
So there's a growing movement of people saying, if that was the objective of the war, then we're clearly losing it.
And I think we saw, wasn't it yesterday, that some families of the hostages actually stormed parliament and interrupted parliament.
That's how serious they are about what's happening.
I think there was just a couple of days ago yet another hostage that was killed by quote-unquote friendly fire.
So it does seem to be some serious protests there, some serious social unrest there.
Yeah, I think that's a safe bet.
And it's only going to get worse for the leadership.
But the leadership, as I say, is at this point hanging on because it's what gives them credibility.
And it also makes the possibility that this was a huge intelligence and military screw-up that led to this happen, or even more to the point, possibly something that was allowed to happen.
So these thoughts are all going through the minds of the Israelis who are wondering what's going on, although still supporting a bloody option against the Gazans.
So it's a strange little thing going on.
My concern, of course, frequently is how did the United States get into this up to its eyeballs and has served the role of being an accomplice to the genocide that's going on.
I mean, this is incredible.
I mean, it's interesting that there's a specter of an impotent United States.
I mean, you have President Biden saying, well, we have to have a two-state solution.
Netanyahu has assured me that they're going to look into a two-state solution.
Then Netanyahu gets on TV and says, we have absolutely no intention whatsoever of a two-state solution.
I mean, it seems like Biden is just sort of talking in an aspirational manner while the Israelis, and certainly Netanyahu is probably the moderate in the situation, but he and the others are saying, we're not listening to you.
We don't care what you say.
I think even Netanyahu said it, nobody's going to stop us.
Not the International Court of Justice, not the U.S., not the U.N. Nobody's going to tell us what to do.
So I don't remember ever seeing a specter of a U.S. president being so completely impotent in the situation.
How do you read this?
Well, I've read it exactly the way you do.
It's unbelievable that this is going on and playing out the way it is because it is absolutely in the U.S. interest to end the fighting, to have a ceasefire, stop the slaughter, and to arrange for some kind of two-state solution, even if it's full of holes.
I mean, it's absolutely in U.S. interest.
And here, B.B. Netanyahu tells them to go to hell.
And the U.S. has huge leverage over Israel.
We're talking about, in one form or another, $10 billion a year that goes to a wealthy country, Israel.
And all the weapon systems that Israel has, by and large, are U.S.-produced or U.S. modified.
So it's incredible.
You got the leverage, and you said what you want, and the other guy says to hell with you, and you just sort of grin and sit on your hands.
Yeah, send Blinken again for another trip.
That'll do it.
That'll do it.
The funniest part, we're in an election year.
We're in an election season.
People are paying attention.
This is a huge political loser for Biden.
We've seen it in the swing states.
We've seen it in Michigan.
We've seen it anecdotally in different focus groups where a big, big chunk of Democratic voters are furious with the one-sidedness of Biden and his administration.
And it seems even Trump has gotten a hold of this and understands this because I wanted to pull up the quote, but I don't have it in front of me.
But he made some kind of comment like, look, we've killed some millions of people in the Middle East.
We've been involved in all these stupid wars.
We shouldn't be involved anymore.
So he even seems to have his finger on the pulse where the Biden administration seems to have a, I don't know what you call it, an iron ear or something for this.
It's a loser for him politically.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this could be like the swing vote in the coming election.
Trump has, I don't trust Trump one bit.
I think he's an evil personality and malignant.
But he said now more than once, he said, if I were president now, I would end these wars.
He's talking also about Ukraine with a phone call.
And he's recognizing, or his advisors are recognizing, that we have the leverage to do that, and we should have not allowed these things to develop the way they have in the first place.
And now we should be trying to fix them instead of expanding them, which is what Biden is doing.
In the backdrop to the seeming impotence or incompetence, whatever you want to say, in the administration, you're seeing some other interesting things happen.
And I'm wondering, especially from your background, whether you think, for example, here's an article that was a Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
We talked about in yesterday's show.
U.S. intelligence says Israel nowhere close to its goal of eliminating Hamas.
Now, leaks from the Intel community, am I right or wrong, especially in this administration?
Do you think this is a way of sending a message to Israel from the administration in an indirect way?
Yeah, I think you could consider it that, and particularly because the source is the Wall Street Journal, which is a known conduit for the Intel community.
And I would rather suspect they're sort of saying, hey, guys, you're not exactly running away with a victory on this one.
And the longer you, and of course, the subset of this, the other issue, is the fact that Israel, as a country respected or not respected by the rest of the world, is definitely deep on the non-respected side.
And the longer the killing goes on and the more visible it becomes, Israel is going to be more in a hole on this.
And of course, the United States will be right down there digging too.
Yeah, I think I remember exactly who it was.
Maybe it was Alistair Crook who said Israel right now has literally one ally, one friend in the entire world right now.
And that's not even the U.S. people.
It's just the U.S. government because polls in the U.S. are not friendly toward increasing U.S. support for Israel.
So they've completely alienated themselves, not only in the region, but in the entire world.
You have new cases.
I think it was Mexico and a few other countries are thinking about bringing a case against Israel, something that I have never seen in my life.
I mean, you have to wonder at what point do they start caring what the rest of the world thinks.
Yeah, well, I'm sure many of them do care about what the rest of the world thinks, but they're not calling the shots at the moment.
And it's a tragedy for everyone involved in this.
I'm not saying that Israel doesn't deserve to get attacked by Hamas.
Some people are making that argument, saying that Hamas and Gaza was under occupation.
But I don't like seeing people killing other people when there are other ways to resolve these issues.
And this is an issue that was resolvable.
And Biden is at least somewhat right in saying that the two-state solution, which most critics or observers would say is dead in the water, is still something that should be striven for.
That is, it is until the Palestinians have a state where they have sovereignty and they don't have Israeli roadblocks and Israelis going into towns and villages and shooting people at random, this thing will never be resolved.
So there's got to be some kind of shared sovereignty or sovereignty on both sides that's recognized.
And that's the only way it's going to be resolved.
And it's interesting that the Russians and Chinese have been very firm in sticking to this idea while the Americans, as they have been in Ukraine, seem completely, once again, impotent.
They are so stuck on the narrative, they can't let go of the narrative, that they have made themselves irrelevant in the situation.
I wanted to move on to another point, Phil, and this is about something that happened.
I think it was yesterday, but I think it's sort of indicative of how things are not going as well for the Israeli military in Gaza.
You had the situation, at least as I've seen it reported, where there were 20-some IDF troops in some Palestinian houses, and they set it up with explosives.
And they were ready to, as they've done many, many times in Gaza, they are ready to blow it to the ground.
They stopped to make a celebratory TikTok video.
And at that moment, at least according to the narrative I've seen, at that moment, a Hamas fighter shot an RPG into it and detonated the entire building and killed all 21 troops.
Now, we've seen so many of these videos being made.
Our mutual friend Larry Johnson has commented on the discipline of the soldiers not being well reflected in the making of these videos.
What is this situation?
What is the status of these people that are, these Israeli soldiers that are fighting in Gaza?
Well, it's not just Larry.
There are a lot of observers or people who have American soldiers and American intelligence officers who've been to Israel and actually seen the training and seen the way the soldiers respond, who have had a lot of trouble with it.
That basically you're working with reservists who are conscripts.
And essentially, that they reached a point where they're not very disciplined because they're not very well trained.
And I remember, I don't know if you know Colonel Pat Lang.
Yes.
He was in Israel for some time, and he commented to me once.
He said, you know, all they really needed was a bunch of really tough sergeants to kick them in the butt, and they don't have that.
And so that was his assessment of why they were underdisciplined and under-trained.
But, you know, I've heard that from a lot of people.
Yeah, I think, I don't know how you see this, but it appears, at least to a lot of people, myself included, that they are definitely under-reporting KIA and wounded in action among the Israelis.
I mean, it looks like there are many more.
I'm sure you've seen the videos.
I've saw one video, of course, of some Israelis that were injured writhing in pain, saying, we're fighting ghosts.
We're fighting ghosts.
I mean, the Hamas fighters from the video of this that I've seen are just appearing out of nowhere.
I saw one dig a little hole in the wall, stick his grenade launcher through it and blow up a tank and killing however many people.
It just seems like a nightmare for these troops on the Israeli side.
Well, there's always the assumption made by people who follow battlefields and combat situations that for every soldier who's killed, something like three will be wounded.
Israel's Ghost War 00:12:21
And the wounds, of course, can be anything from amputations to minor flesh wounds.
But the fact is that there usually is a big discrepancy between the two numbers.
And the injured number is important because these guys and girls are the ones that are going to be going back to their homes with an arm missing.
And that, of course, increases the pressure on the government to do something dramatic.
So it's unfortunate.
And the fact is, I don't believe any statements coming out of the Israeli government, just as I don't believe anything coming out of the White House.
And the fact is, you know, there's a lot of propaganda mixed in with all of this, and they're all trying to look a certain way as part of what's going on.
And once they start doing that, the lies start coming out.
And once the lies start coming out, we have some really good liars in the Biden cabinet.
We've seen a lot of secretaries of state in our careers, Phil.
How would you rank Tony Blinken?
We've had so many bad ones.
You know, because the fact is that Donald Trump was no great selector of secretaries of state either.
True.
But I think Blinken is probably maybe the worst, certainly in my lifetime.
And I would make that judgment based on the fact that he can't even lie with a straight face.
There was a session he was there, one of his sessions with Netanyahu.
Whatever Netanyahu, what nonsense Netanyahu was coming out with, Lincoln was kind of looking at him with this paralyzed, terrified look.
And there have been scenes with him and with Biden where Biden's just saying things, and he's kind of there with the dog in the manger look.
I almost sympathize with him for that situation.
I remember the one you're talking about.
He really looked like he needed some anti-acid as he was listening to his boss.
Funny but tragic.
I want to just touch on one other thing that you pointed out before we go.
And this is an article that came out yesterday or today in the Washington Post.
And we read the Post like we read, well, like they used to read Pravda.
We want to know what they want us to believe.
But this was an interesting title.
I didn't think that I would see it.
Growing October 7th Truther Groups say Hamas massacre was a false flag.
Two things that were important.
First, that they felt the need to cover this so-called movement.
And secondly, that it appears to be, I don't want to characterize it before you get into it, but it seems to be a bit of a red herring as a way to discredit people that are questioning the official narrative.
You read the article, Phil.
What do you make of it?
Well, first of all, it's a typical Washington Post, which means that it's fundamentally dishonest.
If you read through it and know a bit of the background to what it's talking about, you realize, first of all, that they're weighing the argument to support what the government is saying and what the Washington Post friends are saying.
And they don't give any credibility to what anybody else is saying.
I am, in fact, a truther on this issue.
Since right after October 7th happened, I wrote an article for a website, and I basically said, this smells bad.
And I'll tell you why.
I said, because the Egyptians warned Israel that this was coming a week before it happened.
The United States intelligence community warned Israel that it was coming.
And there were certainly plenty of indications.
Technological indications from the, the heavily wired and armored border fortifications that Israel had had put in place to monitor what the uh, Hamas and the Gazans were doing.
From my own point of view, the thing that was decisive is that UH Israelis Shinbet, the Israeli intelligence service, Internal Intelligence service UM had wonderful capability to recruit hamazins to go back and report on what was going on inside their organizations.
I say that as a former intelligence officer who was a spy.
I was an intelligence collector, and that's a different viewpoint than what a an analyst would give you and what I?
What I knew was that every day, there were workers coming out of Gaza, going into Israel.
The number I saw was there were up to upwards of 15 000 of them.
Well, so this was like.
This is like you walk into that situation.
You start recruiting these people, you give them simple communications devices and you tell, look, tell me everything going on there.
And it turned out, of course, that Hamas was doing all its training and everything right out in the open.
So there was so much information.
It seemed to me that this had to be a setup, that it was a provocation agreed to by the Israeli government to let this happen, and I would say.
I would guess that they didn't had no idea that it would be as effective as it was, but to let it happen so that they could do the cleaning operation and get rid of Gaza altogether.
That's what I feel and that's what this article is attacking.
Uh suddenly, people are, a lot of people are coming around to this conclusion that this is very possibly just what happened, that Israel made this happen and is now exploiting it to destroy Gaza.
And the way of excuse me, of course, the way the Washington POST reports it, they use the word denier in denial, because that, of course, harkens the idea of a Holocaust denier.
You're, you're an evil person.
But what's interesting is that uh, the Israeli papers have been all into this, have been, have talked a lot about it, and I credit Max Blumenthal and the guys over THE Grays, the guys and gals OVER THE GRAY ZONE uh, for really doing a deep dive into the Israeli newspapers and the Israeli media uh, where they've talked about this specific thing, the um, where the Hannibal directive uh, where you saw the Israelis uh using uh the uh military attack helicopters on these sorts of things,
is pretty Openly discussed in Israel, but somehow it's being quashed here.
I mean, you feel sort of sorry almost for Shinbet and for the intelligence and for the military in Israel because the rest of the world is being expected to believe that they are so incompetent that they let a bunch of guys in flying lawn chairs practically take over the country.
I would be pretty resentful if that's what my government was expecting people to believe.
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.
And Israelis who are, of course, on the cutting edge of this in one way or another are suspicious about a lot of this stuff, and they're quite rightly suspicious.
And let me give you an example from my own life when I was in CIA.
We used to run these kinds of operations all the time against Iran when we were in Turkey, when I was in Turkey after the revolution.
There were a lot of Iranians that were kind of like these Hamas or these Gazan workers going into the denied area of Turkey because it was the only country they could go into without a visa.
And we would pick them up, turn them around, send them back, give them a simple communications device, and they were reporting everything to us.
So it's a, you know, this is the way intelligence agencies are supposed to work.
And that's why when it was being claimed that the Israeli service, which has good leadership and they're knowledgeable people, were apparently not doing these things.
Of course they were doing these things.
Yeah, it's certainly hard to believe.
But the other thing that struck me in the article is maybe an unintended point is that they were able to find and interview lots and lots of people, seem like average Americans, who just don't buy it.
And when I was reading those parts of it, it didn't affect me like it was probably supposed to because I thought, wow, this is something very, very different.
It looks like public opinion in the U.S. is changing.
And they didn't sound like Arab names to me.
And they didn't sound, they weren't sort of, you know, I'm sure if they had said some heavily anti-Semitic things, they would have been quoted.
They just seemed like average people saying, I don't buy it.
I'm not buying it.
It seems something unusual and different about this.
Yeah, and of course, I would agree with that assessment.
And if the whole thing kind of smells.
And the way it's playing out now continues to smell.
Because obviously, this whole, I don't know, disagreement, shall we call it, between Joe Biden and Netanyahu is got a funny kind of turn to it.
Netanyahu should not be trying to do this.
This is not the game that will win Israel any points.
And it potentially could lead to a Donald Trump presidency where Trump decides to, you know, give the boot to Netanyahu.
I'd love to see it.
So it's not a winning game.
It's not a winning hand for Israel, just as it's not a winning hand for Biden.
And sooner or later, one of them is maybe going to crack a little bit.
Well, you talk about a smell.
What I smell, a bad smell of neocons, because it seems to me like their goal is and always has been, we need a war against Iran.
And they seem to be getting closer.
Of course, you could never see the Houthis or anyone else mentioned without saying Iran backed, you know, Iran sponsored, as if no one is allowed to have an ally except the U.S.
But you're seeing, I mean, you've got the potential conflict between Israel and Egypt at this demilitarized zone on the border of the Philadelphia line.
You have increased U.S. military action against Yemen, against the Houthis in Yemen.
You have expansion with Hamas.
If you're looking at this big picture, I know that you can see the neocons are just sort of frothing at the mouth with glee, but where do you see this ending best and worst case scenarios?
Well, I think the first thing you have to concede is that basically neocon foreign policy or John McCain foreign policy is dominant in both the Republican and Democratic parties.
So that's a major source of where we have a problem here.
The American people, a majority of the American people, are opposed, according to opinion polls, are opposed to both what's going on in Gaza and what's going on in Ukraine.
But they don't have a vote in the matter.
And Joe Biden has circumvented whatever limitations were put in place for sending weapons to these people, sending money to these people, and providing political cover and support.
And you better believe there are U.S. boots on the ground in both Israel and in Ukraine right now.
So that's been a lie.
And Biden said yesterday, he said, you know, about the recent attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, where we are at illegally, illegally.
And he said that if some American soldier is killed, he threatened basically to attack Iran.
Now, this is insane.
This is a policy without a brain.
And it never seems to end.
Policy Without Brain 00:00:53
Every day there's a new surprise, and it's a surprise that's unpleasant.
A policy without a brain from a president without a brain, you might say.
Well, we're going to have to cut it off here, Phil.
I can't thank you enough for spending some time, taking some time out of your day, for your great insights.
And we hope to see you again on the show soon and hope to see you at a Ron Paul Institute conference again soon.
Thanks very much, Phil, for joining us.
Thank you for having me, and it was a pleasure.
And I love you guys.
I mean, you're, you know, since I met Dr. Paul so many years ago, you introduced me, and I've just admired the hell out of what you're doing.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, Phil.
The filling is mutual.
I want to thank our viewers and remind them, if you're watching the show, to please hit like so we can get a wider audience for Phil's great insights.
Export Selection