Philip Giraldi (born c. 1946)[1] is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a columnist and television commentator who is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.[2]. As an author and analyst, Giraldi writes a regular column for the neo-Nazi citation needed publication Unz Review. He is especially controversial for the many articles he has written denouncing Judaism and Jews whom he has compared to "a bottle of rat poison" and for his denial of the Nazi Holocaust.
He gained a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the University of Chicago and a MA and a Ph.D from the University of London in European History.[1]
According to his official biography, Giraldi worked for the CIA for 18 years.[2]
Since 1992, Giraldi has been a consultant; he is president of the consulting firm San Marco International and a partner in Cannistraro Associates, another security consultancy.[3] Giraldi has written columns on terrorism, intelligence, and security issues for The American Conservative, The Huffington Post, and Antiwar.com and op-ed pieces for the Hearst Newspaper chain. He has been interviewed by Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, Iran Daily[4]Russia Today,[5]Veterans Today, Press TV[6] and other outlets.[2] During the 2008 presidential primaries, Giraldi was a foreign policy adviser to Ron Paul.[7][8]
In 2004, with his partner Vincent Cannistraro, a retired CIA counterterrorism chief, Giraldi wrote that Turkish sources had reported that Turkey was concerned by Israel's alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state and that Israeli intelligence operations in the area included anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity by Kurds. They predicted this might lead to a new alliance among Iran, Syria, and Turkey which have Kurdish minorities.[9]
In August 2005, Giraldi wrote that US Vice President Dick Cheney had instructed STRATCOM to prepare "a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States... [including] a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons ... not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States." The reason cited for the attack to use mini-nukes is that the targets are hardened or are deep underground and would not be destroyed by non-nuclear warheads.[10][11]
In 2005, Giraldi also wrote that the Italian Niger/yellowcake documents claiming an Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from Niger were forgeries created by former CIA officers and Michael Ledeen. (See Niger uranium forgeries.) Giraldi also wrote that officials in the Office of Special Plans working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had forged the "Habbush letter" allegedly written by Saddam Hussein's intelligence director regarding shipping the uranium.[12][13]
In 2009, Giraldi wrote that unnamed intelligence sources had told him that a document published by the London Times, which allegedly described an Iranian plan to experiment on a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, was in fact a fabrication, which Giraldi speculated was created by the State of Israel. He claimed that Rupert Murdoch publications regularly disseminate false intelligence from the Israeli and sometimes the British government.[12][14] Further disclosures by The Times undermined the document's veracity.[15]
In August 2010, Giraldi wrote that unnamed "sources in the counterintelligence community" had told him that agents of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency were posing as American intelligence agents and visiting Arabs and Muslims in New York and New Jersey. This was allegedly done to help agents gain information about Iran, which they believed would not be forthcoming to known Israeli agents. The Israeli embassy, the United States Department of Justice, and Giraldi all declined to comment for an article on the allegations in the biweekly New York Arab-community newspaper Aramica.[7][16]
In April 2011, Giraldi wrote in opposition to the Libya intervention and was critical of humanitarian intervention in foreign countries. He wrote that "the problem with humanitarian intervention as a concept is that it opens the door to more of the same wherever there are violations of fundamental rights" and that "there are a whole lot of countries that are ripe for a little humanitarian intervention and even regime change in the more obdurate cases, but there are a couple of good reasons not to do so. First is the ethical consideration that interventions might be grounded in good intentions but they are generally based on inaccurate or even false information about the situation on the ground, which renders suspect the humanitarian aspect itself. Second, whenever a humanitarian intervention takes place it often produces a bad result."[17]
In September 2017, Valerie Plame encountered much criticism on Twitter when she retweeted Giraldi's Unz Review column "America's Jews are Driving America's Wars", and it was pointed out she had retweeted his previous column "Why I Dislike Israel" among other articles he has written critical of Israeli influence in American foreign policy.[18][19] In the article, Giraldi ties certain Jewish media figures and lobbying organizations to increased calls for military interventions in the Middle East, including Iraq and Iran, which he believes pose no direct threat to the U.S., but are viewed by Israel and its allies as enemies. In the article, Giraldi also accused Jews of controlling the American media and said they should be labelled as Jews when appearing on television,"like a warning label on a bottle of poison".
In April 2018, Giraldi wrote that "Israel's fingerprints are all over American interventionism, reflecting Jewish power in the United States and the presence of a plethora of well-funded Israel-centric lobbies, think tanks and media outlets" and that "Israel is not at all shy about what it wants to happen, namely a war in Syria targeting both Damascus and Tehran, leading to a much bigger war with the Iranians."[20][citation needed ]
Giraldi writes that Israel was involved as a perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, concluding that "Why would the Israelis do it? [...] To be sure, 9/11 was a gift to Israel and it is a gift that keeps on giving. America is at war in a number of Muslim countries and its troops blanket the Middle East, to include a base in Israel dedicated to the defense of that country. It is all a result of the Global War on Terror and the GWOT started with 9/11. And just maybe it was a fire that was ignited by Israel."[21]
Giraldi believes that America's support for Israel is a result of Jewish power, writing: "The Israel-thing is Jewish in all ways that matter and its sanitized Exodus-version that has been sold to the public is essentially a complete fraud nurtured by the media, also Jewish controlled, by Hollywood, and by the Establishment... Sure, Congressmen will continue to be bought and sold and Jewish money and the access to power that it buys will be able to prevail in the short term in a conspiratorial fashion. But, in the long run, everyone knows deep down that loyalty to Israel is not loyalty to the United States."[22]
Giraldi is a founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.[23] In September 2015 Giraldi and 27 other members of VIPS steering group wrote a letter to the President challenging a recently published book, that claimed to rebut the report of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture.