Philip Giraldi


Philip Giraldi is an American columnist, commentator and security consultant. He is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a role he has held since 2010. A Ph.D holder and multilingual, he was previously employed as an intelligence officer for the CIA, before transitioning to private consulting. He has written or commentated for numerous media outlets. Giraldi has received criticism for associating with anti-Israel organizations, and for promoting fringe theories.

Education

Giraldi holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago, and a MA and a Ph.D in European History from the University of London. A native English speaker; he also speaks German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Career

Girardi's 18-year stint with the Central Intelligence Agency focused on counter-terrorism efforts. He spent time serving in numerous European and Middle Eastern theaters, including an appointment as the deputy base chief for the field office in Istanbul in the late nineteen-eighties. From 1989-1992 he was designated as the agency's senior officer for Olympic Games support, assuming the title of Chief of Base for the Barcelona summer Olympics.
After leaving the CIA, Giraldi started a security consulting firm; and became a columnist, speaker, and commentator for numerous organizations and media-outlets.
He was a foreign policy adviser to Ron Paul during the 2008 presidential primaries.
Since 2010, Giraldi has served as the executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a non-profit political group that purports to provide independent analysis of U.S./Middle-Eastern policy, however, critics of the group perceive an anti-Israel agenda. He is also the national security editor for The Unz Review, a webzine described by the Anti-Defamation League as "a forum for writers who demonize Israel." The foundation of Ron Unz has made grants to Giraldi.
Giraldi has written columns on terrorism, intelligence, and security issues for the American Herald Tribune, The American Conservative, The Huffington Post, and Antiwar.com; as well as op-ed pieces for the Hearst Newspaper chain.

Political Commentary

The American Conservative

In August 2005, Giraldi wrote an article for The American Conservative that outlined his supposed knowledge of a contingency plan under development by the then Bush/Cheney administration involving a potential nuclear attack on Iran. In another article that same year, Giraldi suggested that the outing of CIA officer Valarie Plame was part of a larger U.S. conspiracy to cover-up the forgery of documents used to implicate Iraq in the attempted acquisition of nuclear material. The documents were a crucial component of the Bush administration's case to go to war with Iraq.
In 2013, Giraldi wrote a TAC article outlining a theory that the Syrian gas attacks in Damascus were staged by Middle Eastern actors outside of Syria in an attempt to frame the Assad regime in order to incite increased opposition to the Syrian war efforts.

Other Outlets

In 2014, the Anti-Defemation League published a blog that identified Giraldi, among others, as a speaker at a National Press Club event that aired on CSpan, dubbed as the "National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship," and purported to be sponsored by groups the ADL identified as being anti-Israel. At the event, it was reported that Giraldi spoke about the visible celebrations of Israeli spies while the Twin Towers fell on September 11.

Assertions about Jews and Israel

Noah Pollak wrote in Commentary magazine in August 2008: "In Giraldi’s world, scratching the surface of almost any event exposes the sinister machinations of international Jewry". He has been accused by Max Boot in The Washington Post of using the term "neocon" as a cover word for Jews.
In 2004, in a privately circulated newsletter co-written with Vincent Cannistraro, a retired CIA counter-terrorism chief, Giraldi said 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. Giraldi speculated in 2008: "There are a number of possible “false flag” scenarios in which the Israelis could insert a commando team in the Persian Gulf or use some of their people inside Iraq to stage an incident that they will make to look Iranian, either by employing Iranian weapons or by leaving a communications footprint that points to Tehran's involvement".
In 2009, according to Giraldi, 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 Israel. He claimed that Rupert Murdoch publications regularly disseminate false intelligence from the Israeli and sometimes the British government. Further disclosures by The Times undermined the document's veracity.
In August 2010, Giraldi referred to unnamed "sources in the counterintelligence community" in The American Conservative who had told him intelligence agents of Israel's Mossad were posing as representatives of the equivalent American agencies and visiting Arab and Muslim residents in New York and New Jersey. He alleged it was done as a "false flag" operation to help agents gain information about Iran, which they believed would not be forthcoming to 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.
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 reported she had retweeted his previous 2014 column "Why I Dislike Israel" among other articles he has written making claims about Jewish influence in American foreign policy. In the article, Giraldi asserted American Jews pushed the United States into war with Iraq, were fueling a war machine against Iran; had a "dual loyalty" to Israel; and controlled U.S. media. Giraldi also suggested American Jews should be barred from holding national security positions that directly involve Middle East policy and said that Jews appearing on television be labeled, "like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison.” He accused American Jews of making false claims and taking politicians and the media down with them. Alan Dershowitz wrote for The Jerusalem Post: "In other words, Jewish supporters of Israel, like Kristol and me, should have to wear the modern day equivalent of a yellow star before we are allowed to appear on TV." After the publication of the column, Giraldi said he had been fired for the Unz Review column by The American Conservative, where he had been a contributor for fourteen years.
Giraldi suggests 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."
In March 2020, in an article for The Unz Review, Giraldi claimed Israel had created the Coronavirus as a "biological weapon" to use against Iran. He said in the same month in an article for the Strategic Culture Foundation that if "one even considers it possible" the virus was created by the United States "it is very likely that Israel was a partner in the project". He continued: "It is difficult to explain why coronavirus has hit one country in particular other than China very severely. That country is Iran, the often-cited enemy of both the U.S. and Israel".

Claims about the Holocaust

A letter co-written by Giraldi was published by his alumni magazine in 1999. Near the end of the letter, Giraldi and his co-author wrote:
"Perhaps what is truly unique about the Holocaust is the ability of its exploiters to preemptively silence their critics. Surely within the University of Chicago community there must be many who recognize that the Holocaust industry has gone too far, that the Holocaust is far from being the central event of the century, and that its message of an exclusivity in suffering—serving to promote a Zionist agenda—is dubious at best."

Giraldi has been criticized for Holocaust denial, as well as antisemitism. He has written: "The so-called holocaust was an historical event that took place in Europe seventy-five years ago. It has an established but very debatable narrative that pretty much has been contrived over the past fifty years for political reasons.... The imposed holocaust narrative is full of holes and contradictions in terms of who was killed and how, but it is impossible for genuine academics to critique it if they want to stay employed."