Kourosh Ziabari

Philip Giraldi is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

Now, he chairs the Council for the National Interest as the Executive Director. CNI is a nonprofit organization that advocates for the transformation of United States' Middle East policy.

As a CIA officer, Giraldi served in different countries including Turkey, Italy, Germany and Spain. He is now a Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American Conservative Defense Alliance. He has appeared on several radio and TV programs including Good Morning America, MSNBC, NPR, Fox News, BBC, Al-Jazeera and 60 Minutes.

Giraldi works with the American Conservative magazine as a contributing editor and writes a regular column for the Antiwar website. He is an outspoken critic of the hawkish policies of the United States and has publicly decried Washington's unconditional support for the state of Israel.

Philip Giraldi joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the latest developments of the Middle East, the prospect of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the possibility of a peaceful compromise between Iran and the United States and the impact of Israeli lobby on the long-term policies of the White House.

Kourosh Ziabari: Why is the Israeli lobby so powerful, influential and authoritative? Almost all of the major media conglomerates in the United States own to well-off Jews who are committed to maintaining the interests of the state of Israel in the U.S. Some experts say that Israel is the representative of the United States in the Middle East region, but some others suggest that it's Israel which determines the future of political developments in the United States. What's your take on that?

Philip Giraldi: The Israel Lobby is so powerful because it deliberately set out to establish control over key elements in the United States. It has demonstrated a number of times that politicians who are perceived as being unfriendly to Israel will face serious problems in being reelected because the Lobby mobilizes to provide money and media support to opponents. This means that congress is afraid to oppose anything that Israel and its Lobby wants. The same holds true for the presidency. Every presidential candidate must be seen as friendly to Israel or he will be attacked in the media and denied millions of dollars in political contributions, making it a safer option to support Israel. Finally, pro-Israeli interests control much of the media and, more important, dominate the opinion and editorial pages, making the only narrative that most Americans hear about the Middle East highly favorable to Israel and highly critical of all Israel's enemies. As a result, Israel is able to control U.S. foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East and also much of the Muslim world.

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Nick Egnatz
Online Journal

Prisoner undergoing torture, US soldiers using nightsticks. Taken
directly from US CID photos investigating Abu Ghraib prison tor-
ture, physical abuse and sexual abuse. (salon.com / The We!)

After voting in every national election since I came of age serving in Vietnam, I have come to the studied conclusion that continuing to participate in U.S. federal elections serves no purpose other than to convey my consent to a system which is both anti-democratic and criminal.

Anti-democratic because rather than a system of one person/one vote, we have a system of multi-millions of dollars required to run for the House or the Senate. The two corporate political parties enjoy monopoly status and refuse to allow democratic reforms. Independent and third parties have almost no chance in winning a single election of consequence. While voting for an independent or third party candidate might assuage one’s conscience, in reality it is a vote giving one’s consent to a grossly unfair system.

Personally, it took the illegal Bush wars to wake me from an American culture-induced coma and onto a path of study and activism in the pursuit of peace and social justice for all the people of the earth. Indeed for the earth itself.

But the criminality didn’t start with Bush Jr. invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Both done without permission from the U.N. Security Council as required by the U.N. Charter and the U.S. Constitution and thus illegal. As an American I was steeped in the American World View--that America was the kindest, gentlest nation on earth, that America was a representative democracy and that our policies at home and abroad, while occasionally misguided, were certainly done for the benefit of mankind. Then came Bush’s wars. Like many others when I first started protesting them I felt that they were some sort of aberration and a simple course correction would get us back on track.

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Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Palestine

[L-R:] Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Ahmad Qadhaf Al-Dam.
Libyan Prime Minister Baghdadi al-Mahmudi in the middle.

The bleak mood in Ramallah that preceded the Sirte Arab Summit in Libya became even more sombre as Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas discovered that the Arab leaders whose help he was seeking were themselves helpless and could do next to nothing in terms of helping the Palestinians at this crucial juncture in their struggle.

Having engaged in some acrimonious exchanges with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in Sirte, and with the Arab League failing miserably to take a decisive stand with regard to Israel's determination to steal additional Palestinian land, and in broad daylight, the Palestinian leader appeared in despair. A reliable source in Ramallah spoke of "a certain propensity" on the part of the PA leader "to go it alone".

"The president thinks that many Arab leaders are quite detached from the Palestinian reality and are trying to settle old accounts with the Palestinian leadership more than they are interested in helping the Palestinian cause." The source, who requested anonymity, described the Sirte meeting as "another monumental failure because everyone wants to use the Palestinians as cannon fodder." "The Arabs want us to confront Israel and the United States alone, but when we ask them why they don't do the same, they shut up and tell us that they have their own interests to protect and care about."

The Sirte meeting gave the Obama administration 30 days to get Israel to adhere to the basics of the peace process, including pressuring Israel to renew the freeze on Jewish settlement activities. However, it is widely thought that this one-month hiatus is aimed more at unburdening the Obama administration of the task of confronting Israel during the upcoming election season rather than seeing any concrete results from any renewed American efforts at reactivating an exhausted and unpromising peace process.

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Les Visible
Smoking Mirrors

♫ Row, row, row your boat, gently down the streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream ♫

I haven’t been in the US since 2003 and that was on the island of Maui, HI. I haven’t been on the mainland US since 1996. I don’t have a sense of the place. I know it’s not like the parts of Europe that I live in where I seldom even see a police car and where the police are uniformly (heh heh) polite. The places that I am weren’t even much affected by World War 2. They weren’t and aren’t strategic for any reason, except for growing food.

My objectivity narrows and widens, depending on my state of mind and degree of awake/aware. At times, when I look at the world around me, through the vari-colored lenses of the media; Zionist owned, Zionist influenced, Zionist threatened and Zionist-free, I get the impression that the whole world is on a dreamboat that is sailing for the rocks, while the Invisible Siren Chorus sings from a promontory. The lighthouse is actually a holographic projection machine that presents the impression that white sand beaches and naked volleyball games await. It’s apparent that BP had been in the night before, with dump trucks filled with sand.

We approach that November whirlpool by the day. Pundits and prophets from the various realms of industry and random mountaintops have all indicated that November is bringing that critical straw for the camel’s back. Chiropractors in three piece suits are standing by; not because they care one way or the other about the camel but because someone has to stand around and speculate and look busy, while the people responsible for the state of things sneak out of town.

The primary, flesh-based enemy of humanity is the bankers and chief among them is the central banks. There are various other consortiums like the IMF which are dedicated to world wide economic slavery of anyone and everyone but themselves. They are joined by those who operate and feed upon the fantasy football game at Wall Street; wherever Wall Street may be in whatever urban location it feeds in. The politicians are a secondary concern. They serve the will of the bankers. The bankers serve the King of Hell through the proxy of their own self interest. The bankers create the wars for profit. They create them any time and anywhere that profit can be realized and they fund both sides of the conflict in order to own the economy on either side at the war’s end.

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