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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