[yt_dropcap type=”square” font=”” size=”14″ color=”#000″ background=”#fff” ] T [/yt_dropcap] here’s something to be said for nominating a Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) Director who actually knows and understands how to do their job – that is, honestly and truthfully collecting, disseminating, and analyzing intelligence.
For far too long, the position of CIA Director has been like nearly every other Executive Appointed or Cabinet Member position within the U.S. Government – just another popularity or political contest no different than choosing teammates in a grade school kickball team or invitees to a Hamptons Party by the elitists of New York City.
This may be the exact same reason that the U.S. Government is failing on so many fronts – the wrong people are sitting in the wrong jobs, and have either no idea what they are doing, or are so heavily politicized and “owned” by certain special interests, lobbying groups, or foreign governments, that they literally are unable or unwilling to do what is best for the American People and the United States of America.
One such case example is the eminent Philip Giraldi, who has a collective experience in the CIA spanning over 18 years.
He is consistently a voice of sanity and reason, as is his colleague Ray McGovern, but has been consistently shut out, marginalized, driven out, and “dis-invited” from all of the “intelligence parties” going on in Washington DC.
He is probably one of the most qualified, down to earth, matter of fact, no-nonsense career intelligence officers this country has ever had, but no one is throwing his name around as either an intelligence director, or even as a “consultant” to the intelligence community, in any of the 16 intelligence agencies within the U.S. Government.
Instead, career politicians, neo-conservative loyalists, “America-Lasters,” co-opted bureaucrats, ex-lobbyists, and bankster owned stooges are consistently hoisted into these intelligence director and leadership positions, who routinely and without fail have either suppressed relevant intelligence so desperately needed by the congress and senate to pass legislation or navigate foreign affairs and conflict, or have outright misconstrued or lied about foreign intelligence, in order to achieve “outcome determinative” goals of the banking and corporate oligarchy/plutocracy, bombing and killing and murdering millions of innocent people in the process, destroying viable and independent peaceful nation states around the world, assassinating duly elected foreign leaders who stand in the way of American oligarchy hegemony, and other sick and twisted outcomes.
Philip Giraldi was born in 1946 and is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the CIA as well as a columnist and television commentator who is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a group that advocates for more even-handed policies by the U.S. government in the Middle East.
He received 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.
Giraldi was employed by the CIA for eighteen years working in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain and is fluent in Turkish, Italian, German, and Spanish. Since 1992 Giraldi has consulted for several Fortune 500 corporate clients. President of San Marco International, an international security management and risk assessment consulting firm and a partner in Cannistraro Associates, another security consultancy. Giraldi has written columns on terrorism, intelligence, and security issues for The American Conservative magazine, 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 British Broadcasting Corporation, al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, Iran Daily, Russia Today, Veterans Today, Press T, and other media outlets. During the 2008 presidential primaries, Giraldi served as a foreign policy adviser to Ron Paul.
His writings always consistently cut through the mainstream media nonsense being propagated by the plutocratic Deep State, a topic of which he has also written extensively about, based on his intelligence experience in Turkey where the proverbial “Deep State” was an integral and cultural way of life, consisting of, in Phil Giraldi’s words, as “including all the obvious parties, both public and private, who benefit from the status quo: including key players in the police and intelligence agencies, the military, the treasury and justice departments, and the judiciary.”
In 2004 Giraldi, with his partner Vincent Cannistraro, a retired CIA counterterrorism chief, 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.
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.
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. 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.
In 2009 Giraldi wrote that unnamed intelligence sources had told him that a document published by The 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 published false intelligence from the Israeli and sometimes the British government. Further disclosures by The Times undermined the document’s veracity.
The underlying theme and thread of all these revelations by Phil Giraldi underscores one glaring bright truth – that Mr Giraldi has consistently, courageously, heroically, and patriotically always chosen to expose the truth and provide intelligence that serves the interests of the American People and the United States of America, rather than the corporate/bankster plutocratic deep state elite.
This may be the essential reason Phil Giraldi has been consistently passed over for the credit and positions within the U.S. Intelligence Community for nominations to essential national security positions for nearly every single presidential administration since he left the CIA.
Hopefully President-Elect Donald Trump will recognize this, and choose or ask Mr Giraldi to serve in some capacity, as this man is a national treasure and living legend who could only strenghthen and fortify U.S. Intelligence work, as well as begin to heal the open bloody wounds of decades of stupid foreign policy decisions and idiotic wars typified by the Neo-Conservative and previous establishment decisions and positions over the past few decades.
If Donald Trump truly wants to “drain the swamp,” and “make America great again,” then perhaps he should start with ensuring that his daily intelligence briefings are honest, forthright, devoid of political bias, neutral, impartial, informative, and ultimately helpful to both him and the legislative branch, in order to make the difficult foreign policy decisions during the Trump Presidential Administration.
Recently Phil Giraldi has spent a great deal of his time in his capacity as a founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (“VIPS”), which is a think-tank made up of former intelligence officers dedicated to upholding the virtues of true intelligence work and analysis, offering countercurrent views often at odds with establishment plutocratic deep state outcome determinative intelligence, and again, is designed to serve the American people and the United States rather than the corporate/bankster oligarchs.
His work is all over the internet and in print, and he often appears in the Unz Review online journal, and his articles are always instrumental in helping to elucidate and crystallize the truth, in a wilderness of dishonesty and falsities churned out by the Mainstream Media and their handlers within the U.S. Intelligence Community.
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.
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.
True to what must be habit, Phil Giraldi “does not tweet, and avoids all (except FaceBook) social media.”