Obama's spy ruffles hawks' feathers
By Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - The appointment of a top-ranking retired diplomat and vocal critic
of Israel to a key intelligence post has triggered an intense backlash from
hawkish Israel supporters in Congress and the media who are pressing the
administration of President Barack Obama to reconsider.
Critics have seized on retired ambassador Charles "Chas" Freeman's ties to
Saudi Arabia and views on human rights in China to argue against his
appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), but
Freeman's defenders charge that their real aim is to impose an ideological
litmus test on top government officials and ensure a continued policy of
reflexive US support for Israel.
Observers are watching the campaign against Freeman, who enjoys strong support
among intelligence professionals and realists in the national-security
bureaucracy, as an early test of how much influence the so-called "Israel
lobby" will be able to exert on the new administration.
Freeman was formally appointed NIC chairman last week by Obama's Director of
National Intelligence (DNI), ambassador Dennis Blair. A polyglot with unusually
wide-ranging foreign policy expertise - he has served as ambassador to Saudi
Arabia, as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs,
and has shaped US policy in areas ranging from Asia to the Middle East to
Africa - Freeman is reported to have been Blair's hand-picked choice for the
job.
The NIC is the US intelligence community's center for mid- and long-term
strategic thinking and analysis on a range of issues facing the United States.
Among other responsibilities, it produces National Intelligence Estimates
(NIEs) - the consensus judgments of all 16 intelligence agencies - regarding
the likely course of events.
In December 2007, for example, it published a NIE that found that Iran had
stopped work on one key component of nuclear-weapons development in 2003, a
finding that frustrated efforts to rally public support for military strikes
against Iran's nuclear facilities before president George W Bush left office.
Freeman has been an outspoken critic both of the Bush administration's "global
war on terror" and of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories. In a 2007
speech, he denounced US support for "Israel's efforts to pacify its captive and
increasingly ghettoized Arab populations [and] seize ever more Arab land for
its colonists", and warned that Israel would soon face "an unwelcome choice
between a democratic society and a Jewish identity for their state”.
The campaign against Freeman began shortly after rumors of his appointment
surfaced two weeks ago. It was initially confined to neo-conservative media
organs such as the Weekly Standard and Commentary magazines, as well as liberal
but hawkishly pro-Israel figures such as Martin Peretz, editor of The New
Republic.
Steve Rosen, a former staffer at the powerful America Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) who is now facing trial for passing classified information to
the Israeli government, played a leading role in denouncing Freeman's
appointment, accusing him of "old-line Arabism" and of having "an extremely
close relationship" with Saudi Arabia.
Although the coalition of media figures lining up against Freeman - such as
Rosen, Peretz, The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb and The New Republic's
James Kirchick - are known primarily as vociferous defenders of Israel, they
have focused most of their fire on his ties to Saudi Arabia, pointing in
particular to a US$1 million donation made by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
to the Middle East Policy Council, a think-tank headed by Freeman, as evidence
that he was a "puppet" of Riyadh.
They also seized on an e-mail that Freeman sent to a private listserv in 2007,
in which he argued that the Chinese government's primary mistake regarding the
1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations was its "failure to intervene in a timely
manner to nip the demonstrations in the bud". Freeman's alleged callousness
regarding human-rights issues in China was held up along with his Saudi ties as
a reason to scuttle his appointment.
The campaign gained a much higher profile this week when the ranking Republican
and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, called
on the administration to withdraw Freeman's appointment in an interview with
the Wall Street Journal whose neo-conservative editorial page had already
denounced the appointment, and a New York Democrat, Representative Stephen
Israel, urged an investigation of his ties to Saudi Arabia.
Ten other members of Congress made a similar demand in a letter addressed to
the DNI's inspector general on Tuesday.
Four of the signatories - Republican Mark Kirk and Democratic Shelley Berkley,
as well as the top two Republicans in the House of Representatives, minority
leader John Boehner and minority whip Eric Cantor - were among the five top
recipients in the House of campaign contributions from pro-Israel political
action committees (PACs) closely tied to AIPAC during the 2007-8 election
cycle, according to figures compiled by the Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs. Kirk himself has been the house's top recipient of Israel-related PAC
money over the past decade, according to the report.
Freeman's defenders, most of them veterans of the national security
bureaucracy, have strongly rejected charges that he would be beholden to Saudi
Arabia or to the Chinese Communist Party and counter that his attackers are
practicing a form of McCarthyism against anyone who might question the wisdom
of unconditional support for Israel.
"They seek to eliminate from public life all those whom they think are not
completely in the control of 'the lobby'," wrote Pat Lang, the former senior
Mideast analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, on his blog. "Charles
Freeman is a man awesomely educated, of striking intellect, of vast experience
and demonstrated integrity ... Who could possibly be better for this job?"
Similarly, David Rothkopf, a former managing director of Kissinger Associates
who has written an authoritative work on the history of the National Security
Council, charged in his blog on the Foreign Policy website that "there is
something ugly to these attacks on Freeman ... The notion ... that there is no
room in the US government for people who are skeptical of Israeli policies or
for people who are not in lockstep with one view of, say, Saudi Arabia, is both
absurd and dangerous."
His defenders have also noted that his critics have not raised similar
objections to other officials whose organizations have accepted Saudi
donations.
In December, for example, shortly before Hillary Clinton was confirmed as
secretary of state, her husband Bill Clinton disclosed that his foundation had
received between $10 and 25 million from the Saudi kingdom, among other foreign
donations. Although some isolated critics in the media raised concerns about
potential conflicts of interest, she was overwhelmingly confirmed by the
senate.
Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, now a top Obama economic advisor,
also accepted a $20 million donation from Alwaleed bin Talal himself when he
was president of Harvard University in 2005.
More generally, donations from foreign donors to think-tanks are fairly common.
"Half the think-tanks in this town take money from someone overseas," former US
ambassador to Israel Sam Lewis told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in Freeman's
defense.
M J Rosenberg of the dovish Israel Policy Forum also accused Freeman's critics
who attacked him for his comments about the Chinese government's handling of
the 1989 pro-democracy movement of hypocrisy.
"If Freeman was pro-settlement and pro-Likud, and if he was a major donor to
AIPAC and Israeli institutions, if he had a billion dollars worth of
investments in Israel, and was unsympathetic to human rights in China to boot,
would any of these critics have opposed his appointment?" he asked. "The answer
is no. We probably would never have even heard his name."
So far, Blair's office has stood by the appointment, noting that the NIC post
is "one of analysis, not policy”. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on
Tuesday he had "not read" reports about Freeman's ties to Saudi Arabia or his
criticism of Israel.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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