Why We Should Defend Obama's Latest Intelligence Pick from Right-Wing Attacks

By Robert Dreyfuss, TheNation.com. Posted February 25, 2009.

Schoenfeld, in the Wall Street Journal piece, says that Obama is placing a "China-coddling Israel-basher" in charge of writing intelligence estimates that, he says -- with no evidence whatsoever -- will reflect Freeman's own "outlandish" ideas.

But the firestorm directed at Freeman didn't start with Schoenfeld. It began with alarmist postings on a blog by Steve Rosen, the former official of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee who's been indicted for pro-Israeli espionage in a long-running AIPAC scandal. Rosen, whose blog is entitled "Obama Mideast Monitor," is published by the Middle East Forum, a rabid, right-wing Zionist outlet led by Daniel Pipes, whose Middle East Quarterly is edited by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. Said Rosen, whose blog appears alongside the Pipes-Rubin axis:

Freeman is a strident critic of Israel, and a textbook case of the old-line Arabism that afflicted American diplomacy at the time the state of Israel was born. His views of the region are what you would expect in the Saudi foreign ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship, not the top CIA position for analytic products going to the President of the United States.

The Steve Rosen blast, which was followed up by Rosen here and here, richocheted around various AIPAC-linked blogs until it was picked up by (of course) Fox News on Monday. Fox settled on Frank Gaffney, an extremist, right-wing Zionist who leads the Center for Security Policy, to blast Freeman:

"This is a really serious error on the part of Dennis Blair and the Obama administration," said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the think tank Center for Security Policy . "Both in government and certainly in the period since he left government, he has compromised the objectivity that one would want in the person whose job it is to oversee the production of National Intelligence Estimates."

Gaffney called Freeman's perceived lack of concern for the Iranian threat to the U.S. and Israel "profoundly troubling," saying it would be "irresponsible in the extreme in the person who runs the National Intelligence Council."

"Whether it's his association with organizations with close ties to Iranians or close ties to the Chinese, these are disqualifiers for the job," Gaffney said.

And today, the smearing of Freeman landed on page 15 of the Wall Street Journal.

Some defenders of Freeman have begun speaking up. Jim Lobe, at Antiwar.com, calls it "amazing" and "stunning" that Freeman was selected for the NIC chairmanship, and praised Freeman, writing: "He doesn't pull punches." Dan Froomkin, at Nieman Watchdog, called Freeman "a one-man destroyer of groupthink," and added:

The man is one of a rare breed: He is a Washington insider, and yet he is also a ferociously independent thinker, a super-realist, an iconoclast, a provocateur and a gadfly. He has, as I wrote in a Niemanwatchdog.org article about him in 2006, spent a goodly part of the last 10 years raising questions that otherwise might never get answered -- or even asked -- because they're too embarrassing, awkward, or difficult.

But Freeman needs more defenders. The campaign by AIPAC, AEI, Pipes, the Wall Street Journal and their ilk can only be expected to intensify, using lots of muscle behind the scenes to pressure the White House, and Admiral Blair, to capitulate.

See more stories tagged with: iran, iran, neocons, iraq, israel, china, afghanistan, palestine, right wing blogs, barack obama, neoconservatives, aipac, wall street journal, frank gaffney, dennis blair, charles freeman, chas freeman, jewish telegraph agency, steve rosen, american-israeli public a, daniel pipes, michael rubin, middle east quarterly, jim lobe, dan froomkin, niemanwatchdog

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »