Obama Intelligence Nominee Withdraws

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Steven Rosen, een oud-directeur van AIPAC (DE Joodse Lobby organisatie in
USA), staat volgende maand terecht voor spionage voor Israel, en krijgt
het toch voor elkaar om de nominatie van Charles Freeman voor de National
Intelligence Council te torpederen omdat deze te kritisch zou zijn
tegenover Israel.
Hoe kan dit?

Groet / Cees

Charles "Chas" Freeman, Obama’s pick to head the National Intelligence
Council, has withdrawn from contention for the job. The Daily Beast’s Max
Blumenthal reported that the leader of the campaign against Freeman was
Steven Rosen, a former director of AIPAC awaiting trial on espionage
charges, who has a long history of attacking and undermining anybody he
deems hostile to Israel.

The assault on Charles “Chas” Freeman Jr., a former ambassador tapped to
lead the National Intelligence Council, is the first blow in a battle over
the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. Steven Rosen, a former
director of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee due to stand
trial this April for espionage for Israel, is the leader of the campaign
against Freeman’s appointment. In his wake, a host of critics from the
Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to the New Republic’s Marty Peretz have
emerged to assail Freeman’s comments on Israeli policies and demand that
Obama rescind the diplomat’s appointment. The campaign against Freeman
spread to Congress, where a handful of representatives including the top
recipient of AIPAC donations, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), called for an
investigation of Freeman’s business ties to China and Saudi Arabia.

{Rosen’s tactics follow a familiar pattern he has displayed throughout his
career, in which he viciously undermined anyone in the foreign-policy
community deemed insufficiently deferential to Israel—even his own boss.}

But it was Rosen who first publicly accused Freeman of unholy ties to
foreign governments and Rosen who first attacked Freeman’s relatively
benign statements about the Israeli occupation. His tactics follow a
familiar pattern he has displayed throughout his career, in which he
viciously undermined anyone in the foreign-policy community deemed
insufficiently deferential to Israel—even his own boss. But with Rosen’s
indictment for spying for a foreign government, his attacks are resonating
less strongly than in the past.

“What’s so strange is that the face of the campaign against Freeman is
Steve Rosen, and he is the weakest possible face,” said M.J. Rosenberg, a
former colleague of Rosen’s at AIPAC who now serves as policy director for
the Israel Policy Forum. “You couldn’t have picked anyone less credible to
lead the charge.”

The effort to dislodge Freeman still has the potential to impact the Obama
administration’s policies toward Israel, however discredited its architect
may be. This is, of course, the underlying objective of many of Freeman’s
critics. “Freeman is stuck in the latest instance of the deadly power game
long played here on what level of support for controversial Israeli
government policies is a ‘requirement’ for US public office
”
foreign-policy analyst Chris Nelson wrote in his Nelson Report, an
influential private daily newsletter read by Washington policy makers. “If
Obama surrenders to the critics and orders [Director of National
Intelligence Dennis Blair] to rescind the Freeman appointment to chair the
NIC, it is difficult to see how he can properly exercise leverage, when
needed, in his conduct of policy in the Middle East. That, literally, is
how the experts see the stakes of the fight now under way.”

The Israeli lobby’s mounting frustration with the intelligence community
suggests another reason for its opposition to Freeman. As NIC director,
Freeman would oversee the production of National Intelligence Estimates,
the consensus judgment of all 16 intelligence agencies—essentially the
official analysis of the U.S. government on global realities. When the
December 2007 NIE found that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its
nuclear-weapons program,” and that Iran was “less determined to develop
nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005,” advocates for a
preemptive U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities reacted with anger and
dismay. Neoconservative scholar Daniel Pipes—Rosen’s new boss at the
Middle East Forum—decried the NIE as “a shoddy, politicized, outrageous
parody of a piece of propaganda.”

“It’s clear that Freeman isn’t going to be influenced by the lobby,” Jim
Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of Inter Press Service, remarked to me.
“They don’t like people like that, especially when they’re in charge of
products like the NIE. So this is a very important test for them.”

Hand-picked to lead the NIC by Obama’s director of national intelligence,
Admiral Dennis Blair, Freeman brings a wide-ranging resume to the job. He
has spearheaded key U.S. initiatives from Africa to Europe to East Asia
while gathering experience in the Middle East as U.S. ambassador to Saudi
Arabia during the first Gulf War. Having cut his teeth as President
Richard Nixon’s translator during his historic trip to China, Freeman is
fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. Pat Lang, a retired senior officer of
U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces colonel, described
Freeman as “a man awesomely educated, of striking intellect, of vast
experience and demonstrated integrity.” A letter signed by 17 current and
former ambassadors published in the Wall Street Journal underscored the
career diplomat’s credibility. “We know Chas [Freeman] to be a man of
integrity and high intelligence who would never let his personal views
shade or distort intelligence assessments,” the ambassadors wrote.

But Freeman’s professional qualifications are irrelevant to Steven Rosen.
“This is a profoundly disturbing appointment,” he wrote in a February 19
entry on his Obama Mideast Monitor, a blog he writes for Daniel Pipes’
Middle East Forum. Of particular issue to the former AIPAC director was a
2005 Freeman speech in which he partially blamed the failure of the peace
process on U.S. support for the Israeli occupation on the West Bank. The
next day, Rosen pronounced his alarm at a 2006 address by Freeman that
called for “a break from the past” in U.S. policy toward Israel and
Palestine, calling for a new peace process suggested by the framework
offered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2002—a proposal praised by
President Obama in his interview with al Arabiya. The Atlantic’s Goldberg
echoed Rosen three days later, claiming Freeman was “well-known for his
hostility toward Israel.” Goldberg’s sole piece of evidence was the 2006
speech Rosen had highlighted. From there, criticism of Freeman spread to
the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and the New Republic.

Rosen’s campaign against Freeman follows the tactics he honed during a
series of internecine battles within AIPAC against the Middle East peace
process and to gain control of the organization. In 1988, Rosen overthrew
his chief rival, legislative director and chief lobbyist Douglas
Bloomfield, after the Reagan administration recognized the Palestine
Liberation Organization. “Bloomfield was fired in a blast of unwelcome
publicity airing AIPAC’s inner turmoil,” The Washington Post’s Lloyd Grove
reported in 1991. “Rosen had won.” His method, according to the Post,
“indulged an appetite for the ad hominem, warning of conspiracies among
various Jewish organizations to undermine AIPAC's mission.”

According to M.J. Rosenberg, the former AIPAC staffer, Rosen then trained
his sights on the man who hired him, AIPAC director Tom Dine. “Rosen
didn’t like the fact that Dine was a Democrat,” Rosenberg told me, “and
even more than that, he didn’t like having a boss.” When Rosen learned of
alleged remarks by Dine that seemed to disparage Orthodox Jews as “smelly”
and “low-class,” he rushed to AIPAC’s board of directors to complain. In
short order, Dine was drummed out. But Rosen’s real agenda was to
undermine the Oslo peace process initiated by Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin. In 1993, the second-ranking AIPAC lobbyist, Harvey
Friedman, a Rosen ally, called Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi
Beilin "a little slime-ball" for advocating Rabin’s land-for-peace policy.
Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Itamar Rabinovich, demanded an apology,
which was publicly offered by Dine. That prompted Rosen’s counterattack,
Dine’s ouster, and his control of the group. According to Douglas
Bloomfield, in an article published last week in the New Jersey Jewish
Week, Rosen “coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led
the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to
impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and
Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.”

Rosen’s machinations eventually precipitated his undoing. In 2005, federal
prosecutors indicted him and two other AIPAC staffers for allegedly
violating the Espionage Act by furnishing top-secret U.S. documents to
reporters and foreign officials. The one-time power broker suddenly became
persona non grata on Capitol Hill. In 2007, Rosen announced a new mission
to The Forward’s Nathan Guttman: avenging “the strong anti-Israel
sentiment among individuals in America’s intelligence community, which he
believes is what led to the investigation against him in the first place.”
In November 2008, Rosen started blogging for the Middle East Forum, a
neoconservative think tank founded by Pipes, who once called for “razing
villages” in Palestine.

Rosen’s former employer denies any role in fueling the Freeman
controversy. “We’re not really interested in Freeman,” AIPAC director of
communications Josh Block told me. “It’s not something we’re working on.”
But when I asked Block whether anyone at the group had circulated
information about Freeman to reporters, he declined to comment.

Spencer Ackerman, a national-security reporter for the Washington
Independent, first reported the rumors. “Reporter friends of mine have
told me that AIPAC has been shopping oppo research on Freeman around,”
Ackerman wrote on March 5. Ron Kampeas, a reporter for the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency, told me that after he published his first report on
Freeman, “[Josh] Block called to say, ‘Wow, that’s interesting stuff you
found out!’ But it wasn’t as if he had some material to give us,” Kampeas
added. “We had the background on Freeman in the first place.” Kampeas said
that many of the Freeman quotes furnished by critics “were not out of the
mainstream in terms of Middle East policy
 And a lot of what we’re seeing
is smears.”

While AIPAC has attempted to avoid the appearance of being involved in any
way in the attacks on Freeman, Rosen has taken a leading role. In assuming
such a prominent part, he has violated his own rule: “A lobby is like a
night flower,” Rosen once wrote in an internal AIPAC memo. “It thrives in
the dark and dies in the sun.”

“The way it used to work in the case of someone like Freeman or people in
Jewish community who broke from the consensus,” Rosenberg remarked, “you'd
never know why he lost his job or didn't get the appointment. But now
people focus on this and people know why it's happening. What did they
think? That this wouldn't become a huge story?”

Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow
at The Nation Institute, whose book, Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation
Books), is forthcoming in Spring 2009. Contact him at
maxblumenthal3000 at yahoo.com.

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