Alternet: "Is This Last Gasp for the Israel Lobby and the Neocons?"
Is This Last Gasp for the Israel Lobby and the Neocons?
By Robert Dreyfuss, Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 16, 2009
After sinking intel chief Chas Freeman, pro-Israel hardliners are celebrating. But they may have overplayed their hand on this round.
Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared?
Judging by the outcome of the Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman affair this week, it might seem as if the Israeli lobby is fearsome indeed. Seen more broadly, however, the controversy over Freeman could be the Israel lobby's Waterloo.
Let's recap. On February 19th, Laura Rozen reported at ForeignPolicy.com that Freeman had been selected by Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, to serve in a key post as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC, the official in-house think tank of the intelligence community, takes input from 16 intelligence agencies and produces what are called "national intelligence estimates" on crucial topics of the day as guidance for Washington policymakers. For that job, Freeman boasted a stellar resumé: fluent in Mandarin Chinese, widely experienced in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, and an ex-assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration.
A wry, outspoken iconoclast, Freeman had, however, crossed one of Washington's red lines by virtue of his strong criticism of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Over the years, he had, in fact, honed a critique of Israel that was both eloquent and powerful. Hours after the Foreign Policy story was posted, Steve Rosen, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), launched what would soon become a veritable barrage of criticism of Freeman on his right-wing blog.
Rosen himself has already been indicted by the Department of Justice in an espionage scandal over the transfer of classified information to outside parties involving a colleague at AIPAC, a former official in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and an official at the Israeli embassy. His blog, Obama Mideast Monitor, is hosted by the Middle East Forum website run by Daniel Pipes, a hard-core, pro-Israeli rightist, whose Middle East Quarterly is, in turn, edited by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. Over approximately two weeks, Rosen would post 19 pieces on the Freeman story.
The essence of Rosen's criticism centered on the former ambassador's strongly worded critique of Israel. (That was no secret. Freeman had repeatedly denounced many of Israel's policies and Washington's too-close relationship with Jerusalem. "The brutal oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending," said Freeman in 2007. "American identification with Israel has become total.") But Rosen, and those who followed his lead, broadened their attacks to make unfounded or exaggerated claims, taking quotes and emails out of context, and accusing Freeman of being a pro-Arab "lobbyist," of being too closely identified with Saudi Arabia, and of being cavalier about China's treatment of dissidents. They tried to paint the sober, conservative former U.S. official as a wild-eyed radical, an anti-Semite, and a pawn of the Saudi king.
From Rosen's blog, the anti-Freeman vitriol spread to other right-wing, Zionist, and neoconservative blogs, then to the websites of neocons mouthpieces like the New Republic, Commentary, National Review, and the Weekly Standard, which referred to Freeman as a "Saudi puppet." From there, it would spread to the Atlantic and then to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, where Gabriel Schoenfeld called Freeman a "China-coddling Israel basher," and the Washington Post, where Jonathan Chait of the New Republic labeled Freeman a "fanatic."
Before long, staunch partisans for Israel on Capitol Hill were getting into the act. These would, in the end, include Representative Steve Israel and Senator Charles Schumer, both New York Democrats; a group of Republican House members led by John Boehner of Ohio, the minority leader, and Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican Whip; seven Republican members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and, finally, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who engaged in a sharp exchange with Admiral Blair about Freeman at a Senate hearing...
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http://www.alternet.org/audits/131715/is_this_last_gasp_for_the_israel_lobby_and_the_neocons/
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Freeman talks
Sorry this is Part One (Freemen Talks)
Fareed Zakaria has his Bull-Sh_t* generator up in full steam
in this interview: Fareed Zakaria: “So you see our support for Israel as having produced a kind of tidal wave of hostility, that in some way did cause 9/11… isn’t it fair to say?”
The former Ambassador to Saudi-Arabia answers: “I think we are paying a price, because our actions have catalysed, perhaps not caused, but catalysed a radicalisation of Arab and Muslim politics, um, (that is the sound of Charles Freeman’s turbo BS* generator) - that facilitates the activities of terrorists with global reach like those who struck us on 9/11” He goes on, further in the interview, saying : “Similarly, in Saudi Arabia, the United States is now amazingly unpopular and disliked: the American invasion of Irak, a fellow Arab country, the American backing of Israeli actions in Lebanon and Gaza, and other activities in the region, all are deeply resented…
Here, obviously Americans remain traumatized and very angry about 9/11 as we should be.”
(Fareed Zakaria jumps in at this point with his very intellectual question :) Zakaria:
”But you don’t think the Wahabi clerics created this kind of Frankenstein monster?”
This is the type of intellectual analysis we have come to expect from CNN: It was certainly the Frankenstein monster, tele-guided by the Egyptian (blind) cleric Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and his friends Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and forever elusive Usama bin Laden (out of a cave in Tora Bora) who was able to introduce himself to three of our country’s most high-security buildings (WTC-7 housed the largest CIA office outside of Langley Virginia) to plant military grade sol-gel-nanothermite ,allowing the buildings to come down symmetrically at nearly free fall speed as we all observed, and rechecked on Richard Gage’s important DVD: “9/11: Blueprint for Truth – The Architecture of Destruction”
Charles Freeman defined his work as an Ambassador well: “I know very well how to subverge my own opinions, and to articulate the views of the collective, the organization, the government I serve. (I believe him on that.) I don’t have any particular agenda with regard to Israel or any other issue (except the agenda of the collective, the organization, the government you serve, we presume) What I do have is an iconoclastic mind… Um, um. I don’t like people who assert things because they have heard them, they are conventional wisdom, um – and I would have challenged people to produce evidence that what they were saying had some grounding in evidence, um, in other words, I think this business of that some-how or other an analytical job cannot be done by somebody with a critical mind is an oxymoron.”
Here, Freeman gives himself away to the people as the oxy-injected moron that he really is: We the people do not want a former ambassador (to Saudi-Arabia) who has no agenda, except that of his masters, to be put in a high intelligence position, when he babbles about radicalized Muslims striking down three steel-frame high rises at symmetrical free fall speed with two passenger airliners, and killing 39 of 41 comptrollers deep in the Pentagon (investigating the disappearance of 2.3 Trillion dollars in the Office of Naval Intelligence) with a third airliner in Washington that vaporized 90 tons of aluminum (but the dna of every passenger was collected on the scene, they say..) Show us the EVIDENCE that this story holds true. Explain to us how those radical Muslims planted the sol-gel-nanothermate. We are like you, we do not like people who assert things because they have heard them on CNN, they are conventional wisdom because they are repeated over and over by our corporate media, – and we do challenge our government, since this is a country of WE THE PEOPLE, and our intelligence service is there to serve US, to produce evidence of how the official blowback theory "executed by radical Muslim Terrorists” can be true, in light of the evidence of much more scientifically plausible scenarios of means, motive and opportunity that has been uncovered since the heinous massacre to traumatize the US population. Until this has been fully investigated, we advise you not to utter a single word like “Muslim terrorists with global reach struck us on 9/11”. Those who continue talking in their night cap like this will soon be looked upon as ridiculous fools, or manipulators working for a criminal agenda.
Love from Brussels,
drbeeth
"unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man." (Harold Pinter)
www.mp911truth.org/#Beeth Dr Beeth is a contributing member of the intl. ass. of Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth and of the Belgian ass: www.vigli.org/news.htm
www.patriotsquestion911.com/professors.html#Beeth + also of the American Patriots Question 9/11 (DOT) com association.
Visit www.AE911Truth.org and sign up for their excellent monthly newsletter: www.ae911truth.org/newsletter/enews002.php [ See also : www.ae911truth.org/events/eurotour/#BrusselsDiary ]
Help rebuild TRUST in our institutions fast, starting with shining a light on the criminal demolition of skyscrapers in New-York, and the lack of integrity in those to whom we have entrusted our macro-economy : see www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/02/most-dangerous-words-theres-n... Understanding how we got to the present situation will help us learn from our mistakes, and build a more peaceful and sustainable future.
Update from Brussels : we have a prestigious venue ! http://www.911blogger.com/node/19570#comment-205760
Faire suivre sur tous vos résaux! www.vigli.org/news.htm
Freeman Affair Puts Israel Lobby in Spotlight
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/03/13-8
Avnery: The Freeman Affair: The Rape of Washington
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14916
"...Freeman was called by Barack Obama’s newly-appointed Chief of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, to the post of Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. In this position, he would have been in charge of the National intelligence Estimates (NIE), summarizing the reports of all the 16 US intelligence agencies, which employ some 100,000 people at an annual cost of 50 billion dollars, and composing the estimates that are put before the President.
In Israel, this is the job of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the officer in charge has a huge influence on government policy. In October 1973, the then intelligence chief disregarded all reports to the contrary and informed the government that there was only a “low probability” of an Egyptian attack. A few days later the Egyptian army crossed the canal.
Throughout the 1990’s, the man in charge of intelligence estimates, Amos Gilad, deliberately misled the government into believing that Yasser Arafat was deceiving them and was actually plotting the destruction of Israel. Gilad was later openly accused by his subordinates of suppressing their expert reports and submitting estimates of his own, which were not based on any intelligence whatsoever. Later, as the guru of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Gilad coined the phrase “We have no Palestinian partner for peace”.
In the US, the intelligence chiefs famously supplied President George W. Bush with the (false) intelligence he needed to justify his invasion of Iraq.
All this shows how vitally important it is to have an estimates chief of intellectual integrity and wide experience and knowledge. Admiral Blair could not have chosen a better person than Charles Freeman, a man of sterling character and uncontested expertise, especially about China and the Arab world.
And that was his undoing..."
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http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14916