Despite intense, behind-the-scenes lobbying by some Jewish groups, the Obama administration yesterday tapped veteran diplomat Chas. W. Freeman Jr. to head the National Intelligence Council in what may be its most controversial appointment yet.
As chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Freeman will be responsible for producing the National Intelligence Estimate - the classified document given to the president and senior intelligence officials that analyzes threats to U.S. security.
By all accounts a brilliant man who is fluent in several languages, Freeman is a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a former assistant defense secretary and a China expert who served as principal translator for the late Richard Nixon on his groundbreaking 1972 trip.
But since his retirement from government service in 1994, he has voiced strong, often undiplomatic opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and China.
As the president of the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank, endowed in part by King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, he has often expressed critical views of Israel. “Demonstrably, Israel excels at war,” he said in 2006 to the 15th Annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference. “Sadly, it has shown no talent for peace.”
He has also enraged some human rights advocates with his defense of the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissidents in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (albeit in what he thought was a confidential Internet discussion group). “The truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud,” he wrote.
But even some who repudiate those opinions laud Freeman’s choice as the nations “analyst-in-chief,” as former Treasury Department official David J. Rothkopf describes the job.
The head of the NIC … must have a great mind, must reject cant, must have a nose for political agendas (and the willingness to filter them out… including first and foremost his own biases), and must be genuinely intellectually daring, willing to explore unpopular or unlikely ideas to consider their implications. … Few people would be better for these tasks than Chas Freeman. Part of the reason he is so controversial is that he has zero fear of speaking what he perceives to be truth to power. You can’t cow him and you can’t find someone with a more relentlessly questioning worldview.
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan, called Freeman “one of the most well-rounded, knowledgeable and fiercely independent people I’ve ever dealt with in or out of government.”
Korb told Fox News “it’s completely unfair” to question Freeman’s objectivity. “He’s going to tell it like it is and he doesn’t have any bias. This is a man who interpreted for Richard Nixon in China. I can’t think of a better background,” he said.
Others, however, from the New Republic’s Marty Peretz to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg are less confident.
In an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Gabriel Schoenfeld of the Princeton-based Witherspoon Institute criticized Freeman’s “distinctive political views and affiliations, some of which are more than eyebrow-raising” - among them, his leadership of the Middle East Policy Council, which Schoenfeld called “an influential Washington mouthpiece for Saudi Arabia.”
And he notes Freeman’s remarks in a 2007 address to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, that “Israel no longer even pretends to seek peace with the Palestinians; it strives instead to pacify them.”
Some critics pull sound bites from some of Freeman’s speeches without putting them in context, of course. In a column Freeman himself wrote for the New York Times in October, 2000, he laid responsibility at the door of both the Israelis and the Palestinians for the breakdown in peace talks and called on the next U.S. president “to rebuild trust with both sides.”
Freeman’s appointment does not need confirmation by the Senate.
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2 Comments
#1. JOJOJO 02.27.2009
GOOD MOVE OBAMA .. This is great news. the USA has been blindly on Israel side 9 the jewish lobby threats?) for far too long. this is why the ARABS HATE US. get it people? and the jewish state is really not a democracy, it is quite racist . it privelges one ethnic/ reliogious group./… SO YES, we need more even handedness and for those jews about to start whining and calling ‘anti-semite’ look in your OWN BACK yard.. and those Palestinains ARE SEMITES…
#2. nico 03.03.2009
chas freeman is great he has a perfect back ground and he tells it like it is. i personaly know chas and he is great in person plus he is hilarous.
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