In all the talk about the politicization of intelligence during the Bush administration it has been largely lost that a war to control the intelligence community has been ongoing since the mid-early 1970’s, and that, while alliances shift over time, the battlelines have mostly been made up of advocates of bigger defense spending and a pro-Israel policy on one side and realists and Arabists on the other. In other words, factions have fought for the right to control the output of the Intelligence Community.
The current battle is over DNI Dennis Blair’s appointment of Chas Freeman Jr. to head up the National Intelligence Council. In that position, Freeman will oversee the creation of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE’s) that we’ve heard so much about over the last seven years. And that is a job that Israel absolutely does not want to see in Freeman’s hands. Without understanding the history of more-or-less constant politicization of our intelligence product over the last forty years, it might seem odd or presumptuous for Israel and its domestic advocates to openly presume to tell the president whom he can or should have overseeing his intelligence reports. You’d think that the goal should be to get good intelligence, regardless of political considerations. Wouldn’t Israel like the American government to first be well-informed and get the intelligence right, and then advocate for policies that help Israel in light of that intelligence?
The answer is a clear ‘no’. Israel wants to control the creation of intelligence assessments. And they’re incredibly brazen and transparent about it, as Max Blumenthal reports in today’s Daily Beast.
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.
Perhaps relying on a man who is set to stand trial next month for spying for Israel against his home country is a sign of Israel’s desperation.
…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.
It’s hard to believe that Rosen would accuse someone other than himself of having an unholy alliance with a foreign government. But opposition to Freeman is widespread, and includes Sen. Joe Lieberman, who questioned DNI Blair about him this morning.
All of this is quite reminiscent of Israel Lobby’s successful 1994 effort to kill the nomination of Bobby Ray Inman as Secretary of Defense. The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, while not the kind of reputable source I usually use, is worth reviewing for their contemporaneous analysis.
The most fascinating, but oddly enough the least reported, aspect of the Inman Affair, is the source of the implacable hostility that [New York Times columnist William] Safire and his allies have borne for many years toward Bobby Ray Inman. Inman revealed the source in his famous January 18 press conference [withdrawing his nomination], but he failed to bring out the background. The source: In early 1981, Israel suddenly bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Puzzled, Inman, then deputy head of the CIA, realized that Israel could only have known where the nuclear reactor was located by having gotten access to U.S. satellite photographs. But Israel’s access was supposed to be limited to photographs of direct threats to Israel, which would not include Baghdad. On looking into the matter, furthermore, Inman found that Israel was habitually obtaining unwarranted access to photographs of regions even farther removed, including Libya and Pakistan. In the absence of Reagan’s head of the CIA, Bill Casey, Inman ordered Israel’s access to U.S. satellite photographs limited to 250 miles of its border. When Casey returned from a South Pacific trip, his favorite journalist and former campaign manager, Bill Safire, urged Casey to reverse the decision, a pressure that coincided with complaints from Israeli Defense Minister General Ariel Sharon, who had rushed to Washington to try to change the new policy.
Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger, however held firm, supported Inman, and overruled Casey, and from then on Safire pursued a vendetta against Bobby Ray Inman.
Israel, and friends of Israel, and people on trial for betraying the United States to Israel, seem to have no embarrassment about telling us who we are allowed to have run the Pentagon and oversee our intelligence services. That should be a scandal, but it isn’t. It’s been the status quo for a long time, with bad results for both America and Israel.
