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Intelligence post getting blind ideologue

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 11, 2009

Never let it be said that America isn't a country of remarkable openness. You can go directly from effectively working for the Saudis and Chinese to the country's top intelligence analyst. Only in the land of opportunity.

This is the career trajectory of Chas Freeman, the former diplomat the Obama administration intends to make chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the most lucrative diplomatic posting in the world because the ambassadors usually end up in the employ of the Saudis after leaving public service.

Sure enough, Freeman is president of the anti-Israel Middle East Policy Council, which might not exist without Saudi largesse. In a 2006 interview with a Saudi news outlet, Freeman explained that the council couldn't continue without an endowment it had set up through "the generosity of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz."

Before he became ambassador to Saudi Arabia (and then, basically, a Saudi ambassador to the U.S.), Freeman served in China. The enterprising Freeman parlayed his expertise to membership on the international advisory board of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation - think Exxon, except owned by a dictatorial government. The corporation is, as Eli Lake of The Washington Times has reported, notorious for its connections to the world's nasty regimes, besides the one it serves in Beijing.

Not that that would bother Freeman. He's from the school of foreign-policy realists who think pandering to and making excuses for the world's dictators and terrorists is the sine qua non of sophistication. The Weekly Standard unearthed an e-mail from Freeman about the Tiananmen Square massacre in which he regretted only that the Chinese hadn't cracked down faster.

It's not pro-democracy protesters, but Israel, that is the most intense object of Freeman's ire. He blames the Jewish state for the deadly hatred directed at it, and at us. Whether you consider these views odious - right answer - or courageous, Freeman is a committed partisan in the war over American foreign policy, exactly the wrong profile for a job requiring dispassionate analysis. At the National Intelligence Council, Freeman would supervise the crafting of the National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. Whoever controls the extremely influential NIE has a large say in determining U.S. policy.

For years, Democrats brayed about the "politicization" of intelligence. Their only real evidence for this charge was that Dick Cheney asked the CIA a few questions. Now, they are about to put a blinkered ideologue in the most important intelligence analysis job in the U.S. government, and congratulate themselves on their commitment to evenhandedness and neutrality.

© 2009 King Features Syndicate

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