Who is Chas Freeman and why should you care?
Wednesday, February 25, 2009 By: Shari Hillman
Serious concerns have been raised by
reports that President Obama will name Charles "Chas" W. Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC produces the National Intelligence Estimates and is the main strategic thinking body for the U.S. intelligence community.
Freeman was the United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992. He is president of the Saudi-funded Middle East Policy Council (MEPC).
Former AIPAC official Steve Rosen described Freeman as "a strident critic of Israel, and a textbook case of the old-line Arabism that afflicted American diplomacy at the time the state of Israel was born. His views of the region are what you would expect in the Saudi foreign ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship, not the top CIA position for analytic products going to the President of the United States."
Why is this important?
Melanie Phillips writes:
If he is appointed to this new intelligence role, Freeman will shape the intelligence assessments that will tell America, among other things, what threats are posed to America and the free world by the Iranian regime. We already saw, with the misleading and manipulatively spun NIE two years ago which facilitated the demonstrably false conclusion that Iran had stopped working on the bomb – a conclusion almost immediately disproved by further intelligence but which was used to head off action against Iran – how such politicised intel can be used to thwart attempts to stop the Iranian bomb.
Freeman's anti-Israel bias is clear from many of his speeches and writings. Here are several samples.
On Israel•
Fox News reports (2/23/2009):
In a speech to the Pacific Council on International Policy in October 2007, Freeman said the U.S. has "abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel's efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations."
"We wring our hands while sitting on them as the Jewish state continues to seize ever more Arab land for its colonists," he said. "This has convinced most Palestinians that Israel cannot be appeased and is persuading increasing numbers of them that a two-state solution is infeasible ... killing, incarcerating, or otherwise humiliating Arabs and other Muslims who sympathize with Al Qaeda does not defeat the enemy; it aids him."
In reference to the Iraq war, Freeman said, "Now the United States has brought the Palestinian experience -- of humiliation, dislocation, and death -- to millions more in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"By invading Iraq, we transformed an intervention in Afghanistan most Muslims had supported into what looks to them like a wider war against Islam. We destroyed the Iraqi state and catalyzed anarchy, sectarian violence, terrorism and civil war in that country."
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"American Interests, Policies, and Results in the Middle East: Energy, Israel, Access, and the Containment of Muslim Rage", Middle East Policy Council speech by Chas Freeman,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program, February 11, 2008
Meanwhile, next door in the Holy Land, it has been years since we made a serious effort to promote negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians or even exercised our own judgment about the issues that divide them. Rather, we have reflexively supported the efforts of a series of right-wing Israeli governments to undo the Oslo accords and to pacify the Palestinians rather than make peace with them. Our recent embrace of the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and a secular Arab state - the so-called "two-state solution" - is widely seen in the region as too late and too little. Too late, because so much land has been colonized by Israel that there is not enough left for a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel; too little, because what is on offer looks to Palestinians more like an Indian reservation than a country. Such status will not be accepted by the inhabitants of the occupied territories; nor will it be accepted by the six-to-seven million-strong Palestinian Diaspora. It would inflame rather than relieve Arab resentment of Israel. It would not lead to normalization of Israel's relations with other Arab states. Far from achieving the acceptance of Israel that is essential to its long-term survival, it would assure the continuation of efforts by other states in the region to erase Israel from the map. It would risk further globalization of asymmetric warfare in the form of terrorism against Israel and its supporters overseas, including the United States.
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Excerpt from his remarks to the 15th Annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference in Washington, D.C., October 31, 2006:
Finally, let me allude briefly to the issue of Israel, a country that has yet to be accepted as part of the Middle East and whose inability to find peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs is the driving factor in the region's radicalization and anti-Americanism.
The talented European settlers who formed the state of Israel endowed it with substantial intellectual and technological superiority over any other society in the Middle East. The dynamism of Israel's immigrant culture and the generous help of the Jewish Diaspora rapidly gave Israel a standard of living equivalent to that of European countries. For fifty years Israel has enjoyed military superiority in its region. Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace.
... The suspension of the independent exercise of American judgment about what best serves our interests as well as those of Israelis and Arabs has caused the Arabs to lose confidence in the United States as a peace partner. To their credit, they have therefore stepped forward with their own plan for a comprehensive peace. By sad contrast, the American decision to let Israel call the shots in the Middle East has revealed how frightened Israelis now are of their Arab neighbors and how reluctant this fear has made them to risk respectful coexistence with the other peoples of their region. The results of the experiment are in: left to its own devices, the Israeli establishment will make decisions that harm Israelis, threaten all associated with them, and enrage those who are not.
Tragically, despite all the advantages and opportunities Israel has had over the fifty-nine years of its existence, it has failed to achieve concord and reconciliation with anyone in its region, still less to gain their admiration or affection. Instead, with each decade, Israel's behavior has deviated farther from the humane ideals of its founders and the high ethical standards of the religion that most of its inhabitants profess.
(
Also reproduced in full by the Saudi-US Relations Information Service (SUSRIS) here.)
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Remarks to the 14th Annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference
The National Council on US-Arab Relations, September 12, 2005 in Washington, D.C.
The fact is, of course, that Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands is inherently violent. Occupations are acts of violence. The dispossession of people from their land is an act of violence. Preventing people from coming to and going from their own country is an act of violence. And as long as such Israeli violence against Palestinians continues, it is utterly unrealistic to expect that Palestinians will stand down from violent resistance and retaliation against Israelis. Mr. Sharon is far from a stupid man; he understands this. So, when he sets the complete absence of Palestinian violence as a precondition for implementing the road map or any other negotiating process, he is deliberately setting a precondition he knows can never be met. As long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected. .
... The extremism and terrorism bred by the continuing injustices and crimes against humanity in the Holy Land thus continue to take their toll in places as remote from the Holy Land as Britain, Thailand, Nigeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
On the role of MEPCThe Saudi-US Relations Information Service (SUSRIS) interviewed Freeman about the activities of the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC), of which he is president. (9/20/2006)
The Council works in three main areas: a series of policy discussions on Capitol Hill
addressing topics that are either neglected or are too awkward
politically to get the attention they require on the part of Washington
policy community; Middle East Policy which is the premier quarterly journal in the field both in the US and internationally; and, of course, there is the MEPC
program of training high school teachers how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. Regarding Saudi funding of MEPC:
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz in late 2005... initiated contacts with MEPC after hearing about its seminars designed to shape American teachers’ perceptions of the Middle East. It appears that the partnership between MEPC and Prince Alwaleed has borne fruit. This past March, Prince Alwaleed announced that he was supplementing his earlier donation of $100,000 to MEPC with a $1 million gift for its teacher-training programs.
Regarding the controversial curricular materials MEPC helped produce for use in American schools, see
here and
here.
On the "Israel Lobby"In the September 2006 interview with the Saudi-US Relations Information Service, Freeman boasted:
Our Fall issue [of the Middle East Policy journal] will contain a revised, updated, and unabridged version of the controversial paper by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article, given the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it. So we continue to do important things that are not done by anybody else, which I think fill some gaps.
On HamasFreeman moderated an April 2008 MEPC conference on Hamas entitled, "Hamas and the Two-State Solution: Villain, Victim or Missing Ingredient?" in which he raised these issues and questions:
Many see Hamas as a pure villain. It has been branded by Israel, the United States, and some others as a terrorist organization rather than a legitimate movement for Palestinian independence or resistance against occupation. It is widely seen as extremist, and yet on many instances it has shown principled and disciplined restraint.
This is an organization which is Islamist, Sunni Salafi in orientation. Is it morally absolutist or is it, as it claims, a democratic party which is prepared to accept electorally determined alternation in office? It, of course, won the Palestinian elections rather decisively and remains very popular, but it is seen in neighboring countries, autocracies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as a major threat in that it appears to unite Islamism and democracy. It does not accept Israel's right to exist, but it does accept that Israel does exist and repeatedly states that it is willing to deal with Israel.
Is Hamas, the elected government of the Palestinians, a victim? It has been assiduously isolated and sought to be overthrown by Israel and the United States. It has, oddly, as a Sunni Islamist movement, been driven into the arms of Iran, having nowhere else to go. It is now the subject of a siege in Gaza, with many implying that the siege will soon blossom into a full-scale war. In any event, Hamas' ascendancy as an elected government in Gaza has been accompanied by new extremes in suffering for the Palestinian people.
Is Hamas the missing ingredient in peace? Can a peace process that excludes the elected majority government of Palestine work, or is it dead on arrival? If Hamas is not included somehow in whatever peace may eventuate, will it not have the capacity to wreck that peace? By what right do those who are not elected claim to speak for and negotiate on behalf of Palestinians?
Remarking on the "murder" of Hamas "politicians" at the same conference:
But that illustrates another point, and that is that it is hard to get a life insurance policy if you're a Hamas politician. And I mention this because if you go on the Middle East Policy Council website you will find interviews with a fairly large number of Hamas leaders, all of whom are now dead. Over the years we have interviewed them through professional interviewers, and I'm sorry to say that, essentially without exception, they've all since been murdered.
From the same conference, regarding Israel:
I think your ending remark is absolutely crucial because we live in a moment of great irony in which, for the first time, governments generally are committed to a two-state solution, while the sense in the region is that a two-state solution is becoming impossible to imagine. How can there be two states when one of them is limited to less than 11 percent of the original territory of the Palestine mandate? How can there be two states when one state has the sovereignty that we accord to Indian tribes, rather than the sort of sovereignty that is generally recognized internationally as pertinent to a state?
On other countries[Freeman is served several diplomatic tours in the director for Chinese affairs at the U.S.
Department of State from 1979-1981. He was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989-1992.]
Gabriel Schoenfeld pointed out Freeman's comments on China: On the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mr. Freeman unabashedly sides with the Chinese government, a remarkable position for an appointee of an administration that has pledged to advance the cause of human rights. Mr. Freeman has been a participant in ChinaSec, a confidential Internet discussion group of China specialists. A copy of one of his postings was provided to me by a former member. "The truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities," he wrote there in 2006, "was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud." Moreover, "the Politburo's response to the mob scene at 'Tiananmen' stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action." Indeed, continued Mr. Freeman, "I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be."
The
Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted and commented on this Freeman remark about Saudi Arabia, which provides significant funding to MEPC:
Participating in a 2002 panel for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Freeman said that "in the case of Saudi Arabia, reform has always come from the top down. It has been the ruling family that has sought to liberalize society and to open it up."
Saudi exiles over the years who have sought democratization might disagree. They have fled in fear for their lives and continue to be harassed in their new homelands.