MJ Rosenberg: Lobby Out To Defeat Obama Appointment: Too Evenhanded

MJ Rosenberg
Director of Policy for the Israel Policy Forum
Posted February 23, 2009

Lobby Out To Defeat Obama Appointment: Too Evenhanded

This is getting good. Laura Rozen was first to report that the Obama administration wants to appoint Charles Freeman, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as head of the National Intelligence Council. which synthesizes all intelligence information, makes sense out of it, and delivers it to the President.

Jim Lobe explains why the job is important and why Freeman is a good choice for it.

But here's the problem. The lobby HATES Freeman. It considers Freeman anti-Israel because he has repeatedly indicated that he believes that successive Israeli governments deserve their share of blame for sinking the peace process. He does not toe the line.

So they have to stop him. First salvo came from indicted for espionage former AIPAC spook Steve Rosen (spook as in spooky, I don't know if he was a spy. I do know that the dude is spooky). Then the JTA (the authoritative Jewish Telegraphic Agency) gave the more-or-less official view of Freeman. And now another hit from the indicted Rosen saying that Freeman is on the take!

<snip>

That is how it worked when Admiral Bobby Inman was nominated for Secretary of Defense by President Clinton. William Safire thought him to be anti-Israel. Pretty soon, somehow, everyone was hearing that he was crooked and gay, and bingo, he was out.

I don't know much about Freeman. But I do know this. No one is ever disqualified from high office from being too close to Israel. Martin Indyk came to this country from his native Australia to work for Steve Rosen at AIPAC. Pretty soon he was an Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East and then ambassador to Israel. Indyk got the jobs despite his AIPAC ties and was damn good at them. In fact, the Clinton administration's entire "peace team" was close to Israel and AIPAC.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/lobby-out-to-defeat-obama_b_169204.html

They're trying to spin it, stop it, anything so it doesn't go forward. AIPAC has gone so far as to drop its association with Rosen and discontinue pating for his lawyers.

“On August 27, 2004, CBS News broke a story about an FBI investigation into a possible spy in the U.S. Department of Defense working for Israel. The story reported that the FBI had uncovered a spy working as a policy analyst under Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. He was later identified as Lawrence Franklin, who had previously served as an attaché at the U.S. embassy in Israel and was one of two mid-level Pentagon officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense responsible for Iran policy in the office's Northern Gulf directorate. He has since been demoted within the Defense Department and no longer has his previous security privileges.<1><2><3> Furthermore, he was sentenced on January 20, 2006 to 12 years and 7 months in prison and was fined $10,000 for passing classified information to a pro-Israel lobby group and an Israeli diplomat<4>

Franklin has pled guilty to passing on a classified presidential directive, and other sensitive documents pertaining to U.S. deliberations on foreign policy regarding Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, who in turn provided the information to Israel. FBI sources have indicated that the year-long investigation was actively underway when the CBS News story broke.

According to FBI surveillance tapes, Franklin relayed top-secret information to Steve Rosen, AIPAC's then-policy director, and Keith Weissman, a senior Iran analyst with AIPAC, while at the Tivoli Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. On 27 August, the FBI raided Rosen's office, copying his personal computer's hard drive.<5>

According to The New York Times, Lawrence Franklin was one of two U.S. officials that held meetings with Iranian dissidents, including Paris-based arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair. These Pentagon-approved meetings were brokered by neoconservative Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who had also played a part in Iran-Contra, and is said to have taken place in Paris in June 2003. The Jerusalem Post reported that the purpose of the meetings was to "undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government", specifically, an exchange of high-ranking al-Qaeda members in Iranian custody in return for a stop to U.S. support of the anti-Iranian Mujahideen al-Khalq fighters in Iraq.<6>broken link The Post article dated the beginning of the FBI investigation to this secret meeting, which the public first learned about in August 2003.” Cont…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Weissman