Charles Freeman Fails to Show Up at the Committee Hearing

I was just leafing through my new hijab catalogue, trying to decide which color to order for wearing under The New Order when the good news arrived: Charles Freeman is not going to be the head of O’Bama’s National Intelligence Council.

Freeman is a piece of work. The deeper you dig into his history the worse it gets. Dirt all the way down. In the brief piece announcing his no show at the House Intelligence Committee hearing that was to begin vetting his nomination, The Wall Street Journal mentioned that “critics focused on Mr. Freeman’s comment that the Chinese government acted too slowly to crack down on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989”.

Mr. Nice Guy.

Oh, if that were the only thing he’d ever done.

An earlier WSJ opinion piece outlined some of Mr. Freeman’s activities and opinions:

Without question, Mr. Freeman has a distinguished résumé, having served in a long list of State and Defense Department slots. But also without question, he has distinctive political views and affiliations, some of which are more than eyebrow-raising.

In 1997, Mr. Freeman succeeded George McGovern to become the president of the Middle East Policy Council. The MEPC purports to be a nonpartisan, public-affairs group that “strives to ensure that a full range of U.S. interests and views are considered by policy makers” dealing with the Middle East. In fact, its original name until 1991 was the American-Arab Affairs Council, and it is an influential Washington mouthpiece for Saudi Arabia.

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As Mr. Freeman acknowledged in a 2006 interview with an outfit called the Saudi-US Relations Information Service, MEPC owes its endowment to the “generosity” of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia. Asked in the same interview about his organization’s current mission, Mr. Freeman responded, in a revealing non sequitur, that he was “delighted that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has, after a long delay, begun to make serious public relations efforts.”

Among MEPC’s recent activities in the public relations realm, it has published what it calls an “unabridged” version of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. This controversial 2006 essay argued that American Jews have a “stranglehold” on the U.S. Congress…

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While President Obama speaks of helping the people of Israel “search for credible partners with whom they can make peace,” Mr. Freeman believes, as he said in a 2007 address to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, that…the primary reason America confronts a terrorism problem today…is “the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by an Israeli occupation that is about to mark its fortieth anniversary and shows no sign of ending.”

The Middle East…is by no means Mr. Freeman’s only area of interest. He has pronounced on a wide variety of other subjects, including China…The specter of a Chinese threat, he remarked during a China forum at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in October 2006, is nothing more than “a great fund-raiser for the hyper-expensive advanced weaponry our military-industrial complex prefers to make and our armed forces love to employ.”

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 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.”

Earlier, Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, had measured the ways in which Mr. Freeman failed as a safe appointment to a critical position within any administration:

Since Freeman left the Foreign Service after a multidecade career involving service in, among other places, Communist China where he was the No. 2 man in the U.S. embassy and Saudi Arabia where he held the top diplomatic job, he has done what many others with similar backgrounds have done: Cash in.

Freeman served on the board of Beijing’s noxious state-owned petroleum giant, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) during the years it sought to corner the market on oil produced around the world. Among its targets: Unocal, a major U.S. company with significant oil reserves and the owner of the only American repository of certain highly strategic rare earth minerals.

Mr. Gaffney also has more information on the MEPC group mentioned in the Journal’s editorial piece. Remember that Freeman ran this group:

… the Middle East Policy Council, an organization bankrolled by, among others, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the pre-eminent practitioner of what has come to be known as “stealth jihad,” the effort to promote through influence operations, front groups and outright acquisitions the seditious theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls “Shariah.”

In other words, we were about to get saddled with the scum de la scum as the head of our National Intelligence Council, a position from which he could have pushed his anti-American agenda on a daily basis.

Mr. Gaffney says:

It is not just that the ambassador was effectively employed by foreign governments and interests hostile to America. He actively advanced their agendas through his public advocacy of their positions, sometimes in utterly sycophantic ways. For example, as Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens observes in an essay today in which he describes Freeman as a “crackpot,” the would-be NIC chairman has unctuously fawned over Mao Zedong and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Worse yet, he has served as an apologist for not only the Chinese and Saudi regimes but also the Iranian mullahocracy and even Hamas. He and his council have been prime purveyors of Arabist disinformation, including relentless attacks on Israel.

Freeman is not the first, and certainly will not be the last, senior U.S. government official to translate connections developed during his public sector career into a lucrative practice in the private sector. In the latter capacity, he is, of course, free to espouse whatever tyranny and spin whatever repressive and even anti-American behavior he wishes.

It is wonderful news indeed that the revolving door jammed against this particularly odious appointment. I am thankful that so many people pushed against Mr. Freeman, and pushed so hard that he didn’t even bother to show up for the Intelligence Committee hearing that was to have been held in his honor.

That’s one point for the good guys.