[Marxism] Interview with Charles Freeman by Robert Dreyfuss

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/417420
Interview With Charles Freeman 
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 03/13/200
Since February 26, I've written several times (here, here, here, and here)
about the battle over the nomination of Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman as
chairman of the National Intelligence Committee. On Tuesday, he withdrew his
name from consideration after what I called a "thunderous, coordinated
assault" against him by the Israel lobby and its neoconservative allies. 

On Friday, three days after he withdrew -- in the midst of a media storm,
including front page stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post
-- Freeman and I spoke in an exclusive interview for The Nation. Here is the
unedited transcript: 

Q. When were you first approached by Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of
national intelligence? A. It was in early to mid-December. My initial
reaction was that I was reluctant to go back to the government at all. And
then my reaction was about, as I've been quoted saying, giving up my
freedom, my leisure, most of my income, undergoing a mental colonoscopy, and
resuming a daily commute to a job with long hours and a ration of political
abuse. 

Q. So when did you accept the position? A. Probably late January. It took me
five, six weeks to overcome common sense and agree to do it. 

Q. And what happened between January and the leak of your appointment? A.
Two things happened. One, I began to notify the various organizations I
nominally head or on whose boards I sit that I would be leaving to go into
the government, though I didn't say where, and when I was approached to join
new activities I replied that I would be grateful but that I couldn't
consider it because I was going into government. And, two, I took the
various business activities I was engaged in and looked at them to see how I
could bring projects that were ongoing to a stage where I could responsibly
walk away. 

Q. Did you start to work with Blair in terms of defining your job? A. I had
a series of conversations with him in which we discussed the need for the
Obama administration to have a strong National Security Council policy
process that could re-examine things on the strategic level, which is
clearly long overdue. To look at the preconceptions of policy and to take a
zero-sum look at quite a range of issues, including some connected with the
Middle East, and a few, not very many, connected with China, because I don't
see too much broken there: the alliance relationships, the NATO-Russia
relationship, the emergence of narco-states within Mexico spilling over our
border, the increasingly defiant stance of countries in Latin America to our
influence, issues of order and state collapse in Africa, the issue of
Indo-Pakistani relationship, "Pashtunistan" on both sides of the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border, how to understand the possibility of an orderly
withdrawal from Iraq, and what remains as the basis for a mutually agreed
upon Arab-Israeli settlement. And a lot of economic issues, too. 

Q. Then the appointment was reported by Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy? A.
Oh, I think I can probably reconstruct how Laura Rozen got the information.
I think it was an innocent thing. I think the person who leaked it thought
it was a 'good news' story. And didn't have any idea of the level of
opposition that would quite quickly congeal. 

Q. Were you planning an announcement? A. There would have been an
announcement when I got on the job, which is the normal way these things are
done. And I had figured on taking all or most of March to complete the
process of disengagement. 

Q. So after the Foreign Policy report . A. Yes, and within a day or two the
Steve Rosen and Daniel Pipes crowd began piling on. And there were various,
well, you watched it all. [Note: Steve Rosen, a former AIPAC official, blogs
for Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum.] 

Q. You were confident that you could withstand this assault until just
before you dropped out. A. Oh, I could have withstood it anyway. I don't
mind criticism. The issue was, in the end, that while in my own mind I
thought I could make rather significant improvements in the integrity of the
analytical process, I couldn't enhance its credibility, because anything
that it produced that was politically controversial would immediately be
attributed to me as some sort of political deviant, and be discredited.
These guys would pile on with their usual lies, and half-truths, and
distortions, and everything else. 

Basically what Denny Blair wanted was a broadly experienced iconoclast,
which some people says fits me as a description. And somebody who wasn't
afraid to tell it like he saw it, or to ask people writing things for him
why he's so sure about X, Y, or Z. Do they know that because everybody knows
it, or do they have some evidence? And one could argue that is fairly
critical in a number of contexts. 

The only thing I regret is that in my statement I embraced the term 'Israel
lobby.' This isn't really a lobby by, for or about Israel. It's really,
well, I've decided I'm going to call it from now on the [Avigdor] Lieberman
lobby. It's the very right-wing Likud in Israel and its fanatic supporters
here. And Avigdor Lieberman is really the guy that they really agree with.
And I think they're doing Israel in. 

I had a really amazing outpouring of support, privately, not just from
individuals, from Jewish-Americans of other views who hope that this was
going to open up room for a discussion. 

Q. How did your discussions on Capitol Hill go? A. Well, they didn't go
badly. But I'm one guy talking to one or two people, and they're quite a
number of people and they're feeding all sorts of disinformation in, and
they have established channels and they also have clout. So there wasn't
much hope on my part that I could get many people to stand up and support
me, because the down side of doing that is so obvious. Because if you go
against this group, they either curtail your contributions or they arrange
to contribute to an opponent. So it's not realistic to expect courage on the
Hill. And I didn't. 

Q. You say that you retain confidence in the president. You don't think that
a quiet word from him to members of Congress might have stopped all this? A.
Oh, I think it might well have, particularly at the beginning when it was
still a purely partisan matter. Before Nancy Pelosi jumped on the bandwagon.
When you had the seven Republican members of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence writing a letter that was particularly partisan, that's when,
if the White House were going to weigh in, it might have done some good. 

Q. So the White House might have jumped in quicker. Certainly the White
House suffered a loss of credibility as a result, now. A. Yes. They probably
could have avoided that appearance of embarrassment. Would I have preferred
to have been backed? Of course. But it wouldn't have altered the basic
problem, that anything that the NIC said under my chairmanship would have
been subjected to a slanderous attack. 

Q. The Israel lobby wasn't too happy with other Obama appointments, such as
James Jones, George Mitchell, Samantha Power. Why do you think they went
after you and let them slide by? A. Because I was seen as particularly
vulnerable. I'm precisely not the things they accuse me of being. I'm not a
lobbyist. I haven't had a profile on the Hill. I think they probably very
early figured out that this appointment, while presumably known to Jim Jones
- well, I know it was known to Jim Jones - that there wasn't a specific
White House buy-in because there didn't need to be anybody in the White
House to buy in, and it was a nice way of, as the Chinese say, killing a
chicken to scare the monkeys. 

Q. Do think that's working? Are the 'monkeys' scared? Is the administration
deterred? A. By 'monkeys' in this analogy I mean people who might accept an
appointment in the administration who are independent, who have an open as
opposed to a closed mind on these matters. I don't think it's working. But,
I mean, I'm the last person to be able to judge that. 

Q. Have you heard from members of the Jewish community and Israelis? A. Yes,
of course, quite a few. Including many of those who are themselves concerned
about Israel's settlement activities and other aspects of the occupation.
What it shows is that despite efforts by the 'Lieberman lobby' to make it
seem like members of the American Jewish community speak with one voice, on
behalf of Liebermanesque policies in Israel, in fact the American Jewish
community has a broad diversity of opinion, and a good deal of it, maybe a
majority, doesn't agree with this particular perspective and feels terribly
afraid that it can't speak out without being trashed. So you're either
anti-Semitic or you're a self-hating Jew. Either way it's an awful
accusation to have to endure.



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