With withdrawal of Chas Freeman as National Intelligence Council chairman, the Intelligence Community loses big...?
We have now confirmation of the utter "charade" of the Chas Freeman nomination of Rahm Emanuel thugs within the intelligence power turf battles... Freeman was supposed to be sacrificed from the start of the process, in order to Tame the intelligence community some more....into
complete and utter submittable subservience, obedience , to the Policies of the power behind the power in DC and the Pentagon....
In informal remarks last night at the National Press Club to a media study group founded decades ago by the late White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, Ambassador Chas Freeman, who was forced to withdrawal as Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair's choice to chair the National Intelligence Council (NIC) after a blistering attack against him from Israel's Lobby in Washington, made it clear by his remarks that the Intelligence Community was deprived of a potential supervisor who agreed with an overwhelming majority of intelligence analysts on a number of issues. The NIC oversees some 100,000 analysts in the Intelligence Community and is responsible for writing National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), upon which policies are generally based, and the lesser known National Intelligence Assessments.
The NIC also prepares the all-important President's Daily Brief. Freeman would have tried to cast away past tendencies among U.S. intelligence analysts to engage in "sycophancy" and "group think." He would have also addressed the lack of experience of U.S. intelligence analysts. For example, half of the CIA's analysts have been in their jobs for less than five years. The Bush administration also resulted in a major morale problem among U.S. intelligence analysts, a problem that continues to plague their ranks.
Freeman was opposed to Israel's war against Lebanon in 2006 and its most recent attack on Gaza. Freeman, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm, also opposed the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as expanding the original policy of eliminating Afghanistan as a base for "Al Qaeda" and its local sponsors into a policy of establishing a strong central government in the country. Freeman also suggested there is a tendency to lump various Afghan and Pashtun tribes in Pakistan into a largely bogus entity called the "Taliban."
Freeman also said he thought it ironic that while he was being accused by Steve Rosen of shilling for foreign governments, Rosen, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was under indictment for espionage for Israel.
Freeman regretted that after the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy had been "franchised" to certain interest groups.
There is still no word on who Blair will ultimately choose to replace Freeman as NIC chairman. The position does not require Senate approval but Congress, and especially the AIPAC-controlled members, have made it known that they would prefer some plain vanilla candidate who will continue business as usual. In other words, someone who will not rock the boat.
