The Stakes Are Real

Max Blumenthal profiles the leader of the anti-Freeman brigade: Steve Rosen, facing trial this spring for allegedly passing US national security secrets to reporters. No, I didn't make that up. Two things I didn't know: that one of the chief leaders of the effort to blackball Freeman, Mark Kirk, is the top Congressional recipient of AIPAC money; and that Rosen has long engaged in ad hominem attacks on those allegedly not sufficiently supportive of Israel, including his former boss at AIPAC. Money quote:

“Freeman is stuck in the latest instance of the deadly power game long played here on what level of support for controversial Israeli government policies is a ‘requirement’ for US public office…” foreign-policy analyst Chris Nelson wrote in his Nelson Report, an influential private daily newsletter read by Washington policy makers.

“If Obama surrenders to the critics and orders [Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair] to rescind the Freeman appointment to chair the NIC, it is difficult to see how he can properly exercise leverage, when needed, in his conduct of policy in the Middle East. That, literally, is how the experts see the stakes of the fight now under way.”

This is revealing as well:

According to Douglas Bloomfield, in an article published last week in the New Jersey Jewish Week, Rosen “coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.”