HOW DOES JIM BAKER NOT HAVE A JOB IN THIS ADMINISTRATION?:

Potential intel pick peddled Saudi-funded textbook accused of bias (Ron Kampeas, February 24, 2009, JTA)

The Obama administration’s reported pick for a top intelligence post helped peddle a Saudi-funded school study guide decried by Jewish groups and educators for having anti-Jewish biases.

Charles "Chas" Freeman, the U.S. envoy to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, is slated to chair the National Intelligence Council, according to The Cable, a blog at Foreign Policy magazine that has been unerring in reporting Obama administration national security appointments. [...]

Freeman is president of the Middle East Policy Council, a Saudi-funded think tank. A JTA investigative series in 2005 exposed how the council, led by Freeman, joined with Berkeley, Calif.-based Arab World and Islamic Resources in peddling the “Arab World Studies Notebook” to American schools. In the version examined that year by JTA staff, the "Notebook" described Jerusalem as unequivocally "Arab," deriding Jewish residence in the city as "settlement"; cast the "question of Jewish lobbying" against "the whole question of defining American interests and concerns"; and suggested that the Koran "synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations."

Freeman's reported appointment already has set off a firestorm among Middle East policy bloggers, with some on the dovish side welcoming it as refreshing injection of "realism" after the neo-conservatism that defined the Bush administration, and others expressing alarm at pronouncements of Freeman and the council that have been relentlessly critical of Israel.

"Freeman is a strident critic of Israel, and a textbook case of the old-line Arabism that afflicted American diplomacy at the time the state of Israel was born," Steve Rosen, a former top official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, wrote on his Obama Mideast Monitor blog hosted by the Middle East Forum.

Likely Obama Appointee Had Bin Laden Ties (Ashley Rindsberg, 2/24/09, Daily Beast)

Amid the criticism that has already emerged about President Obama's reported pick for the powerful position of chairman of the National Intelligence Council, there is a yet unmentioned problem that is likely cause even bigger troubles: He had business ties to the bin Laden family after 9/11.

Charles “Chas” Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, had business connections with the bin Laden family and their Saudi Binladin Group, a multi-billion dollar construction conglomerate founded by the father of Osama bin Laden. As chairman of Projects International, Inc., a company that develops international business deals, Mr. Freeman asserted in an interview with the Associated Press less than a month after September 11 that he was still “discussing proposals with the Bin Laden Group—and that won't change.”

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2009 5:15 PM