The New York Times today essentially reprints Chas Freeman’s conspiratorial view of how his appointment as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council went down, in a story headlined “Israel Stance Was Undoing of Nominee for Intelligence Post.” There is no mention of Nancy Pelosi’s anger at Freeman’s support for the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the 87 Chinese dissidents and human rights activists who signed a letter in protest of his appointment. No mention of Frank Wolf’s angry package. “The reality of Washington is that our political landscape finds it difficult to assimilate any criticism of any segment of the Israeli leadership,” the Times quotes Robert W. Jordan. Who’s he? Like Freeman, a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, one who now works in the Middle East practice of Baker Botts. Go figure. Having largely ignored this story for the past two weeks, the Times now puts this misleading piece on page 1.

A Washington Post story by Walter Pincus, meanwhile, is no better. Pincus, like the Timesmen, makes no effort to look past Freeman’s claims that he was done in by the “Israel Lobby,” ignoring the China angle. In this sense, both the Post and the Times were scooped and outshone by Newsweek, whose Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball discovered the real story, which is not as simplistic as Freeman or his defenders in the Juicebox Mafia would have us believe.

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