In other words, Lane suggests that Freeman is the one responsible for the ugly personal attacks and that the poor neocons are the victims.
“To be sure, Freeman and his supporters feel ill used,” Lane acknowledged. “The criticism he faced was not 100 percent fair; some of it went over the top in labeling him a pawn of the Saudis, etc. But for the most part it wasn't ‘libelous,’ as Freeman claims. It was basically a strong policy reaction based on his own voluminous paper trail.”
Lane then cites what he terms a “strange” speech by Freeman in 2006 in which the former ambassador labeled the Republican and Democratic parties as "xenophobic, Islamophobic, Arabophobic, and anti-immigrant" and also observed that the United States had become "the planet's most despised nation, with its most hateful policies."
However, in the real world, Freeman’s observations in 2006 were largely correct. Both parties were scurrying to burnish their “anti-immigrant” credentials and were endorsing or acquiescing to President George W. Bush’s extreme rhetoric about the “long war” against Islamic militants.
As Pew and other opinion research organizations discovered, there was widespread global condemnation of Bush’s policies, including his invasion/occupation of Iraq and his use of torture and other barbaric practices in the “war on terror.”
Lane continues: “Even if Freeman had a perfectly legitimate grievance, even if he had been maligned, he wouldn't be entitled to respond in kind -- much less to brand large numbers of his fellow citizens as fifth columnists.”
Remember that just the previous day, the Washington Post had run Wolf’s op-ed linking Freeman to the Taliban protectors of Osama bin Laden and to the Darfur genocide. Some of the neocon attacks on Freeman also had painted him as “an agent of influence” for Saudi Arabia and China, but Lane says Freeman doesn’t have the right “to respond in kind.”
As totalitarian as the Post’s editorial mindset seems to have become – a citizen can be pulverized by powerful interests, including Washington’s dominant newspaper, but he mustn’t dare defend himself or he will invite a new round of punishments – the Post's behavior is part of a long-term pattern.
The Plame-gate Offense
The Post’s war against Freeman was not an aberration. Indeed, it parallels a similar campaign against another former U.S. ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who dared step forward in the spring-summer of 2003 to challenge President Bush’s “twisting” of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
While Wilson’s complaint was directed at the Bush administration, his criticism also reflected negatively on the Post’s editors whose coverage of the run-up to the Iraq invasion had all the diversity of opinion – and tolerance of dissent – that one might have expected from Izvestia and Pravda in the old Soviet Union.
The Post editors stacked their influential editorial section with notorious neocons like Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan, along with other Iraq War enthusiasts such as David Ignatius, Jim Hoagland, Michael Kelly and Richard Cohen.
So, in September 2002, when former Vice President Al Gore objected to the rush to war, the Post let loose their columnists to distort and mock what Gore had said.
Kelly called Gore’s speech “dishonest, cheap, low” before labeling it “wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” Krauthammer added that the speech was “a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” There was no countervailing opinion published. [For details, see our book, Neck Deep.]
After Secretary of State Colin Powell made his now-infamous presentation of the Iraq evidence to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Post judged Powell’s WMD case as “irrefutable” and added: “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.” That judgment was reinforced by a solid phalanx of Post columnists, all hailing Powell’s speech.
The Post’s own editorials treated the Bush administration’s false allegations about Iraq’s stockpiles of WMD as indisputable fact and trashed even long-time American allies who dared disagree.
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