Fox News' concern about reported appointment of Charles Freeman

It's being reported that President Obama is going to appoint Charles Freeman as national intelligence director. If Obama wants to signal this his administration will be adopting a new, more balanced approach to Middle Eastern policy, I can hardly imagine a wiser choice. Freeman is on the record as a critic of the US's pro-Israel bias, and of the US's ill-conceived invasion of Iraq.

Fox News, of course, takes issue. That's their right, obviously, but to quote Frank Gaffney as worried about Freeman's "lack of objectivity"is (to put it as charitably as I cab) laughable. This is a guy who began his career working for Richard Perle; who advocated bombing al-Jazeera; and who said on the record that 4000 American soldiers indeed had to die because of the direness of Saddam's WMD threat. I've read enough of Freeman's stuff (his views appear regularly in articles published in the journal Middle East Policy) to come to admire the general soundness and moderation of his judgment. Gaffney, on the other hand, is an American-hegemonist super-hawk who would gladly cheerlead us along the trails blazed by Bush and Cheney.