CNAC Distances Itself From Ex-CIA Official Over Israel Remark

The taxpayer-funded Center for Naval Analyses is distancing itself from remarks made by a former CIA official, Michael Scheuer, in which Mr. Scheuer criticized "the U.S. citizen Israel-firsters who dominate the American governing elite."

A complaint about the presentation prompted the president of the Virginia-based CNA Corporation, which operates the center, Robert Murray, to take the unusual step of issuing a memo apologizing to any participant who took offense. The memo says one person at their workshop on the Middle East was offended but that other participants might also have been offended.

At a CNAC-sponsored roundtable on April 9, Mr. Scheuer had said, "By defining bin Laden and his ilk as would-be Islamist Hitlers, the U.S. citizen Israel-firsters who dominate the American governing elite ensure that those who question the nature and benefit of current U.S.-Israel ties are slandered as pro-Nazi, anti-Semites."

The memo from CNAC, dated April 18 and intended for workshop participants, does not mention Mr. Scheuer by name. But the memo says that the organization invites people whom they believe to be knowledgeable, does not review their remarks in advance, and does not take responsibility for remarks of any speaker. In the memo, Mr. Murray wrote that the aim of the off-the-record discussions was to promote dialogue "on important and controversial issues."

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for CNAC told The New York Sun, "the memo is an accurate reflection of our views on this matter."

Mr. Scheuer told the Sun that his remarks at the workshop were the same as what he has since said at other forums. At the April workshop, whose topic was "Islamist Aspirations for a Modern-day Caliphate," Mr. Scheuer said that "the Israel-firsters" had used the idea of Islamofascism in 2006 "to slander and quiet" a dean of Harvard University, Stephen Walt, and a University of Chicago professor, John Mearsheimer. The pair had co-authored a paper in 2006 that, as Mr. Scheuer said, "critiqued at length the prolonged, deranging, and clearly negative impact the Israeli lobby has had on the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy." Mr. Scheuer, the former head of the American intelligence unit tracking Osama bin Laden, went on to say that a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Eliot Cohen, journalists David Gergen, Max Boot, and others had arrogated themselves the right to decide who was good and patriotic "among their fellow citizens based on the attitude of individuals toward Israel."

Mr. Scheuer, the author of "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror," denied his speech was anti-Semitic and said that a complaint about it was an effort to stifle his free speech.

In 2005, the senior editor at Commentary magazine, Gabriel Schoenfeld, sharply criticized remarks that Mr. Scheuer had made at another think tank. At an on-the-record event at the Council on Foreign Relations in February of that year, Mr. Scheuer had described Israel as operating in America "probably the most successful covert-action program in the history of man" and offered as an example the Holocaust Museum.