First James Jones was plucked out of his Middle East State Department job - where he was creating a paper trail blaming Israel for Palestinian intransigence - and appointed National Security Adviser. Since then he's been very efficiently making sure that the President only hears what he wants the President to hear:

General Jones, Obama's National Security Adviser, is making an effort to assert sweeping authority over the national security decisionmaing process... "Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the 'back channels'...Directorates inside Jones's NSC staff [such as the Near East section headed by Dan Shapiro] will oversee implementation of decisions. 'It doesn't mean that we micromanage or supervise,' he said. 'But you have to make sure, . . . particularly if it's a presidential decision, that the president is kept abreast of how things are going. That it doesn't just fall off the end of the table and disappear into outer space.'"

Samantha Power was drawn away from her public rants about "a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import" and installed as the director of the NSC's multilateral affairs section. Once there she immediately to the US involved in Durban II.

Now Chas Freeman - who quite literally made a career out of being cozy with the Saudis and channeling their anti-Israel ravings to Washington...

Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, [said], "As long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected" and decrying the consequences of "Israeli violence against Palestinians."

... is set to become chair of the National Intelligence Council. He'll be in charge of filtering the bulk of the US's intelligence output:

Sources tell The Cable that Chas W. Freeman, Jr., the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, will become chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community's primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates... Associates say that at a recent board meeting of the Middle East Policy Council, of which he has been president, Freeman said that he was resigning to take a job in the administration. He said his post was not in the State Department and did not require confirmation, but did not specify what the job was.

The appointment has been confirmed by a second source, prompting Steve Rosen to write a followup post to his first writeup about how deep in the anti-Israel camp Freeman really is. From a 2006 speech that Freeman gave:

For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favored to stabilize its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle. The suspension of the independent exercise of American judgment about what best serves our interests as well as those of Israelis and Arabs has caused the Arabs to lose confidence in the United States as a peace partner... Americans need to be clear about the consequences of continuing our current counterproductive approaches to security in the Middle East. We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home.

It's hard to overestimate the kind of access and influence that the NIC chair wields. He personally and regularly sits in on the President's daily intelligence briefings. The rest of the time he's in charge of filtering the intelligence products that the President sees. Among those products are the NIEs that the intelligence community produces. Those, you'll recall, have been kind of a thing lately.

Oh - and none of these positions require Congressional approval. Jones, Power, and Freeman are all handpicked, institutionally anti-Israel appointees. I wonder if being suspicious about that qualifies as the kind of "Obama paranoia" the Jeffrey Goldberg sneered about during the election (h/t: Soccer Dad).

References and previously after the jump...