The Record Shows Tulsi Gabbard Was Not An Apologist For Russia-Backed Syria

Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClearPolitics,

Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to serve as President Trump’s director of national intelligence hinges on questions about the judgment and patriotism of the former congresswoman and Army veteran, doubts that are expected to take center stage at her Senate confirmation hearing Thursday.

Echoing a charge first lodged by Hillary Clinton, Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren have spread innuendo that Gabbard is a “compromised” “Russian asset” who has been “in Putin’s pocket.” Former CIA Director John Brennan has speculated that Gabbard may deliberately “withhold” or even “skew” vital intelligence in briefing President Trump. Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has called Trump’s selection of Gabbard to oversee the nation’s 18 spy agencies “a bit baffling” and predicted a defeat of her nomination in the Senate.

While eyebrows have been raised over Gabbard’s support of a pardon for Edward Snowden – the contractor who stole and released classified information revealing that the U.S. government was conducting domestic mass surveillance and who eventually received asylum in Russia – the main criticism involves Gabbard’s views on Syria, whose recently deposed, Russian-backed dictator, Bashar al-Assad, engaged in a long and brutal war against U.S.-backed insurgents.

In January 2017, just as the U.S. was winding down a covert war to topple the regime, Gabbard met with Assad in Damascus. With designated terror groups occupying swaths of the war-torn country, Gabbard warned that Assad’s removal would create a destabilizing power vacuum filled by Al-Qaeda. And when these same insurgent groups accused Assad’s government of chemical weapons attacks, Gabbard voiced skepticism of the allegations, particularly in two incidents that prompted U.S. military airstrikes.

The charges against Gabbard – which have recently been revived in the Washington Post and other news outlets – are that her dissenting opinions on Syria put her at odds with the consensus views of U.S. intelligence agencies, which therefore calls into question her fitness to oversee them as the nation’s top spy chief.

Yet Gabbard’s record on Syria, and that of the intelligence community she is poised to lead, shows that her views are not the fringe position that her detractors claim. Gabbard has never offered support for Assad or issued a blanket denial of chemical weapons use by his recently ousted government. In a 2020 statement during her run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gabbard described Assad as a “brutal dictator” and said that “[t]here is evidence” that both his forces and anti-government insurgents “have used chemical weapons.”

While Gabbard has indeed voiced skepticism about specific chemical weapons allegations lodged against the Assad government, she is far from alone among U.S. officials, including at the top of the intelligence leadership. On this contentious issue, the available evidence shows that Gabbard’s skepticism does not contradict that of the U.S. intelligence community, which has never released formal assessments in the cases where Gabbard has raised doubts.

’No Violations’ in Visit to Assad

When Gabbard met Assad in Damascus in January 2017, she characterized the encounter as an effort to end one of the 21st century’s deadliest wars. “In order for any peace agreement … there has to be a conversation with him,” Gabbard said.

To Gabbard’s critics, “particularly … Democrats,” the meeting instead “served to legitimize the dictator,” as the Washington Post put it earlier this month. Although the Post’s article cast Gabbard’s Syria trip as a red flag hanging over her nomination, it only briefly mentioned the Office of Congressional Ethics investigation of her visit in which “no violations were found.” The Post also failed to note that such efforts by members of Congress are not unprecedented: Beginning in 2007, for example, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Secretary of State/presidential nominee John Kerry met separately with Assad in Damascus, with Kerry doing so multiple times, and despite Bush administration complaints that that such meetings legitimize the dictator.

The controversy surrounding Gabbard’s Damascus visit came amid wider unease over her opposition to the U.S. government’s covert support for the insurgency fighting Assad’s government. Shortly after her Syria trip, Gabbard introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which called for banning any U.S. weaponry or assistance to the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (another name for Al-Qaeda’s Syria franchise), all major forces in the armed rebellion.

A recent Foreign Policy article argued that Gabbard’s bill was unnecessary because these were groups “that were already designated terrorists by the U.S. government and therefore barred from receiving any kind of support.” Yet Gabbard’s bill also singled out assistance to “any individual or group that is affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups.” This reflected what was by then common knowledge at the highest levels of the U.S. government: The U.S.-armed insurgency was dominated by Al-Qaeda, and at times even fighting alongside ISIS.

Jake Sullivan, who would become national security adviser under Joe Biden, acknowledged this in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.” Later that year, a Defense Intelligence Agency report noted that “Salafi[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency,” which, it added, has the “support” of the U.S. and its allies.

When President Trump shut down the CIA’s covert Syria program in July 2017, he too echoed Gabbard’s position. “It turns out it’s a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to,” Trump remarked.

Another of Gabbard’s warnings has since proved to be prophetic. “[I]f President Assad is overthrown,” Gabbard warned in 2017, “then Al Qaeda or a group like Al Qaeda … will take charge of all of Syria.” When Assad was finally toppled last month, the head of the new government became Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the founder of Al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria and a former deputy leader of ISIS. Jolani’s militia, since renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is still a U.S. government-designated terrorist organization, though the Biden administration announced in its last days in office that the U.S. will no longer enforce the $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Doubting Press Releases, Not Intel

While Gabbard’s concerns about the Al-Qaeda-dominated insurgency in Syria are now seldom challenged, her skepticism of chemical weapons allegations against the now former Syrian government have emerged as a major stumbling block to her nomination.

A statement released by Foreign Policy for America, a Democratic Party-aligned think tank, recently assailed Gabbard for having “publicly cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports and overwhelming public reporting that Assad carried out chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians.”

This criticism relies on a widespread misnomer. Gabbard has not “cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports” about Syrian chemical weapons attacks, because no such reports have ever been released.

In the three major incidents where Gabbard has challenged a U.S. military intervention over alleged Syrian government chemical attacks – in Ghouta (2013), Khan Shaykhoun (2017), and Douma (2018) – the U.S. intelligence community has never published a formal report making the case. In a deviation from established practice where the intelligence community issues declassified summaries of its conclusions, the Obama administration established a precedent in which the White House, not the nation’s spy agencies, have released statements lodging allegations against the Syrian government.

In Syria’s most notorious chemical weapons incident – the August 2013 sarin attack in Ghouta that crossed President Obama’s self-declared “red line” – the nation’s top intelligence official, then-ODNI director James Clapper, explicitly refused to release an intelligence product accusing Assad’s military of guilt. And on the question of Syrian government culpability, Clapper adopted a position that would later mirror that of Gabbard, his would-be successor.

As Obama and his senior aides mulled bombing Syria after sarin-filled rockets killed scores of civilians in Ghouta, Clapper personally visited the White House to issue an impromptu warning. At the president’s daily briefing, Clapper told Obama that the evidence implicating Assad’s forces in the sarin attack in Ghouta was not a “slam dunk.” This was a deliberate reference to the term used by George W. Bush’s CIA Director, George Tenet, in vouching for the falsified intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the pretext for the Bush administration’s decision to invade.

Clapper went out of his way to repeat that same warning on two other occasions, including at a meeting of White House principals, which nervous aides soon leaked to the media. Obama, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg later reported based on an interview with the 44th president, was “unsettled” by Clapper’s visit. He may also have been influenced by intelligence emanating from the Pentagon. According to a leaked assessment prepared for the Defense Intelligence Agency in June 2013, al-Nusra in Syria maintained a sarin production cell that marked the group’s “most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort.”

After invoking the Iraq WMDs debacle, Clapper told his administration colleagues that the intelligence community would not produce an intelligence product for public release. Instead, he handed off the task to Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and top speechwriter. “It took me a moment to understand what he was suggesting,” Rhodes later wrote in his memoir. “In all my time at the White House, I had never written that kind of assessment, and never would again. These were usually technical documents produced by teams of people in the intelligence agencies.”

With the job left to him, Rhodes, who had no intelligence experience, was unsettled as well. The former aspiring novelist spent more than two days drafting what he called a “U.S. Government Assessment,” a term that carries no formal significance and that amounts to a White House press release. “I felt waves of anxiety,” Rhodes recalled, “anticipating how I might be hauled before Congress if things went terribly wrong after a military intervention. I was responsible for writing the public document that would justify the United States’ going to war in Syria.”

Gabbard, then serving in Congress, was among the lawmakers to oppose a U.S. military strike on Syria. In criticisms of Gabbard’s position, it is widely overlooked that her skepticism did not entail challenging the formal assessment of the U.S. intelligence community. Instead, she did not accept the argument produced by Rhodes, a creative-writing MFA who felt “waves of anxiety” writing it.

While Rhodes centered Clapper’s “slam dunk” warning in his memoir, Clapper omitted it from his. Instead, Clapper claimed in his 2018 book that the intelligence community “obtained evidence” of the Assad regime’s guilt in Ghouta. Yet Clapper also hinted that this evidence was far from convincing. The IC’s classified assessment on Ghouta, Clapper recalled, “gave alternate explanations” to an Assad regime chemical attack “and highlighted the things we didn’t know.” The former intelligence chief also disclosed that Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was another skeptic. Donilon, Clapper wrote, “seemed to keep raising the evidentiary bar we needed to meet before he believed our reports.”

In a different section of the book, Clapper owned up to participating in the intelligence deception that led to the Iraq war, which undoubtedly informed his “slam dunk” warning over Syria. The U.S. “failure” in Iraq, Clapper wrote, belongs “squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.”

Clapper was acknowledging that he had failed to stick to the known facts about Iraqi WMDS, and instead help come up with evidence that “wasn’t really there” – in other words, fraudulent.

Against the wishes of many of his senior aides, Obama ultimately abandoned his “red line” and declined to bomb Syria. In public, the White House claimed that Obama pulled back after Russia offered to facilitate the destruction of Syria’s decades-old chemical weapons stockpile. It was only in his last months of his presidency that Obama acknowledged the “slam dunk” warning from Clapper – and that war skeptics like Gabbard were handed a vindication.

Challenging a False Flag Coverup

While Clapper’s role in questioning Syrian government culpability in the 2013 Ghouta attack remains widely overlooked, Gabbard has attracted significant controversy for raising questions about two other alleged chemical attacks by Assad’s forces in the period since.

In a 2020 statement, Gabbard said that she was “skeptical” of the Assad regime’s guilt regarding attacks on Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and Douma in 2018 – two towns that were both “under the control of al-Qaeda-linked opposition forces.” In these incidents, she wrote, “there is evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.”

Here again, Gabbard was not alone. As one former U.S. Ambassador to the Middle East put it, Obama’s “‘red line’ was an open invitation to a false-flag operation.” David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who spent years covering the Syrian war, is of the view that “most of the chemical weapons attacks that have occurred during the war [were] perpetrated by the regime.” However, he added, “there was obviously a desire on the part of al-Nusra [Al-Qaeda in Syria] and others to gain access to chemical weapons stores—certainly, a desire to frame the regime for attacks, if they could.”

As with Ghouta, the U.S. intelligence community did not release an assessment in either incident to make the case against Assad. Instead, the White House again issued lengthy press releases written by non-intelligence officials.

The April 2017 statement on Khan Shaykhun, released by the National Security Council under the direction of then-national security advisor H.R. McMaster, claimed to represent “an unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s analysis.” Given that the summary did not come directly from the intelligence community and did not have its imprint, this claim was impossible to verify.

In the only nod to U.S. spies’ data on the incident, the document referenced “signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence,” without offering any details on what was obtained. “We cannot publicly release all available intelligence on this attack due to the need to protect sources and methods,” it added. It also pointed to “a significant body of credible open source reporting, that tells a clear and consistent story.” This was a reference to publicly available material not collected by U.S. spy agencies, and therefore not immune to manipulation by biased actors.

Spies Relying on 'Public Reporting’

One year later, the U.S. government’s statement on Douma contained only a qualified mention of “[r]eliable intelligence,” without explaining what was acquired or how it was deemed reliable. Instead, the statement again made several references to “open-source information.” Rather than drawing on secret intelligence collected by U.S. agencies, the statement cited “social media users, non-governmental organizations, and other open-source outlets”; “photos and videos”; and “reporting from media, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other open sources.” Adopting the same title of Ben Rhodes’ statement on Ghouta five years prior, the White House document was labeled a “United States Government Assessment,” meaning that it did not come from the intelligence community.

In his memoir, John Bolton – who oversaw the U.S. response to the Douma incident as Trump’s third national security adviser – hinted that that the U.S. government did not collect an overwhelming body of evidence. “We discussed at length what we did and didn’t know regarding Syria’s attack and how to increase our understanding of what had happened,” Bolton recalled. This included, he added, uncertainty over the exact nature of the toxic agent used in Douma, with U.S. officials unsure “whether sarin nerve agent was involved or just chlorine-based agents.” The “[p]roof of the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons usage,” he added “was increasingly clear in public reporting.” Those who claimed that there was no evidence, including voices on Fox News such as Tucker Carlson, “were wrong.”

Yet Bolton’s admitted reliance on “public reporting” suggests that the U.S. government’s case was not supported by concrete intelligence. While “open source” information can sometimes be reliable, it can just as easily be compromised by the biases of the unidentified actors that White House officials extensively cited.

Bolton’s argument undercuts the main argument against Gabbard’s nomination – that she rejected the firm conclusions of intelligence agencies.

An Aversion to Politicized Intelligence

Questions have also emerged about U.S. claims that Assad was behind the attack.

According to leaked documents, the original investigative team sent to Douma by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog, did not find evidence to support allegations of a Syrian government chemical attack, raising the possibility that the incident was staged by insurgents. Two members of the Douma team later accused senior OPCW officials of manipulating the investigation and publishing a final report that baselessly implicated the Syrian government in a chemical attack.

The OPCW has refused to meet with the veteran inspectors who challenged the cover-up. U.S. officials have dismissed the OPCW’s Douma controversy as “Kremlin disinformation,” yet have never commented on its substantive issues. Establishment U.S. media outlets have also ignored the story, with the exception of the New York Times, which vaguely mentioned it once in passing. To illustrate, a Washington Post article that sought to discredit Gabbard’s skepticism of Syria chemical weapons allegations, published just days before her scheduled confirmation hearing, made no mention of the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked documents.

Amid government and media silence over claims of a cover-up in a Syria chemical weapons probe, Tulsi Gabbard has been a rare exception. In 2021, she signed a letter urging the OPCW to address the cover-up and meet with the dissenting inspectors. “The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security,” the statement said.

Once again, contrary to her detractors’ claims, Gabbard was not adopting a fringe position. Among the signatories were five former senior OPCW officials, including the organization’s founding director-general Jose Bustani. Others included senior U.S. official Lawrence Wilkerson and Lord Alan West, a former senior U.K. Royal Navy officer and advisor to former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

In Senate meetings ahead of her confirmation hearing, Gabbard has stressed that she is not questioning all Syria chemical weapons allegations, but instead harbors skepticism about the above cases. After speaking with Gabbard, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly complained that Gabbard was citing “experts that were not credible” – a presumed reference to the OPCW whistleblowers, two highly decorated veteran inspectors with more than 25 years of combined experience. “I have a hard time understanding why you would want to do that, to use your political capital to try to prove something when there are multiple cases,” Kelly added.

Yet throughout her political career, Gabbard has explained her reasoning for questioning allegations that can lead the nation to war. “I served in a war in Iraq, a war that was launched based on lies, and a war that was launched without evidence,” she told a CNN town hall in 2019. “So as a soldier, as an American, as a member of Congress, it is my duty and my responsibility to exercise skepticism any time anyone tries to send our service members into harm’s way or use our military to go in and start a new war.”

Yet again, Gabbard’s outlook does not set her apart from her would-be predecessor, Clapper. In his account of the Ghouta episode, Ben Rhodes stressed that the then-U.S. intelligence chief had a similar motivation. “I understood,” Rhodes wrote, “that Clapper was protecting the intelligence community from a repeat of the role it played before the war in Iraq.”

With Gabbard now up for the job that Clapper once held, her nomination may come down to whether the Senate sees that same aversion to politicized intelligence as a liability, or a virtue.

Aaron Maté has provided extensive coverage of corruption within federal intelligence agencies as a contributor to RealClearInvestigations. He is also a contributor to The Nation, and his work has appeared in Democracy Now!, Vice, Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, The Intercept, and Le Monde Diplomatique. Maté is the host of the news show Pushback with Aaron Maté.