Tulsi Gabbard’s historical past with Russia is much more regarding than you assume | EUROtoday

In the summer time of 2015, three Syrian ladies who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood earlier than Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns throughout their our bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a go to to the Syria-Turkey border as a part of her duties for the overseas affairs committee, had a query for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she requested, in line with Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her dialog with the ladies.

It was a revealing perception into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the battle, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the younger youngsters did, that Isis didn’t have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd query that he selected to not translate it as a result of he didn’t need to upset the ladies, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa informed The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even earlier than Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to develop into director of National Intelligence, she was referred to as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In virtually each overseas battle by which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed in opposition to the US. Her previous promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked important opposition on either side of the aisle to her nomination.

Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior started in Syria. The devastating battle was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which have been brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a fancy net of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the globe and world powers into the fray.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group with a community of sources on the bottom, documented the deaths of 503,064 folks by March 2023. It mentioned not less than 162,390 civilians had died in that very same time, with the Syrian authorities and its allies answerable for 139,609 of these deaths.

But Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, seen all of it as a “regime-change war” fueled by the West and geared toward eradicating the dictator from energy. She noticed Assad – and Russia, when it entered the battle – as professional defenders of the state in opposition to an extremist rebellion.

In 2015, when Russia entered the Syrian warfare on the facet of the dictator Assad, Gabbard expressed assist for the transfer, even because the civilian toll from Moscow’s devastating airstrikes grew into the hundreds.

“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911,” she wrote on Twitter.

It was exactly due to her assist for Assad and Russia’s warfare that Moustafa was eager for her to attend the congressional delegation to southern Turkey to satisfy the victims of the battle.

“From experience, everyone that we bring over to the border, and they see the victims, they always come back with a realistic view of what’s happening and who is behind the mass displacement and killing and atrocities and so on, and so that was the objective,” he mentioned. “What was shocking was her lack of empathy. She’ll sacrifice the facts, even when it came to little girls in front of her telling her they got bombed by a plane – it didn’t matter.”

Charles Lister, a senior fellow on the Middle East Institute who testified twice on Syria to the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Gabbard was a member, spent years debunking her numerous conspiracy theories concerning the warfare.

“Her consistent denial of the Syrian regime’s crimes is so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming,” he informed The Independent.

Lister mentioned her views “appear to be driven by a strange fusion of America First isolationism and a belief in the value of autocratic and secular leaders in confronting extremism.”

They included a suggestion that Syrian rebels staged a false-flag chemical weapons assault in opposition to their supporters to impress Western intervention in opposition to Assad — one thing the US intelligence businesses she is going to quickly lead had concluded was false. She declined to name Assad a warfare legal when pressed, regardless of plenty of proof, and used a video of Syrian authorities bombings to criticize US involvement within the warfare.

“Her descriptions of the crisis in Syria read like they were composed in Assad’s personal office, or in Tehran or Moscow – not Washington,” Lister added.

Gabbard was not swayed by assembly the victims of Assad’s airstrikes in 2015. In reality, two years later, she went to Damascus to satisfy the Syrian president in individual and got here away much more satisfied of her opinions.

The congresswoman mentioned her go to to satisfy Assad – the primary by a sitting US lawmaker for the reason that battle started – was geared toward bringing an finish to the warfare.

“I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace,” she informed CNN on the time.

Gabbard was pressured to defend her embrace of Assad and different dictators throughout her 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. During the Democratic main debate, she clashed with Kamala Harris, who accused her of being “an apologist for an individual – Assad – who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”

“She has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I’m prepared to move on,” added Harris, who would subsequently drop out of the race and later be chosen as Joe Biden’s working mate.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard once more defended Russian aggression.

“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” she posted on Twitter in 2022.

Gabbard appeared to fall for numerous conspiracy theories concerning the battle that have been promoted by Russia, as she had achieved in Syria. One of these conspiracy theories was a Russian declare concerning the existence of dozens of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine that have been supposedly producing lethal pathogens.

She later walked again on these remarks, suggesting that there may need been some “miscommunication and misunderstanding.”

Gabbard’s frequent echoing of Kremlin speaking factors has earned her reward in Russian state media. Indeed, an article revealed on 15 November within the Russian-state managed outlet RIA Novosti went as far as to name Gabbard a “superwoman.”

The chance that Trump would faucet somebody with Gabbard’s historical past to be America’s high intelligence official shouldn’t be a shock to anybody who adopted the president-elect’s first 4 years within the White House.

During his 2018 summit with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the then-president was requested if he believed the US intelligence neighborhood’s evaluation, which acknowledged that Russia had interfered within the 2016 presidential election on his behalf.

That evaluation was primarily based on evaluation of what was decided to have been state-sponsored campaigns of faux social media posts and ersatz information websites to unfold false tales about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in addition to cyberattacks concentrating on the Democratic National Committee and outstanding operatives related to the Clinton marketing campaign.

But Trump, who’d simply spent a number of hours in a closed-door assembly with Putin, shocked the assembled press and all the world by declaring that he trusted the Russian chief’s phrase over that of his personal advisers.

​​”President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he replied.

Trump would go on to repeatedly conflict along with his personal intelligence appointees through the the rest of his time period. He sacked his first DNI, former Indiana senator Dan Coats, after Coats repeatedly declined to again away from the federal government’s evaluation of what Russia had achieved through the 2016 presidential race.

Larry Pfeiffer, the director of George Mason University’s Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, mentioned Gabbard’s obvious susceptibility to overseas disinformation and her affinity for strongmen will give pause to American allies with whom the US routinely shares intelligence on widespread threats.

Intelligence providers, he defined, are notoriously territorial and tight-lipped on sources and strategies – significantly with regards to so-called human intelligence, or Humint, which refers to info collected by and from spies and sources inside hostile governments.

Pfeiffer mentioned overseas allies are possible already involved about how a second Trump administration will deal with intelligence, given the president-elect’s report. He additionally predicted that Gabbard’s affirmation as DNI would trigger much more issues amongst skittish companions.

“I think they wouldn’t feel like they’ve got an American confidant that they can deal with on a mature level,” he mentioned. “I can guarantee you that the foreign intelligence services of Europe, including the Brits, are all having little side conversations right now about … what is this going to mean, and how are we going to operate, and what are we going to do now.”

The former US intelligence veteran additionally mentioned Gabbard’s report of spreading overseas speaking factors calls into query whether or not she is going to be capable to perform the DNI’s essential accountability of briefing the president on threats to the nation.

He informed The Independent: “Somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, you look at her long history of statements that seem to come out of the Kremlin’s notebook, her propensity to be influenced by their viewpoint – [it] raises questions as to whether she has the ability to present the intel community’s perspective as it is, or is she going to be one who’s going to want to discount it, influence it, color and change it, or ignore it and just present her own view?

“I think it also raises questions of judgement. You know, here’s an individual who seems very prone to misinformation, prone to conspiracy theory. That should worry anybody who’s worried about America’s national security,” he added.

Trump’s collection of the previous Hawaii congresswoman could possibly be an issue for the senators tasked with confirming her, on a number of completely different ranges. For one, the place is exclusive amongst cupboard businesses in that there are strict necessities for who can serve within the director’s function.

The textual content of the 2004 legislation which established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence within the wake of the 9/11 terror assaults on New York and Washington and the intelligence neighborhood’s failures main as much as the US invasion of Iraq, particularly states that any one who serves within the DNI job “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

The first individual to function DNI, John Negroponte, was a extensively revered overseas service veteran who had served as US ambassador to Iraq, Mexico, Honduras and the Philippines, because the nation’s ambassador to the United Nations, and as a deputy nationwide safety adviser through the Reagan administration. The subsequent three folks to carry the workplace have been flag-rank army officers with important intelligence expertise.

Pfeiffer, a US intelligence veteran of three many years’ standing who as soon as ran the White House Situation Room and served as chief of employees to then-CIA director General Michael Hayden, informed The Independent that Gabbard’s expertise within the House and her army service, whereas admirable, don’t match the requirements envisioned by the authors of the 2004 legislation which established the workplace.

“That’s national security experience … but she was a freaking military cop … operating at a largely tactical level, not that strategic, long-term national security perspective that one would expect,” he mentioned.

Gabbard might have left the Syrian battle behind, however Moustafa nonetheless works with its victims day-after-day. And he believes the connection between her views on Syria and Ukraine is evident.

“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he mentioned.

“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”