The Senate should confirm Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence – Press Enterprise

The American intelligence community needs to be shaken up. And former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is just the person to do it as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence, coordinating 18 intelligence agencies. A veteran of the Iraq War, she will provide the president the classified briefings on what’s going on in the world. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee will begin hearings soon after the new Congress takes its seats on Jan. 3. The attacks on her started early. On Nov. 13, “Nearly 100 former senior U.S. diplomats and intelligence and national security officials,” as AP described them, signed a letter calling for closed-door hearings. 

No more secrecy. That’s what brought us the ongoing disasters in Ukraine, Syria and Libya, and a potential war with China over Taiwan. The letter questioned “her uncoordinated trip to Syria in 2017 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad,” who last month was ousted as the country’s dictator. “Uncoordinated” with whom in 2017? Then-President Trump, who just nominated her?

Then there’s the nature of the new regime in Damascus the Biden administration backed, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS. On May 15, 2014, the U.S. State Department designated it a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” NPR reported HTS “has roots in al-Qaida, even though the group broke away years ago.” Right. You remember al-Qaida, the terrorists who flew airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11?

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HTS is backed by Turkey, our NATO ally. But Turkey is at war with the Kurds in Northeastern Syria, a group backed by U.S. troops on the ground, who also control the area’s lucrative oil fields. And in the Southwest, our ally Israel has advanced further into the Golan Heights. How such a mess happen?

The letter also attacked Gabbard because she “released a video insinuating that U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine were developing biological weapons and that Ukraine’s engagement with NATO posed a threat to Russian sovereignty, both arguments initially used by Russia to justify its illegal invasion of Ukraine.” But was she right? 

On March 11, 2022, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, the point-person for Ukraine policy, testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Asked Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?” 

Nuland replied, “Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of.” Rubio pointed out the only reason to be concerned about the labs was because something serious was going on.

A part of Gabbard’s job will be declassifying information. A good example came out on Dec. 23 when the CIA released, to George Washington University’s online National Security Archive, copies of files on LSD experimentation.