John Jefferson
Mark Twain once described members of Congress as having “the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.”
And true to form, yesterday morning the cowardly lions of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence roared away during former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing to become the next director of national intelligence.
Leading the charge against Gabbard on the Senate Intelligence Committee is ranking member Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia who, like his counterpart Adam Schiff (then serving as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence), spent four years lying to the American people about Donald Trump’s alleged connections to the Kremlin.
Warner’s bellyaching over Gabbard’s past praise of whistleblower Edward Snowden (who, even if one disagrees with his methods, did disclose very real abuses by the National Security Agency) captures the general, worshipful attitude Democrats have developed toward the permanent national security state in the years since Trump took the White House in 2016. National Security Democrats—usually but not always former CIA officers like the newly minted Democratic Senator from Michigan, Elise Slotkin—abhor the idea of actual oversight. They simply exist to further the objectives of the permanent national security bureaucracy.
The objections to Gabbard, then, come in two forms. The first is that she once met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, ergo she is in league with a war criminal (the same smears have not been applied to Nancy Pelosi who met with Assad in 2007). And secondly, and more egregiously in the eyes of the NatSec Dems, Gabbard refuses to genuflect at the altar of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies that comprise the “Intelligence Community” which she has been nominated to oversee.
Let’s first turn our attention to Syria.
Peter Ford, whom I spoke to this week, was the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Syria from 1999 to 2003 and later served as representative of the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from 2006 to 2015.
He has courageously and at great cost to his reputation spoken out about the rank stupidity and recklessness of the West’s dirty war against Assad. The project, which has now tragically come to fruition, of isolating and ultimately overthrowing Assad has benefitted only a gang of Sunni Islamist militants with roots in organizations like al-Qaeda and al-Nusra.
Ford tells me that in his view Gabbard was justified in visiting Damascus because
keeping a closed mind on Assad was doing no service to the US. For many years Assad had pleaded with the West not to force him into the camp of Iran, with which secular Arabs like Assad felt no natural affinity. But that is exactly what we did. In the same way we forced Assad to become reliant on Russia when only the Russians came to his assistance when ISIS were literally at the gates of Damascus.
He continued,
From my time as British Ambassador, I knew the London-trained eye- doctor wanted to take his country in a pro-Western direction but we spurned the opportunity, making him mistrustful of the West. Personal diplomacy by people like Gabbard offered a way to get back on course. By 2019 none of Assad’s actions could remotely be described as anti-American unless resisting US openly acknowledged attempts at regime change could be categorized thus. Even the illegal presence of US troops in North East Syria was not actively opposed.
Gabbard’s other great sin is that of lèse-majesté. The national-security Blob protects its own. Warner’s entire career is proof of that. And the big problem with Gabbard is that she questions the prevailing wisdom—and such questioning will not do.
In a way, Warner and the NatSec Dems are right. The “threat” Gabbard poses to their prerogatives—namely, the ongoing series of worldwide covert regime change operations that redound to no one’s benefit but the Pentagon and IC’s budgets— is indeed a serious one—and one that sensible Americans should welcome.
A manager of national intelligence need not check her brain at the door. As the former CIA head of Russia analysis George Beebe has written in these pages,
If the IC is to improve its analytic record, it needs to promote rather than penalize diverse thinking and employ rigorous methodology to explain instances where objective analysts might reasonably offer alternatives to stream opinion.
In an illuminating 1971 essay titled “The National Security Managers and the National Interest,” Richard Barnet observed that “National Security Managers exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” The philosopher Hannah Arendt also observed around the same time that “the President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man in the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.”
As Gabbard noted in her opening statement, a misuse of the IC’s power, as happened with the politicization of intelligence in the run up to Iraq, can result in catastrophe.
But NatSec Dems have fully embraced their role as the party of the permanent national security state. Warner and the rest know that the real threat Gabbard poses to their agenda is the threat that truth poses to power.
Read the full article here