The Knives Are Out against DNI Nominee Tulsi Gabbard

Nov. 30—A barrage of hysterical articles has emerged over the past 36-48 hours, screaming that Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is “unfit and dangerous” for the post, because she’s pro-Kremlin and pro-Syria and thus a national security threat. So says Gregory F. Treverton, former chair of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017 and vice chair from 1993 to 1995, in a teeth-gnashing fit published in the Nov. 26 U.S. News & World Report.

Treverton dredges up every conceivable “crime” of Gabbard’s, mentioning that she was placed on the TSA travel watch list “when her overseas travel patterns and foreign connections triggered a government algorithm, something that may be unprecedented for an appointee to a sensitive top government position.” Trump, Treverton says, “wants a toady to oversee our national secrets,” going on to document how she has “cozied up with at least two vicious dictators who are America’s enemies: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” She has defended Assad and blamed the United States and NATO for the Ukraine war, Treverton howls.

On Nov. 27, Newsweek tries to make an issue of what it says are Gabbard’s ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Hindu nationalism,” and the century-old Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organization to which Modi has also belonged for years. “Some critics” accuse RSS of “seeking to vanquish Indian Christians and Muslims in order to establish a Hindu nation.” Independent journalist Pieter Friedrich is cited claiming that “having someone like Tulsi so closely tied to the RSS and its affiliates in America benefits India at a time when India is basically run by the RSS.” Gabbard is also described as an “advanced devotee” of a murky organization called the Science of Identity Foundation, former members of which describe it as a cult.

Not to be left out is BBC, which quotes retired diplomat Lewis Luken, who was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in London, and warned that Gabbard’s “dubious judgment” could give allies “reason to question how safe it is to share intelligence with the U.S.” BBC foamed at the mouth over Gabbard’s trip to Syria in 2017 on a fact-finding mission when she “later raised doubt about the U.S. intelligence assessment that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons on civilians.” Her meeting with Assad was the final straw, when she had the nerve to say he was not an enemy of the U.S. because Syria doesn’t pose a direct threat to the U.S.

This hysteria aside, Gabbard is expected to face serious opposition in the Senate, especially from supporters of NATO's war in the Ukraine, which she, like her new boss Donald Trump wants to end as quickly as possible. She also faces opposition from the intelligence establishment, who justifiably fear that she is an outsider who will shake things up.