In Defense of Tulsi Gabbard

 On February 23, 2022, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, a statement appeared on X: “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border.” The speaker was former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, now Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence.

A few days later she posted an appeal on X calling for Russia and the West to stop the war. The way to do it, she said, was to agree “that Ukraine will be a neutral country [with] no military alliance with NATO or Russia.”

Was this disloyalty — or common sense? In a war, you need to understand why your opponent fights. Put yourself in Vladimir Putin’s shoes: The idea of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO — an anti-Russian military alliance — must be deeply alarming. For Putin, it would be much like the situation facing President Kennedy in 1962. Russia had put medium-range missiles in Cuba, and Kennedy went to the brink of nuclear war to get them out. Putin’s fear is not so different from Kennedy’s.

What Gabbard posted was not some wild accusation. But it was clearly anathema to the policy of the Biden administration, and also of the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations. And this wasn’t the only time.

A few days later, Gabbard posted on X again. “There are 25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world,” she wrote. “We must take action now to prevent disaster. US/Russia/Ukraine/NATO/UN/EU must implement a ceasefire now around these labs until they’re secured & pathogens destroyed.”

An outcry ensued — not at the danger she spoke of, but at her. Russia was accusing the United States of harboring bioweapons labs in Ukraine — and here was a former member of the United States Congress parroting Russian lies! Except that Gabbard wasn’t doing that. She had said “biolabs,” not “bioweapons labs.” They are not the same. The infamous lab in Wuhan, China, where Covid-19 may have been hatched was a biolab, not a bioweapons lab.

In fact, there were laboratories in Ukraine doing research on dangerous pathogens, just as Gabbard said. The labs were not secret. The U.S. Embassy in Kiev put out a press release about its plans to secure them. The entire flap over Tulsi Gabbard’s biolab “disloyalty” was nonsense.

Then, in September 2022, the Nord Stream Pipeline exploded near the Danish island of Bornholm. The pipeline, laid deep under the Baltic Sea, was a conduit for Russia to sell its natural gas to Germany without paying to pipe it through Ukraine. The explosion was clearly an act of sabotage, but it wasn’t clear who did it. The “talking point” in Washington, D.C., was that the Russians did it.

Why would the Russians wreck their own pipeline, when they could just turn it off? Tulsi Gabbard spoke up. It was an “absurd lie,” she said, that the Russians had sabotaged themselves.

And it was a lie. Over the next year, it became clear that the Ukrainians did it. European intelligence agencies knew the Ukrainians had a plan to sabotage it, and told the CIA three months before to watch out. Whether the Biden administration approved the plan — which Gabbard accused it of — has not been shown. But Ukraine is a U.S. client state, and clearly the U.S. authorities hadn’t stopped it.

The media storm now raging over Gabbard is being fed by national-security officers whispering poison into the ears of sympathetic media. The New York Times writes that Gabbard stands accused of “parroting the anti-American propaganda of the country’s adversaries.” (Note the word, “parroting.” It implies a bird brain.) Again and again, Gabbard was accused of repeating “Kremlin talking points.”

Every regime has its talking points. Some are true, some are false and some are a stew of both. Back in 2003, when George W. Bush started a war with Iraq, the U.S. talking point was that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of “weapons of mass destruction.” Supposedly we had proof of this supplied by U.S. intelligence services. Bush sent his secretary of state, Colin Powell, to the United Nations to insist that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. And it was false. Bush’s people didn’t have the proof. They never did have it.

Whether Tulsi Gabbard has all the abilities needed to be director of national intelligence I don’t know. She does have the sharpness and independence of mind to question “talking points” — our adversaries’ and, especially, our own. Our government desperately needs the service of people who don’t reflexively believe its own lies.

America also needs someone who will not give the intelligence agencies everything they want. Fifty years ago, the politicians who pushed back against these agencies’ assertions of power — Senator Frank Church of Idaho comes to mind — were Democrats. Liberal Democrats. Not anymore. Today’s Democrats sound like J. Edgar Hoover.

 Gabbard was a Democrat for a long time, with deep roots in a Democratic state. Born in American Samoa, she is of Samoan and European ancestry, and was mostly homeschooled through high school. Following her mother, she became a Hindu. (“Tulsi” is a Hindu name.) Early on, she was drawn to politics; barely out of her teens, she was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives.

Tulsi was a patriot. In 2003, the year George W. Bush began the Second Gulf War, she signed up for the Army National Guard to go and fight terrorism. She served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 as a medical specialist. In 2007 she graduated at the top of her class at the Alabama Military Academy and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. In 2008 she was deployed as a Military Police officer to Kuwait, where she became the first woman to receive an award of appreciation from the Kuwait National Guard.

In 2020, Gabbard was transferred to the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command in California. She is now a lieutenant colonel in the reserves.

During her time in the reserves, she also had a political career. In 2012 she was elected to Congress from Hawaii’s second district, representing all of Hawaii outside of urban Honolulu. From 2013 to 2021, she served on committees on Homeland Security (2013-14), Armed Services (2013-21), Foreign Affairs (2013-19), and Financial Services (2019-21). During these years, she became an outspoken opponent of U.S. intervention in foreign wars. She was all for fighting terrorists, she said, but not wars designed to install pro-American governments. Historically, hers was mostly a left-wing position — and Gabbard was a member of the Progressive Caucus, the group now headed by Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle. In 2016, Gabbard supported Bernie Sanders for president.

In 2020, Gabbard ran for the Democratic presidential nomination as an opponent of “regime-change wars.” That year, the Democratic candidates pulled strongly to the left, but Gabbard did not fit the mold. She had her supporters, but many were not Democrats — and she would soon leave the party.

During her time in Congress, she staked out a position on intelligence agencies that they now fear. In 2016, Gabbard was one of 25 founding members of the Fourth Amendment Caucus, a group that (in the words of its co-chair, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA) aimed “to protect against warrantless searches and seizures, close privacy-violating surveillance loopholes, and to champion reform efforts to protect and restore Fourth Amendment rights.” The group was half Republican and half Democrat, spanning the political spectrum from Walter Jones, R-NC, on the right to Barbara Lee, D-CA, on the left. Suzan DelBene, D-WA, and Peter DeFazio, D-OR, were members of that caucus.

In 2020, Rep. Gabbard introduced H.R. 8452, a bill to allow leakers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden to argue that their intent was public disclosure — an argument courts had not been allowed to consider. The bill died, but it tells something of the author’s mind. CNN  summed up the reason that the intelligence agencies are now so assiduously undermining her — because of “her distrust of broad government surveillance authorities and her support for those willing to expose some of the intelligence community’s most sensitive secrets.”

You can argue these things. Government needs to have secrets — but there is also a temptation to have too many, holding back information in order to manipulate public thinking. There is a value in protecting Americans from terrorism, but also a value in protecting citizens from warrantless searches. You can argue about the right balance. But if the agencies get to decide what that balance is, they will tip it in their favor. And they always have.

What’s notable now is not that the agencies are trying to sandbag Tulsi Gabbard. That was predictable. What’s notable is that prominent politicians are openly accusing her of disloyalty. Now that she has become a Republican, most of the accusers are Democrats. Eighty years ago, when Republicans were routinely smearing Democrats as “pink” or “soft on communism,” their rhetoric was branded as “McCarthyism” and shouted down.

For decades it became taboo to call any left-wing politician a communist or even a socialist, even if the label was true, unless they used those words to describe themselves. (That was the rule at the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer when I worked there.)  But in 2019, Hillary Clinton, still sore that Gabbard had endorsed Bernie Sanders, called her a “Russian asset” — and Clinton got away with it.

Gabbard did sue Clinton for defamation, but she soon decided to drop the lawsuit. Under U.S. laws of libel and slander for Gabbard to collect damages she would have had to prove Clinton’s statement was defamatory, damaging, and done with malicious intent — and also that Clinton knew, or should have known, that it was false. Had Clinton called Gabbard a Russian agent, Gabbard might have made her shell out millions. An “agent” is an employee. “Russian asset” is an artfully chosen term that sounds like slander but really means — what? Someone who agrees with a Russian “talking point”?

I note that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL, who in 2016 was Hillary’s supporter as chair of the Democratic National Committee, has chimed in, carefully using that same phrase: that Gabbard is “likely a Russian asset.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, does the same when she says Gabbard is “in Putin’s pocket.” These people know the words to use that won’t get them into trouble.

Hey, Democrats! Is this not McCarthyism?

The New York Times writes of Gabbard, “Her remarks have made her the darling of the Kremlin’s vast state media apparatus.” We don’t have a “state media apparatus” in this country, and the American state certainly doesn’t need one.