Tulsi Gabbard Was Right to Question Official Narrative About Syrian Chemical Weapons Attacks
Letter by group of national security officials expressing alarm at Gabbard’s appointment as director of national intelligence falsely accuses her of advancing a “conspiracy theory”
[Source: newsweek.com]
On December 4, a group of current and former National Security officials penned a letter directed to U.S. Senate Majority leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Majority leader elect John Thune (R-SD) conveying their concern over the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence by the incoming Trump administration.
The same letter expressed satisfaction at the appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, even though Rubio is a war monger who lied to the public about his family background, supported illegal coup plots, and has a family connection to organized crime.
The authors of the letter include: Wendy Sherman, the former Deputy Secretary of State, Anthony Lake, former National Security Council adviser under Bill Clinton, retired CIA officer Charles Gilbert, former assistant secretary of state Thomas Countryman and Lt. General Charles P. Otstott, former Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.
Wendy Sherman [Source: news.koreanherald.com]
The reason given for the letter writers concerns was that Ms. Gabbard had allegedly “aligned herself with Russian and Syrian officials” and “sympathized with its dictatorial leaders”—Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.
Further, Gabbard was said to have “publicly cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports and overwhelming public reporting that Assad carried out chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians, giving credence to the debunked conspiracy that the attack was staged by agents of the United Kingdom.”
To try and validate these latter allegation, the letter writers made reference to a Bellingcat report written by Elliot Higgins, entitled “Tulsi Gabbard Reports on Chemical Attacks in Syria a Self-Contradictory Error Filled Mess.”
Much of Higgins’ report is a baseless attack on MIT scientist Theodore Postol, a former top policy advisor to the chief of naval operations, who used forensic computer simulations and three-dimensional image analysis to disprove claims that Assad had attacked his own people with chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun.
After publishing his research findings in Global Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine, Postol met with Gabbard to discuss them.[1]
Theodore Postol featured in The Boston Globe in 1991 with a replica of a Patriot missile. [Source: archive.boston.com]
Written with Goong Chen, a mathematician from Texas A&M University and five other scientists, Postol’s article concluded that alleged chemical weapons attacks said to have caused a crater in Khan Shaykhun had to have been carried out by a rocket propelled artillery round Syrian rebels possessed—and not bombs dropped by the Syrian Air Force, as was alleged.
Postol’s team further found extensive tampering with the crater and debris and that a dead goat infected with sarin had been dragged to the scene along with some dead birds, making it look like sarin gas was deployed when he believed it was not.
[Source: “Forensic Evidence Cited by the OPCW That Contradict Its Reported Analysis and Conclusions,” provided to the author by Theodore Postol]
Postol’s analysis was corroborated by the fact that chemical weapons generally do not make large craters in the ground. Since no workers sent to clean up the scene were exposed to sarin or died—when any contact with the asphalt around the crater would have been highly lethal in the wake of an attack—it is unlikely sarin was actually used [2].
When I interviewed Dr. Postol for an article in 2021, he characterized Elliot Higgins as a “crank” and a “clown” who “has no scientific training, knows no science, and is not interested in learning any science.”
A college drop out, Higgins admitted in the early 2010s that he “knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owners; any knowledge he had came from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.”
Higgins, center, addressing press conference in May 2018. [Source: spectrum.ieee.org]
The agency that Higgins works for, Bellingcat, has been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot that specializes in advancing disinformation.
The latter helps explain why the national security veterans—some of whom have worked directly for the CIA—referred to Higgins as an authoritative source, when he is not.
Ms. Gabbard may not have a perfect track record particularly when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it does inspire confidence that she would meet with Dr. Postol and seek the truth about the chemical weapons attacks attributed to the Assad government in Syria.
As far as the claim that Gabbard “aligned herself with Russian and Syrian officials,” this conflates an American politician wishing to meet with foreign adversaries, try and understand their perspective and engage in diplomacy with the hopes of deescalating or averting conflict to one who is an admirer of a dictatorial government and disloyal.
During the height of the Cold War, presidents from both parties routinely engaged in the kind of backchannel diplomacy that Gabbard was trying to carry out, and met with foreign adversaries.
Dwight Eisenhower with Nikita Khrushchev. Was Eisenhower a “Russian asset” who sympathized with a dictator because he met with and was cordial with him? Only the fringe, ultra-right John Birch Society made the latter claim, so why are mainstream liberals making it today for people who do the same? [Source: pastdaily.com]
In today’s political climate, unfortunately, that kind of activity lends one to false accusations of being the asset of a foreign government, which Gabbard has been accused of by Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fl) and others.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz [Source: articlebio.com]
During the 2020 primary campaign, Hillary Clinton, who has done more than any other political figure to bring back the Russophobic climate of the McCarthy era, stated that the Russians “have got their eye on someone [Gabbard] currently in the Democratic Party primary and they’re grooming her to be the third party candidate. She’s a favorite of the Russians.”
[Source: nbcnews.com]
Clinton’s statements are patently false, as no evidence has ever emerged of Gabbard ever having been “groomed” by the Russians. Mainly, Gabbard has warned about the dangers of nuclear war breaking out if the U.S. continued its provocative actions in Ukraine and escalation of draconian sanctions measures that could lead to World War III.[3]
Tulsi Gabbard speaking about the danger os nuclear war at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington, D.C. in February 2023. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]
After her 2017 visit to Syria to meet with Assad, Gabbard told CNN: "whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria. In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur there has to be a conversation with him. My commitment is on ending this war that has caused so much suffering to the Syrian people, to these children, to these families, many of whom I met on this trip."
These comments in no no way suggest that Gabbard “aligned herself” with Assad or sought to romanticize his rule. Rather they show a practical commitment to diplomacy and ending a war that has caused terrible human suffering—which is what a responsible political leader should advocate for.
Towards the end of the letter, Gabbard is maligned for releasing a video after the Russian invasion of Ukraine “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.”
Irregardless of whether Russia used these arguments to justify its invasion of Ukraine, these arguments actually had merit.
CIA Director William F. Burns himself stated—when he was U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 2008—that efforts to expand NATO to Ukraine represented a “red line” for Russia that risked a revitalization of the Cold War.
As far as the bioweapons labs, Gabbard said this about them: “there are 25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world. 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.”
From my understanding Gabbard’s concerns were legitimate and statements factual. When questioned by then-Senator Marco Rubio in March 2022, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland stated that the U.S. had “biological research facilities” in Ukraine that were involved in experiments on deadly disease pathogens. (she said that the focus was on how to contain them).
[Source: timesnownews.com]
Given the U.S. track record, a sensible person with any knowledge of history would suspect that gain-of-function research and biological or germ warfare capabilities were being developed in the “biological research facilities” that Nuland was describing.[4]
In 1969, the Nixon administration formally shut down the U.S. bioweapons program and key facility at Fort Detrick Maryland, though the USA Patriot Act relaunched a bioweapons arms race through a provision that immunized federal officials from criminal prosecution for violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the bioweapon research proposals of the Geneva Convention.[5]
Following the Patriot Act passage, the CIA worked with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the Pentagon, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and military contractors to develop and manage dozens of biolabs in the U.S. and in Ukraine, Georgia and Africa.[6]
Attorney Arnaud Develay reported on a suspicious series of Hepatitis A outbreaks in Southeast Ukraine between June 2017 and January 2018 near where most of the Pentagon’s biolabs were located.[7]
However you factor it, there is nothing conspiratorial in Gabbard’s statements because Nuland confirmed the existence of the labs—what she called “biological research facilities.”
Even if they were not involved in producing any kind of offensive weapons—which Gabbard to my knowledge never said—her warnings would still resonate since the bombing of the labs would threaten to unleash deadly diseases and compound the ravages of the war Gabbard was seeking to end.
Nuland herself raised concern that the Russians might take over the facilities and gain access to the research or wittingly or unwittingly unleash an epidemic with the destruction of the facilities.
The letter put out by Wendy Sherman and her associates generally smacks of McCarhty-era witch-hunting that has come back in vogue in the era of Russia Gate.
Whatever the positive or negative qualities of Gabbard, the accusations that she has advanced conspiracies, aligned with U.S. enemies and sympathizes with dictators are as baseless as the accusation that the targets of Joseph McCarthy were Soviet communist agents.
[Source: x.com]
The only silver lining is that a huge portion of the U.S. public supports Gabbard and her positions and loathes the people that crafted the letter and others who subscribe to the mentality underlying it. All we need now is a modern day version of Joseph Welch, special counsel of the U.S. Army in the 1950s whom McCarthy had gone after, to scream out publicly: “sir, [or madam] have you no sense of decency.”
[1]The accusation that Assad had adopted chemical warfare against his own people was used to justify the launching of 59 cruise missiles by the Trump administration against the Syrian government’s air base at Sharyat and other U.S. military escalations in Syria.
[2] According to journalist Seymour Hersh, the impression that sarin had been used was created by a toxic cloud that resulted from the bombing of an agricultural supply depot near the crater possessing fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods whose release caused neurotoxic effects similar to those of sarin. At least three whistleblowers with the UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) also pointed to the staging of chemical weapons attacks and an elaborate coverup about this along with a “climate of intimidation to keep other staffers frightened into silence.”
[3] Gabbard has seemingly expressed some positive sentiments about the Russian bombing of Syria to target Islamic jihadists trained by the CIA whom she does not like. The latter is because Gabbard advocates for the U.S. to engage in a genuine war on radical Islam, and not the phony War on Terror in which the U.S. has often supported radical jihadist elements like in Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
[4] See Hal Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIAs Secret Cold War Experiments (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2011); Thomas Powell, The Secret Ugly: The Hidden History of U.S. Germ Warfare in Korea (Edgewater Editions, 2023); Arnaud Develay, Foreign Entanglements: Ukraine, Biden & the Fractured American Political Consensus (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023), 97, 98, 101, 107, 108, 110, 111; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race (New York: Skyhorse, 2023).
[5] Kennedy Jr. The Wuhan Cover-Up, 230, 231.
[6] Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 101; Kennedy Jr. The Wuhan Cover-Up, 230, 231; Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, “Pentagon Contractors Worked in Ukrainian Biolabs Under $80 Million Program,” March 16, 2022, https://dilyana.bg/pentagon-contractors-worked-in-ukrainian-biolabs-under-80-million-program/. Black & Veatch Special Projects Corporation was given full access to freely operate in all biolabs in Ukraine that were engaged in biological research activities under a specific DTRA program, according to a letter dated 2 July 2019 from the Ukrainian minister of health to DTRA in Ukraine. Hunter Biden was an investor in Metabiota, which was given DOD contracts for running some of the biolabs.
[7] Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 115. Moscow claimed to have unearthed documents pointed to a mosquito release of deadly pathogens being developed as a form of biological warfare. The CIA unwittingly confirmed that it unleashed germ warfare during the Korean War after years of denial. Powell, The Secret Ugly.
Wonderfully thorough!
I hope as DNI, Tulsi pulls the security clearances of each of these clowns. I, for one, have had enough of their psyops. Time to show Zero Tolerance!