We need someone in the post willing to rein in the neocon intelligence and foreign policy establishments when they urge the president to double down on military action based on phony or incomplete intelligence.
Models of the U-2, A-12, and D-21 photo-reconnaissance aircraft suspended from the ceiling of the C.I.A.’s headquarters’ glass-enclosed atrium in 2007. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
President-elect Donald Trump this week stirred up the intelligence community with his picks of former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence (DNI) and former DNI and Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe as C.I.A. director.
Ratcliff, a fierce partisan, is nonetheless the more traditional pick of the two. Gabbard spent her life as a Democrat, including eight years in the House before running for president in 2020, dropping out, changing her affiliation to “Independent,” and then changing it to Republican and endorsing Trump.
She is the more controversial pick, not necessarily because of her politics, but because she is far more isolationist than most Democrats and she supports an immediate end to the war in Ukraine and engagement with North Korea, China and Syria.
Both Ratcliffe and Gabbard are likely to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, according to The Washington Post. Neither is as controversial as, say, attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, who was investigated a year ago for sex trafficking, or defense secretary nominee Peter Hegseth, a former Army captain who is currently a Fox News host and who has literally no experience running anything larger than his own household.
While Democrats will likely oppose both Ratcliffe and Gabbard, if only because the two are MAGA Republicans who want to end U.S. financial and military support for Ukraine, Republicans now control 53 Senate seats, more than enough for confirmation, with room to lose a few.
Publicly, Democrats aren’t saying much about Ratcliffe. He’s mostly a known quantity in Washington, having been DNI for a few months at the end of the first Trump administration. He’s a former member of the House Armed Services Committee and was also a member of Trump’s impeachment defense team.
Ratcliffe was initially dismissed as unqualified for the DNI job in 2019. He withdrew from consideration, but Trump renamed him a year later and he was finally approved by a sharply-divided Senate. His tenure was short, and he didn’t do anything either controversial or innovative in his few months in the job.
Gabbard’s nomination has drawn far more ire, especially from Democrats. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), a former C.I.A. officer, said she was “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination and added, “Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.”
Gabbard, while a U.S. representative, addressing the 2019 California Democratic Party state convention in San Francisco. (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) called Gabbard’s nomination “incredibly reckless,” and added that “Putting someone with known sympathies for foreign adversaries (in the position) is not putting America’s interests first — it’s putting our security at risk.”
And Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) said, “Tulsi Gabbard’s deep ties to some of our nation’s most dangerous adversaries, including Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Vladimir Putin of Russia, make her an untrustworthy guardian of our nation’s most closely held secrets.”
All of this is, in my own humble opinion, absurd. Democrats don’t like Gabbard because she never bought into the party’s anti-Russia hysteria, because she was never supportive of putting the U.S. and NATO on the brink of war with Russia in Ukraine, and because she doubted the Democratic Party’s assertion that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people, an allegation refuted by United Nations whistleblowers.
That’s exactly what we need in a healthy democracy — somebody in a position of authority who makes decisions based on facts, not on what happens to be politically expedient. We need a person willing to rein in the neoconservative/neoliberal intelligence and foreign policy establishment when they urge the president to double down on military action based on phony or incomplete intelligence.
Gabbard may face one substantive challenge when she finally becomes DNI. That challenge will be in dealing with Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio, currently a Republican senator from Florida. Rubio is a longtime mainstream neoconservative hawk, especially on China, although he has kowtowed to Trump successfully over the past eight years.
Rubio and Gabbard have some clashing views, but Gabbard is as much a seasoned bureaucratic fighter as Rubio is. The question, then, will be who can more successfully get Trump’s ear.
The bottom line in my view is that Trump appears to be serious in his desire to change the country’s foreign and intelligence policy. He appears to be serious about shaking up the intelligence community. He appears to be serious about bringing foreign conflicts in which the U.S. is involved to a close.
Those are all good things for those of us who support a change to the pro-war status quo that is the military-industrial complex. We can certainly disagree with Donald Trump on a thousand other issues. But on Tulsi Gabbard, he got it right.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
All of the accusations against Gabbard are as bogus as the reports about Biden’s cognitive abilities were earlier this year. She would, in my opinion, be great in the position. Which is exactly WHY neo cons don’t want her there. Hope she makes it!
I am of course well aware of the hatred and venom that the Democrats can spew at a person who disagrees with them. I saw this after 2000.
After 2000, what most of the nation saw was the Gore Democrats complaining about the Cheney regime and its Politics of Hate. The ‘Hate Cheney’ theme of that time focused a lot on how nasty the Repubicans were and what bad people they were. Except, as a volunteer for Nader, I also got to see the side of the Democrats where they piled more hate, were more nasty, and more just plain obnoxious and disgusting to the Nader supporters than any member of the Cheney family hit on even their bad days. Quite a contrast, the main Dem message against Cheney was made to seem tame by the Dem hate of anyone who had backed Nader.
This taught a very good lesson about the nature of Democrats, and one that still is strong in my memory and now reinforced by their nasty behavior against the lady who used to be a Democrat but then committed the unspeakable crime of being for “Peace.”
I don’t suppose we’ll be hearing that “we always have to believe women” around Tulsi anytime soon.
At this point, I’d settle for an honest collector and presenter of the best intelligence available, and end this now several decade old practice of deciding what reality is, then concocting the intelligence to try to create the Potemkin village of reality, usually in order to send $billions of taxpayer money to someone’s pockets.
We need a ‘national director of intelligence’ who won’t see mass graves in Serbia or WMD’s in Iraq just because the people who’ve got hold of high office want it that way. That would be a fine first step, restoring honesty and accountability into the system. Its been way too corporate, as in produce whatever the Boss wants, for way too long.
But, one can see why this would scare and horrify the Cheney Democrats.