PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Predictable Capitulation of Tulsi Gabbard

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By professing support for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after opposing it for years, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence has just told America it’s the same old imperium after all. 

Former U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in 2022 at an event hosted by Young Americans for Liberty in Kissimmee, Florida. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

Well, Tulsi Gabbard now says she is all for the unconstitutional law that permits the national security state to surveil Americans without obtaining legal warrants beforehand — a law Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence has previously and vigorously pledged to repeal.

As President-elect Trump’s inauguration approaches and his cabinet appointments will be confirmed or rejected in Senate hearings, Gabbard’s in-your-face betrayal of public trust ought to focus our minds very sharply and very fast. Some of these minds, I will say straightaway, have drifted far from reality since Trump began announcing his nominees. This was especially so in the case of Gabbard. 

As soon as Trump proposed Gabbard as his DNI, the shared expectation in some quarters, most of whose inhabitants I respect, was that she would — singlehandedly, I gathered from the commentaries — bring the hydra-headed monster euphemistically called “the intelligence community” under some semblance of political-civilian control. 

And now this: Professing support for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after opposing it for years, Gabbard seems to have shocked a lot of people. Reading this in the large, she has just told America it’s the same old imperium after all.  

Shall we join to sing “Up, Up, and Away now that all the beautiful balloons have fallen to Earth and the world’s not a nicer place and doesn’t wear a nicer face?

Until her stunning volte-face last weekend, Gabbard had been single-mindedly steadfast in her opposition to many FISA provisions, notably but not only Section 702. A lot of people, I among them, put this among the most significant positions Gabbard, the former congresswoman, had taken on any policy question.

Warrantless Wiretapping

President George W. Bush, surrounded members of his Cabinet and of Congress, signs the FISA Amendments Act on July 10, 2008, in the Rose Garden at the White House. (U.S. National Archives, no known copyright restrictions)

FISA was passed in its original version in 1978. It was amended at various times in subsequent years, and heavily after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Section 702 was written into the act in 2008 in response to media revelations that the National Security Agency was surveilling Americans without first obtaining warrants from the FISA Court, which adjudicates corruptly and in secret. 

Logically enough, in adding Section 702 to the surveillance act Congress simply made what was previously illegal legal. In a trice, what had been a breach of the Fourth Amendment was written into law — in the name of the Fourth Amendment, of course.  

You had to admire Gabbard for all the noise she made about Section 702 during her years in Congress as a Democrat from Hawaii. She voted against reauthorization on several occasions. In 2020 she co-sponsored a bill with Thomas Massie, a Republican and an ardent constitutionalist from Kentucky, to repeal not only the post–Sept. 11 FISA Amendments Act, but the whole of the egregious Patriot Act. 

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Gabbard quoted Ben Franklin and laid into the intelligence apparatus for “not [being] transparent or honest with the American people or even Congress about what they’ve been doing.” Among much else, the bill she co-sponsored made retaliation against whistleblowers illegal and banned the National Security Agency’s use of the “back doors” the NSA was using to gain access to computers, telephones, televisions and who knew what else.

The Protect Our Civil Liberties Act did not pass, needless to say. But it was a carefully researched, serious piece of legislation.

Then, long story short, came Trump’s tap on Gabbard’s shoulder. She seemed an obvious choice for a President-elect determined to prevent the Deep State — the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the national security apparatus — from subverting his second term as it had his first. 

It does not look now as if Gabbard will perform this service for Donald Trump even if she wins Senate confirmation when her nomination comes up for review. And at this writing her political fate remains a question.

Surprise, Surprise 

The press I am reading from Washington indicates that Gabbard has little chance of winning any Democrat’s support for her nomination, so thoroughly and disgracefully has the party allied with intel since the old Russiagate days. On the Republican side, they have made it plain that Gabbard’s stance on Section 702 of the FISA laws is more or less make-or-break: insofar as she can become DNI or sent back to the wilderness. 

Gabbard has been working the corridors on Capitol Hill for weeks, the Washington press corps reports. Given it was clear all along what she would have to say to win over sufficient Republican senators, her capitulation on a question she has owned these past five years cannot be taken as so sudden as it may seem. Oddly, it is a surprise and no surprise all at once. 

National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. (NSA, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Gabbard chose a minor web publication, Punchbowl News, to drop her bomb. Section 702 “must be safeguarded to protect our nation while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans,” she said in an exclusive interview published last Friday.

“If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people.” 

Jeez. John Brennan or James Clapper would not have put it much differently. 

A date for Gabbard’s confirmation hearings is not yet set — a curious circumstance, it seems to me. But given how abjectly she has pressed her forehead to the Senate’s marble floor, my money is she will be named the new DNI.

Things will get very Biblical if I turn out to be right. Gabbard will have betrayed herself and a great many others, she will have her 30 pieces of silver, and then she will hang herself — this if she even glances in the direction of her previous agenda.

Anyone who could not see this coming was not looking carefully enough. 

There are only three fates available for people who go to Washington with the forlorn intention of turning an imperium incapable of change in another direction: 

The imperial seat either eats you alive, it sends you home, or you leave of your own volition with your principles intact. Gabbard seemed to be one of these last for a time; now she is in the first category. 

I look at Trump’s proposed cabinet, a pitiful bunch, Zionists all, who will accomplish nothing interesting when the second Trump regime begins doing business, and my mind focuses on a simple question: Where is the left in all of this? 

As the Gabbard surrender reminds me, there is not a single voice of any consequence that can be called anti-imperial — how anachronistic a term is this? — or speaks seriously of the kind of radical domestic transformation that is all America has time for at this late hour. 

I do not mean the authentic left, I should add. The left worthy of the name succumbed long ago to suppression operations, post–Vietnam propaganda, and death by fratricide. Lately there are the subversions of the identitarian juveniles. 

I mean “the left” in quotation marks, what passes for the left in the American context. Gene McCarthy, any of the Kennedys, McGovern: Not even these kinds of figures can survive in Washington now, where the only party, as the late Steve Cohen used to say, is the War Party. 

People with good minds, heads on their shoulders, are marooned on the edges of their seats hoping for the best out of someone such as Tulsi Gabbard — a figure who has done some good things but who, as is now evident, has no sound political principles, no intellectual discipline, anything that is not negotiable. 

Up, up, and away: At least, best outcome, we will all forget about balloons and focus our minds on what truly needs doing, at, as I say, this late hour.

CORRECTION: Because of an editing error an earlier version of this story said FISA was amended in 2008 because of revelations by Edward Snowden, which didn’t come until 2013. §702 was passed in response to a New York Times article about George W. Bush’s warrantless surveillance.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

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28 comments for “PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Predictable Capitulation of Tulsi Gabbard

  1. Herb Weber
    January 16, 2025 at 10:56

    Gabbard faced a choice: 1. act the lying politician, be approved for office and be able to effect change; or 2. stick to your stated views and be unable to effect the changes you deem necessary. Many of us have faced such choices in our careers and have lived with the results. Personally, I will approve or reject what she does after I see what she does. Surely politicians saying one thing to be elected, then doing the opposite once elected are not a novelty in politics.

    • Susan Siens
      January 16, 2025 at 14:38

      When people face such choices and choose evil, they should live with the results. Some of us ordinary people out here guide our lives with morals and ethics and do NOT choose to compromise them for any reason. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together does not think that people go to DC and either recover their ethics or develop them. Gabbard has made it plain for quite a while what sort of person she is, just another political whore.

  2. January 16, 2025 at 08:07

    And now this: Professing support for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after opposing it for years, Gabbard seems to have shocked a lot of people. Reading this in the large, she has just told America it’s the same old imperium after all.

    *

    Section 702 serves as the mechanism for keeping the American people quiet on controversial (too often, related to major criminality) topics, when allowing total transparency (honest sharing of facts and/or reality) leads to inconveniences for the Fascist ruling minority, – inconveniences such as arrests, prosecutions and long prison sentences.

    A recent example of inconvenient, honest sharing of facts/reality is provided by former appointee in the Reagan administration, Ms. Barbara Honegger, where she brilliantly ties the 1963 JFK assassination, the 1980 U.S. presidential election “October Surprise” steal, the criminal events of 911 and subsequent catastrophic Middle East wars, the current warring in Ukraine, the genocide of the Palestinian people etc. etc. to the Greater Israel Project.

    See: hxxps://onenessofhumanity.wordpress.com/2025/01/14/barbara-honegger-blows-up-the-greater-israel-project/

    Peace.

  3. Caliman
    January 15, 2025 at 23:33

    “By their fruits shall ye know them …”

    I’m not interested in what politicians say … I’m interested in what they do. They can say “hope” and “change” all they want and if they go on to commit war crimes and tyranny and serve empire and $, who have they been?

    On the other hand, they can say stupid or terrible things and yet strengthen social safety, environmental laws, make peace with enemies, etc. in which case who have they been?

    Eyes wide open, friends … we are likely to be disappointed … but nothing is done until we are dead.

  4. cindy dold
    January 15, 2025 at 19:49

    I have no idea why Mr. Lawrence is so surprised. Tulsi Gabbard has been a political chameleon since her career began. Blame the conservative media (who held her up uncritically as a “darling” Democrat defector) for getting us into this mess. We may be stuck with a no-experience, no-principles DNI because TUCKER CARLSON, FOX News (and everyone else) refused to ask Gabbard hard questions from the get-go.

    Maybe the term “fake news” doesn’t just describe the Left anymore, huh?

    • Consortiumnews.com
      January 15, 2025 at 19:58

      How is Mr. Lawrence “surprised” when the word “predictable” is in the headline?

  5. wildthange
    January 15, 2025 at 18:37

    Western empires have coalesced into NATO as the Viking raiding party out to control the world for their religious war and male dominance behavior. It cannot hide with full spectrum dominance strategic planning openly stated.
    The folly of empire, when Alexander’s soldiers refused to fight anymore he may have given up and just retired.
    It is time in world history for us to do the same.

  6. January 15, 2025 at 18:34

    Yes, my friend Patrick: ” Oddly, it is a surprise and no surprise all at once. ” It may be both a surprise and disappointment to many of the Gabbard fans; but I’m not among them; for it is no surprise at all to me. As you and all here have already noted all too well, one does not succeed in rising to such power without major surrender of any positions that are from the outset contrary to the interests of those of “The People Who Really Matter” (TPWRM) – the MICIMATT complex, the politicos who have the power to confirm or block your path, and the oligarchs who ultimately pull all the strings. And the surrender of positions is inevitably a surrender of principles and possibly in the end, an abandonment of one’s deepest values.

    The way I see it, most (though not all) who seek public office have some understanding and willingness to compromise. Some likely think they can limit such compromises … in the hope of doing enough other good things to more than offset the harms. I was once told by a certain Mayor, that he saw his role as effecting as much damage control as possible… confirming that he did not dare go up against the power-brokers who actually control elections and in the end, policy. And so it is at every level, for those who might actually have any care at all about the interests of the public.

    For her part, Gabbard showed occasional hints of understanding about the Deep State and imperialism; but I never saw her as a committed change agent willing to lead any significant resistance. I imagine she will have experienced each of the 3 fates you note. At any rate, Trump – whom I see as a particularly weak fellow with neither moral compass nor ability to maintain a consistently coherent direction – would likely quash any meaningful reforms towards a more humane world, in order to please his fellow oligarchs.

    • Susan Siens
      January 16, 2025 at 14:43

      You are so right. People think they can limit their compromises, then they lie to themselves that what they are doing is okay and justifiable. A wonderful Maine author said that the only thing worth having is a sense of who you are and knowing what you would do in any circumstance, just the quality most people run from as far as they can! Gabbard is no McKinney and never has been. What I want people to think about is Israel recruiting these people either before or during their military activity.

  7. January 15, 2025 at 18:21

    What a disappointment. I thought she might be the real thing. Then I heard she was a Zionist. Now she is a has been.

    Does this mean Kennedy is the next to go down ?

  8. Guy St Hilaire
    January 15, 2025 at 16:46

    I always thought Tulsi had more balls than most men .Very disappointed to be honest and I’m not even American .Good luck America ,you are going to need it ,as the corruption continues to drag your country down .

    • Susan Siens
      January 16, 2025 at 14:45

      If you are using the word balls to mean courage, now we see Gabbard has none. If you meant she is filled with toxic masculinity, I think that’s probably true. As a radical feminist, women’s “equality” has never meant to me the right the dominate, murder, exploit and control others.

  9. bardamu
    January 15, 2025 at 16:40

    Applause for Patrick Lawrence, once again.

    It sounds like Ms. Gabbard had a conversation with management. Unfortunately, that does suggest something about the tenor of such conversations. We might recall that the alpha agencies have a regular relationship with organized crime–or, perhaps better put, they cooperate with other organized crime. Such conversations would appear to be done to negate the possibility of electoral change.

    Perhaps the agencies have succeeded.

  10. January 15, 2025 at 12:25

    “A figure who has done some good things but who, as is now evident, has no sound political principles, no intellectual discipline, anything that is not negotiable.”

    Without making excuses for Tulsi Gabbard (or Rand Paul, or Jimmy Carter, or the assortment of other political figures who appear to fit that description to my mind), that nevertheless appears to be the nigh-inevitable outcome for those who attempt to attain any position of real consequence.

    One who ascends to such a position will be expected to play ball in upholding the core interests of the MICIMATT (the “Global War Party,” in the parlance of Georgian Dream), and if the MICIMATT cannot secure one’s cooperation through bribery, blackmail, or other means of exploiting one’s personal vulnerabilities directly, they are often willing to threaten that person’s most valued relations and relationships (as incidents ranging from Bibi Netanyahu’s purported leveraging of tapes regarding the Clinton-Lewinsky affair to seek Jonathan Pollard’s release [Rebecca Shimoni Stoil, “Netanyahu Said to Have Offered Lewinsky Tapes for Pollard,” The Times of Israel, July 23, 2014], to John Bolton’s threats toward José Bustani’s children [Mehdi Hasan, “‘We Know Where Your Kids Live’: How John Bolton Once Threatened an International Official,” The Intercept, Mar. 29, 2018], to the FBI’s probe into alleged financial fraud by Bernie Sanders’s wife [Jake Novak, “Bernie Sanders Probe Proves FBI Really Is In Tatters,” CNBC, Dec. 9, 2017], may attest).

    • Bill Mack
      January 15, 2025 at 19:37

      Yes…very good points .

  11. Xpat Paula
    January 15, 2025 at 12:25

    Miguel: As a US expat myself, I’m not at all ashamed to say I left the US in protest against the Vietnam war. I try to explain to the French around me that their media completely parrot the US mainstream CIA propaganda, as a US citizen who knows better than French TV or press.

    • Susan Siens
      January 16, 2025 at 14:47

      I read a book for work by a woman who lived in Paris and was shocked to find that the French are as abysmally ignorant of foreign affairs as any American.

  12. Tedder
    January 15, 2025 at 11:08

    I, too, once cheered on Ms Gabbard as an anti-Establishment warrior, and she has succumbed. Too bad.
    On another note, I prefer the scholarly work of Peter Dale Scott and Aaron Good that describes our governmental system as tripartite. There is the elected and accountable state that we see (mostly) clearly; there is the security state of the CIA, FBI, DNI, and the Pentagon in general including the MIC; finally, there is the oligarchic and criminal state that wields the most power and influence in ‘this modern world’. Elements from these parts together form the Deep State, and which display a remarkable consensus in regard to preserving the imperial status quo. Of interest is that there is no such consensus domestically except for the impetus to preserve neoliberal capitalism.
    We see the Deep State in action in the assassination of JFK. There, all these elements colluded to dispatch a President who did not ‘toe the line’. Mr Trump had better watch his back.

  13. Larry G
    January 15, 2025 at 11:00

    As disappointed as I am with Tulsi, what other choice did she have? I would rather have a compromised Tulsi Gabbard in that position than anyone else Trump might conceivably come up with. If Democrats had any integrity, they would pledge to vote for her and she wouldn’t have to capitulate.

  14. Selina
    January 15, 2025 at 10:44

    Since Gabbard has entered the political arena, I’ve been puzzled how come she’s impressed people. It’s a mystery to me.
    That she’d change her mind about anything that would stymie her advancement when the feast is about to be served doesn’t surprise at all.

    • Carolyn L Zaremba
      January 15, 2025 at 16:58

      Nor me. I don’t vote for capitalists anyway.

      • Susan Siens
        January 16, 2025 at 14:48

        I love you both! I don’t vote for genocidal monsters of any sex, race, or stripe.

  15. Willie
    January 15, 2025 at 10:15

    completely what I expected…she will get worse in terms towing the neofascist line before she is ultimately forced to resign for showing some slight sense of decorum

  16. Paul Citro
    January 15, 2025 at 07:52

    We now have institutionalized corruption. No one gets in who doesn’t go along with the system. A governing system with unaccountable power inevitably becomes corrupt. The corrupt have no need of competence. Incompetent people in charge make fatal mistakes. Inevitably the entire system collapses. This usually happens with human suffering on an epic scale.

    • Tedder
      January 15, 2025 at 11:12

      Aristotle opined that ‘democracy’ always turned into oligarchy. Many others have stated that democracy is very fragile. In China, what we think of as democracy as in voting, only happens at the very bottom level of society; thus, the upper levels are both insulated from and accountable to the people, while proven corruption is severely and swiftly punished, often with death.

      • Afdal
        January 15, 2025 at 16:30

        Please don’t bring up Aristotle when bringing up democracy unless you’re prepared to use the actual definition that Aristotle used. The old “anacyclosis” hypothesis of Aristotle and Polybius can only be tested if you’ve actually had a democracy at some point in the first place. We have not. Aristotle makes it very clear in the same series of writings what the ancient democrats considered democracy to be.

        Aristotle’s ‘Politics’ Book 4: “…it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot, for them to be elected oligarchic…”

        Selecting officials by random lot (what we call “sortition” today) was central to the definition of democracy for thousands of years, and it was defined in OPPOSITION to elections–an institution of oligarchy.

  17. Miguel
    January 15, 2025 at 07:52

    I began to admire Tulsi Gabbard after viewing many of her speeches and comments on TV. I actually believed that there were some decent politicians in America, with the hope that maybe she would spearhead a movement towards changing the horrible direction America is going. I guess my hopes were dashed. I now believe America has no hope with the garbage running the USA, including Tulsi Gabbard. Bye America. There was a time I was a proud American. I now keep quiet to everyone around me that I came from America (I’m a foreigner in a foreign country).

    • Carolyn L Zaremba
      January 15, 2025 at 17:01

      I have opposed the U.S. government since the 1960s when I was out getting teargassed while protesting against the colonial war in Vietnam. It took me far too long to discover the Socialist Equality party and vote for them. But I do now and will continue to do so. Capitalism has very nearly destroyed the entire planet. If not overthrown, it will succeed.

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