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 (from whistleblower Ed Snowden) 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.
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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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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