The following is the unedited article and box by Harley Schlanger for this week’s EIR:
The first day of hearings before the Senate Committees responsible for confirmation of two of President Trump’s nominees went as advertised, turning at times into contentious attacks from defenders of the establishment status quo. Both Tulsi Gabbard, the choice for Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and Kash Patel as FBI Director, were effective in rebutting the assaults from their detractors, who were intent in defending the weaponization and politicization of agencies responsible for protecting American citizens and upholding the Constitution. Their opponents on the committees, including some Republicans, demonstrated in their attacks on the nominees why a drastic reform of the agencies they will head is urgent and essential.
In announcing in November why he selected them, Trump said he needs fighters, because “There is something wrong with the institutions,” the agencies don’t function, and need “to be challenged and reconstructed.” He said he believed Gabbard and Patel were the kind of fighters the American people need to root out the “rot” in the “Deep State.” In their responses to the at-times harsh grilling they were subjected to by some of the Senators who will determine their fate, both demonstrated the toughness that Trump expects of them, to fulfill their assignments.
The background to the hearings was a virtual nonstop series of media allegations fulminating against the two. Typical were articles in the Economist, the mouthpiece of the City of London, with an unacknowledged subtext of defense of the “Special Relationship” of U.S. and U.K. intelligence collaboration. On January 28, a lengthy article charged that Gabbard was chosen to purge any employees of the 18 agencies she would command for being “disloyal to the President.” It focused on two executive orders issued by Trump, which call for the new DNI to undertake a “sweeping review of the intelligence community’s activity during the Biden administration, to identify people who ‘weaponized’ intelligence or interfered in domestic politics, and to take disciplinary action—including dismissal—against offenders.”
The article on Patel, published on January 29, the day before the hearings, was less polite. Titled “Kash Patel is a crackpot,” it warns of his “animus toward the national security establishment,” evident in his role as a leading investigator into violations of law involved in the long-running “Russiagate” campaign against Trump. It accuses him of taking “every opportunity to exaggerate mistakes or faults by the intelligence agencies,” with nary an admission that the “mistakes and faults” included violations of law which seriously tarnished the election of Trump—identifying him as a “puppet of Putin”—and disrupted his efforts to improve relations with Russia. The article also fails to mention that those responsible for the intelligence “failures,” which have been widely acknowledged as based on lies to support a political bias, have evaded accountability, and many Senators, such as Adam Schiff, who is on the Committee deciding the fate of Patel, still repeat them at every opportunity.
The assault on Trump’s selection of the two is coherent with a report from the House of Lords released in December 2018, “U.K. Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order,” which warned that, were Trump re-elected in 2020, the “special relationship” between the British and U.S. political and intelligence establishment would be threatened, if not ended. The Special Relationship is identified in the report as the means through which City of London operatives steer U.S. policy. The report asserts that it remains “our top priority and cornerstone of what we wish to achieve in the world.”
Similar warnings of the threat to “business-as-usual” if the pair were approved were omnipresent throughout coverage in major media, including London dailies and the New York Times-Washington Post echo chambers, and were reflected in the interrogation by Senators, who engaged in a high-stakes game of “gotcha” during the hearings.
Intelligence versus Ideology
In asserting her belief in the urgency of the confirmation of Gabbard and Patel, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the necessity of rejecting adherence to the ideology of “geopolitics,” which has been central to the Special Relationship and responsible for repeated violations of international law. The wars, regime change coups, assassinations, etc. which have dominated international relations since the assassination in November 1963 of President John F. Kennedy—from the war in Vietnam, to invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine—are products of the application of geopolitics, in which the Anglo-Americans assert their imperial right to impose their “rules” on the rest of the world as the “sole superpower.” As stated by Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the principal architects of this revision of the classic doctrine of Mackinder’s geopolitics, the U.S. must prevent the emergence of any rival in Eurasia.
The attacks launched against Gabbard in particular reflect the adherence to unquestioning loyalty to this ideological belief. One main point of opposition to her raised in the hearing stems from her refusal to accept what turned out to be false findings used by the intelligence establishment to justify wars. War Hawks from both parties on the Senate Committee accused her of placing her beliefs ahead of the assessments of the intelligence community, which would threaten “national security” were she to be confirmed. Gabbard’s counter reflected the quality which should be most prized in the office of the DNI, that is, she refuses to affirm false claims, to say something which she doesn’t believe, for the sake of getting along.
When pressed, for example, on why she met with Syrian President Assad in 2017, she defended her decision, saying that she believes that it is necessary, when possible, to meet with those you may disagree with, before deciding to risk American lives by going to war—an unacceptable position for those who defend the Biden administration’s rejection of any diplomatic contact with Russian President Putin regarding Ukraine! There was no response from members of the Committee when she pointed out that her concern in Syria was that the Obama and Biden policy, as acted on by Hillary Clinton and her successors, of providing support for “moderate rebels” in a regime change war, could lead to a victory there by ISIS/Al Qaeda terrorists, which has just occurred. In her opening statement, to prove her point, she quoted from an email sent by Jake Sullivan to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February 2012, which said, “AQ (Al Qaeda) is on our side in Syria.” Sullivan, who later served as National Security Advisor to President Biden, was Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff when he wrote that email.
Gabbard has frequently defended the importance of verifying assessments before approving action. An example she cites is the intelligence failures which led to the disastrous war in Iraq. She addressed this during her presidential campaign in 2019, when she explained why she questioned “findings” which can lead to war. “I served in a war in Iraq,” she said at a CNN town meeting, “a war that was launched based on lies, and a war that was launched without evidence. So as a soldier, as an American, as a member of Congress, it is my duty and my responsibility to exercise skepticism any time anyone tries to send our service members into harm’s way or use our military to go in and start a new war.”
She reiterated this sense of a sacred commitment in her opening statement to the Intelligence Committee. “For too long,” she said, “faulty, inadequate or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. The most obvious example of one of these failures is our invasion of Iraq based upon a total fabrication or complete failure of intelligence.”
The cost of this failure, she continued, was the loss of thousands of American lives in Iraq, and the deaths of as many as 1 million Iraqis in America’s wars there. Her implicit message is that her opponents on the committee, who never called out the analysts responsible for the faked intelligence, demonstrate their blatant hypocrisy when they accuse her of undermining the authority of the experts by challenging their conclusions. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the “guardians of the status quo” on the committee were visibly angered by this truthful statement, which might cost Gabbard some needed votes.
She concluded her statement by ridiculing the charges that she is a puppet of dictators and enemies of America, which have been aired by the many, including anti-Trumpers like Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. “Now before I close,” she said, “I want to warn the American people who are watching at home. You may hear lies and smears in this hearing that will challenge my loyalty to and my love for our country. Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the Constitution of the United States, accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet, Modi’s puppet. Not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters.”
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