Tulsi Gabbard Should Open The Books On The War In Syria

Tulsi Gabbard Should De-Classify Documents Relating To The U.S. War She Once Called Out.

Donald Trump has just announced that he has picked former Hawaiian representative and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence.

To me Tulsi is the least bad of his picks so far (a low bar), I don’t think she is as bad as his hardcore neocon secretary of state (Marco Rubio), National Security Advisor (Mike Waltz), or his insane Zionist UN Ambassador Elise Stefanik, who has taken over 100,000 dollars from the pro-Isreal lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Cmte).

This is not to say I am a fan of Tulsi, I have some major issues with her. For one, despite previously representing herself as an anti-war activist, her record is mixed at best. As Alan Macleod has reported in Mint Press News, Gabbard has a long history of supporting war on terror-esque policies such as defending Biden’s drone strikes in Afghanistan. What I find most abhorrent about Tulsi is the fact that since October 7th of last year, she has defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza, something that is not only morally reprehensible but goes against any anti-war principles she has ever espoused.

That being said there is one potential upside to Tulsi Gabbard becoming DNI, she may declassify intelligence documents surrounding the CIA’s involvement in the Syrian Civil War, reports on the alleged chemical weapons attacks in Goutha, Shaykhun, and Douma, and surrounding American manipulation at the UN chemical weapons watchdog OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons).

Tulsi has previously spoken out on all of these issues, and in this article, I will make the case that this information is in the public interest to know, often using Tulsi Gabbard's own words.

Tulsi Should Declassify Documents Pertaining To “Timber Sycamore”.

For those who are not aware, “Timber Sycamore” was the name given to a secret CIA program launched in 2013 designed to arm and train Rebels fighting the Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, and his army in the Syrian civil war. According to the New York Times, the program was “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A” and was “the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s”

The program also gave arms to many unsavory, extremist, and sectarian rebel groups fighting in the war. According to the aforementioned New York Times article “some of the C.I.A.-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to Al Qaeda”. The article went on to report that “C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front (Al Qaeda affiliated group) fighters” and that “some of the (CIA trained) rebels joined the group”.

According to an analysis by Sam Heller of “The Century Foundation” Think Tank the CIA weapons sent to Syria “have functioned as battlefield auxiliaries and weapons farms for larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate”.

There is also evidence that these arms ending up in the hands of extremists was an intentional strategy. In a leaked email, advisor to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan was caught saying “AQ (Al Qaeda) is on our side in Syria.” A DIA report from 2012 similarly warned that “The Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (Al Qaeda) are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”. This report was ignored by the CIA who went on to arm this very insurgency a year later.

The U.S. government often defended its policy in Syria based on the grounds that the rebels were “moderate” and fighting on behalf of the Syrian people but on the ground reports from the country tell a different story. For example New York Times reporter Robert. F. Worth visited Aleppo after it was taken back from rebel forces and told a much different story.

One Aleppo resident who supported the rebellion in its early moderate stages was quoted saying that under Rebel’s control, Aleppo was “a Turkish card guarded by jihadis” and that the Rebels became “corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors”. Worth went on to report that had the Rebels taken over Syria the “result would almost certainly have been sectarian mass murder”.

Journalist Martin Smith of PBS News was able to get into government-held areas of Syria without a government minder and reported a similar situation. He reported that most people he spoke to told him that:

The protesters that took to the streets in 2011 had legitimate demands, but the demonstrations were quickly hijacked by foreign-backed jihadists.

He reported that while most people he spoke to were not fans of the Assad regime or the Syrian government, they did not “want the collapse of the state”. As Smith put it in his report:

They saw what happened in Iraq after Saddam, and in Libya after Qaddafi. They watched as state infrastructure — schools, hospitals, police, water, electricity — crumbled with the fall of the central government, and they didn't want the same to happen to them.

Finally, there is also strong evidence that the CIA program killed many people in the Syrian War. A U.S. official told the Washington Post that “CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years”.

The U.S. government has often blamed the entirety of deaths in Syria on the Assad regime and no doubt they have committed many war crimes throughout the war, but the reality is the CIA-backed Rebels have as well. A 2022 UN report breaking down the deaths in the Syrian war found that the Syrian government and its allies were responsible for 39.3 percent while 35.7 percent were caused by “non-State armed groups” and 24.2 percent are not attributable to either side.

The report found that 24.9 percent of the deaths were caused by non-ISIS “Islamic factions” which were indirectly armed and trained by the CIA while 5.3 percent of the deaths were caused by “anti-government groups” which were directly armed and trained by the CIA.

Tulsi Gabbard has previously been strongly outspoken on this issue. In the 2019 Democratic primary debate, she said:

Many of the politicians in our country from both parties have supported this ongoing regime change war in Syria that started in 2011, along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing and cheerleading this regime change war.

In a 208 interview with The Nation Magazine Tulsi said:

The United States is acting as the big brother and protector of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in Syria.

I personally am not a fan of Tulsi Gabbard’s war on Terror framing of the Syria issue (I don’t like calling groups fighting in a war “terrorists” even if they are extreme) but outside of that she got the basic facts right about U.S. involvement in Syria correct and called out the CIA’s regime change program.

This is why I think it is crucial that Tulsi stick to her previous criticism and declassify any documents relating to Timber Sycamore that do not endanger national security or individual people. I think it is in the vital interest of the people of the world to know:

• How much money was spent and what amount of weapons were sent to this war?

• How many of these weapons ended up in the hands of sectarian extremist groups and how many CIA-trained rebels joined these groups?

• If these weapons were sent to extremists intentionally.

• How many soldiers and civilians were killed as a result of this program?

Tulsi Gabbard Should Declassify Intelligence About The Alleged Chemical Attacks In Ghouta, Khan Shaykhun and Douma.

Note #1: I am not an expert in forensics or toxicology and the following is just my personal analysis of the publicly available evidence.

Note #2: There have been many allegations from both sides of the Syrian War concerning chemical weapons use. I have not looked into many of them and do not know who is responsible or what happened, this section is specifically referring to the three that made major news headlines and resulted in American responses.

Gouta

In 2013, then-president Barack Obama drew a “red line” on Syria. He said that the U.S. would not intervene against Bashar Al-Assad unless he used chemical weapons in the war which in that case America would militarily intervene on the side of the Rebels.

The “red line” presented an obvious problem, it gave the rebels a strong reason to do a chemical attack and blame it on Assad in the hopes that America would intervene on their side and therefore allow them to win the war. As a former US Middle East ambassador told Harper's magazine the red line comment “was an open invitation to a false flag operation”.

Soon after these comments, a brutal Sarin gas attack took place in the Damascus suburb of Gouta that killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians. U.S. intelligence was quick to blame Assad for the gas attack but behind the scenes, they were less confident.

Inside sources expressed skepticism to legendary investigative journalist Sy Hersh who reported in the London Review Of Books that one high level intelligence official called the intelligence “ a ruse” and said the attack “was not the result of the current regime”

Multiple U.S. officials even compared the intelligence blaming Assad for the attack to previous deceptions leading up to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. According to a report in Politico then Vice President Joe Biden compared the intelligence to the Gulf of Tonkin deception in Vietnam saying “Remember Vietnam? Remember how that started?”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper even compared the intelligence to the Iraq WMD deception. The Politico report goes on to say that he said “the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas was not a slam dunk” which “appeared to have been a carefully chosen” reference to when the CIA “told President George W. Bush that intelligence leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a slam dunk.

Furthermore, there has been subsequent open-source information that points to this gas attack being a false flag. For one there is evidence that Rebels groups were in possession of Sarin Gas. The Pro-Rebel foreign fighter Matthew Vandyke told Bellingcat founder Elliot Higgins in a leaked email that “the rebels do have a small quantity of chemical weapons” and that he had a source that gave him “information about the rebels having acquired some” and that he had “been to the sight” of the building that allegedly held the chemical weapons and that fact gave “the information some additional credibility”.

The UN’s Carla Del Ponte also alleged that rebel groups may have been in possession of Sarin Gas.

Ballistic research from M.I.T’s Theodore Postol and Tesla Laboratories’ Richard M. Lloyd found that the sarin rockets “had a range of about three kilometers” meaning they could have been shot from rebel held territory, pointing a false flag.

One of the most overlooked aspects of this attack is that there are actually little seen videos that appear to show the rebel group Liwa al-Islam firing chemical rockets at Gouta. Skeptics have argued that this video was staged by the Syrian government to try to pin the blame on Rebels instead of themselves but the open source outlet Rootclaim was able to find a field in Syria that matched up with the one featured in the video which was “opposition controlled”

Khan Shaykhun

The next alleged Chemical attack that got attention in the West was the alleged Sarin attack in Khan Shaykhun, an area of Idlib where 89 people died and 541 were injured. Again the U.S. intelligence publicly blamed Assad for the attack and this time under Trump even bombed the Syrian government in response to it.

But again Sy Hersh’s inside sources were not so sure. In the German newspaper WELT he reported that his inside sources were skeptical that Assad was behind the attack and one senior U.S. intelligence advisor even told him that “The Salafists and jihadists got everything they wanted out of their hyped-up Syrian nerve gas ploy”

The OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) later blamed Assad for the attack but MIT’s Ted Postal found some massive holes in that report such as the fact that the damage sites not match up to what it would look like if a 500-pound bomb was used (which the OPCW alleged).

Postal also found evidence of tampering at the scene. A dead goat on the scene that tested positive for Sarin was shown with drag tracks around it implying that it was poisoned with Sarin elsewhere and brought onto the scene.

Douma

In 2018 another alleged chemical attack occurred in the Damascus suburb of Douma, this time being an allegation of a chlorine attack. 43 people were killed at an apartment in Douma and videos were released of them foaming at the mouth and pictures were put out of chlorine cylinders at the scene.

Intelligence again blamed Assad and Trump again bombed Syria in response. The OPCW released a report that said it was a chlorine attack and implied that Assad was behind it.

However some of the organization's top inspectors released documents that were suppressed from the OPCW report that called this into question.

One suppressed toxicology report said that the “death of the victims do not match chlorine” and seemed to be “corpses arranged for propaganda purposes”. Minutes from the toxicology meeting with expert said that “there was no correlation between the symptoms and chlorine exposure” and that “the symptoms were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine”.

Another suppressed engineering assessment said that the chemical cylinders found at the scene were likley “manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered by aircraft”.

The final censored report found that

Some of the signs and symptoms described by witnesses and noted in photos and video recordings taken by witnesses, of the alleged chemical victims, are not consistent with exposure to choking agents such as chlorine

and that

the team is unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the relatively moderate damage to the cylinders allegedly dropped from an unknown height, compared to the destruction caused to the rebar-reinforced concrete roofs.

There is also strong evidence that the U.S. was behind the repression of this report. As former Guardian reporter Jonothan Steele reported in CounterPunch, before the report was censored, the OPCW brought in:

Three US officials who were cursorily introduced without making clear which US agencies they represented. The Americans told them emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine.

Steele went on to report that:

The inspectors left the office, feeling that the invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.

The OPCW “IIT” team put out a report in 2023 that tried to blame Assad for the chemical attack but that report contained many gaping holes. Aside from the major errors from that report pointed out by journalist Aaron Mate, there was a major hole in their attempt to counter the leaked engineering report.

The report tried to explain how a chlorine cylinder ended up on a bed even though the hole it supposedly fell out of the sky from was not above the bed.

Pictured Above: Chlorine Cylinder found (or placed) on the bed in Douma

The IIT report tried to explain this cylinder ending up on the bed by saying :

it bounced and (further) rotated. That would explain why the orientation of the cylinder on the bed is opposite to its orientation on impact (about 180o )

The problem with this claim is that analysts, including those who believe Assad did the chemical attack, believed that the canister was moved onto the bed.

The Intercepts James Harkin reported that the open source outlet Forensic Architecture found that the canister on the bed “looked particularly implausible unless it had been moved after the drop” and that they were “close to certain” that “the location of the canister when photographed is not it’s original fall position.”He also quoted an OPCW inspector that said the placement of the canister did not look “plausible”.

What is worth noting is that all these sources believed that Assad did the attack. They were comfortable saying the canister was placed because they could argue that it was dropped from the sky and then was moved onto the bed. However, there is no evidence for this.

The videos posted from pro-rebel sources show the canister on the bed soon after it was allegedly dropped and no witnesses report having moved it there.

As the censored OPCW engineering report said of the theory that the cylinder was dropped from the sky and then moved “There is no particular peruasion for this or reason to belive that it occurred”.

If the canister on the bed could not have bounced there from the sky, and there is no evidence that anyone moved it there after falling, that would mean it was placed and therefore rebels on the ground could be responsible for the 43 dead civilians that they filmed in Douma.

Because of this contradiction, the OPCW IIT report decided to ignore what was previously acknowledged by everyone and pretend that the canister could have bounced onto the bed.

Tulsi Gabbard’s Role

Tulsi Gabbard has been one of the only politicians to publicly bring up these questions about the chemical attacks. All of the information written in this section of the article has been discussed at length by Gabbard. For example, on Chris Cuomo’s CNN show in 2019, she brought up both the leaked OPCW report and the research from Theodore Postal that called into question who did the attacks. In a 2019 interview on the Jimmy Dore Show, Gabbard discussed the OPCW report at length.

This is why Tulsi Gabbard as director of the Director of National Intelligence should declassify any and all intelligence reports surrounding chemical attacks in Ghouta, Khan Shaykhun and Douma and release any information about suppression and interference with the OPCW’s investigation into the alleged Douma Chemical attack.

This is important for several reasons, it could expose an intelligence manipulation scandal as big as Iraq WMDs, could finally allow the censored inspectors to be heard at the OPCW bringing credibility back to the chemical weapons watchdog, and will bring justice to those who died in the attacks by finally revealing how they died and who was responsible.

Demands For Gabbard

Here are the three things I think Tulsi Gabbard should be pressured to do as Director of National Intelligence

• Declassify any and all documents relating to “Timber Sycamore” that do not endanger national security or individual people's lives.

• Declassify any and all intelligence reports surrounding the alleged chemical attacks in Ghouta, Khan Shaykhun, and Douma

• Declassify any documents detailing interference and suppression around the OPCWs investigation into the alleged Douma chemical attack

Everything I detailed in this article is just a small fraction of the remaining questions around the war in Syria. I would recommend that everyone calls on Gabbard to declassify reports around these issues, the people deserve to have answers.