Tulsi Gabbard, Bashar Al-Assad And Me
Tulsi Gabbard, Bashar Al-Assad And Me . (MENAFN - Asia Times) 

In the early months of 2017, two Americans traveled to Syria where they met separately with that country's dictator, Bashar Al-Assad.One of them was Tulsi Gabbard, then a ...
América - MenaFN
(MENAFN- Asia Times) In the early months of 2017, two Americans traveled to Syria where they met separately with that country's dictator, Bashar Al-Assad.

One of them was Tulsi Gabbard, then a Hawaii congresswoman, now President-elect Trump's pick to be director of national intelligence. Another American, arriving in Damascus less than two weeks later, was me.

It's fair to say our meetings with Assad, and the messages we later relayed to the world about what was taking place inside his country,

couldn't have been more different.

Gabbard flew secretly to Syria in mid-January of that year - the first member of Congress to do so since 2011, when Syrian forces gunned down peaceful protestors and imprisoned thousands of others during the height of the Arab Spring. The ensuing conflict between anti-Assad forces and the Syrian military was unspeakably brutal - and became even more so in 2015 when Russia's Vladimir Putin dispatched special forces and aircraft to bombard pockets of“rebel” resistance in towns like Aleppo.

But Gabbard was unmoved by the indiscriminate Russian bombing or Assad's repeated use of chemical weapons against his own people. Her trip - privately funded by a Cleveland-based Arab American group sympathetic to Assad - turned into a propaganda coup for the Syrian regime. Gabbard had two meetings with Assad, revealing nothing (then or since) about what they actually said to each other.

These sessions with the dictator were, to say the least, controversial.”To say I'm disgusted would be an understatement,” said Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger on the House floor.“By meeting with the mass murderer of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, Tulsi Gabbard has legitimized his dictatorship and, in turn, legitimized his genocide against the Syrian people.”

Gabbard, for her part, defended

herself,

writing in a blog

post

(and in a later CNN

interview

) that she would be ready to meet with anyone“if there's a chance it can help bring about an end to this war.” She later

said

Assad is“not the enemy of the United States.”



But the real value to Assad from this trip was not what she said about him, but what she told the world about the Syrian conflict itself. She adopted wholesale the Syrian (and Russian) government line that the main forces resisting Assad were not the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups pledged to creating a democratic free Syria but Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists - supported by the United States government, no less. (Never mind that the US military was engaged at the time in targeting and destroying the ISIS caliphate next door in Iraq.)

“There is no difference between 'moderate' rebels and al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) or ISIS-they are all the same,” Gabbard wrote in her blog post.

Syria's then-ruler Bashar Al-Assad (left) was surprised by the evidence of torture the author brought with him in his coat pocket. Photo: Yahoo News

Even more striking, she later released a three minute YouTube video about her trip, showing bombed-out buildings as well as children in hospitals and maimed civilians with amputated legs, portraying them all as victims of the Syrian“terrorist” rebels. (Fact check: According to the UK based Syrian Network for Human Rights, as of 2022, 228,893 civilians had been killed in the country's civil war - with more than 90 percent of these deaths caused by the Syrian military or its Russian allies.)

On her congressional website, she posted photos from the trip, including one of her meeting with Syrian religious leaders, each of whom, she wrote, called for“an end to foreign support of terrorists who are trying to rid Syria of its secular, pluralistic, free society.” (Fact check: Freedom House, which does annual rankings of the state of freedom in every country in the world, ranked Assad's Syria close to the bottom of its list, below North Korea, China and Iran, calling it“ one of the world's most oppressive regimes” which“harshly suppresses freedom of speech and assembly” with“enforced disappearances, military trials and torture ... rampant in government-controlled areas.”)

All of this was nothing new for Gabbard. Two years before her meeting with Assad, in 2015, Mouaz Moustafa, a Washington based anti-regime activist serving as executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Forces, took Gabbard and several other House members on a congressional trip to the Syrian-Turkish border. There, they met with displaced civilians who related how they were driven from their homes by relentless Syrian and Russian bombings. Much to Moustafa's astonishment, Gabbard was openly skeptical.“How do you know it was Assad or the Russians who did the bombings?” she asked them.“How do you know it wasn't ISIS?”
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2024-12-16
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(MENAFN - Asia Times) 

In the early months of 2017, two Americans traveled to Syria where they met separately with that country's dictator, Bashar Al-Assad.One of them was Tulsi Gabbard, then a ...
Tulsi Gabbard, Bashar Al-Assad And Me