Gabbard's lack of judgment and flights from reality

By Josh Rogin
November 15, 2024 at 5:43 p.m. EST

... Gabbard is dangerous precisely because she doesn’t need any outside influence to come to her conspiratorial, dictator-friendly worldview. The problem is not that Gabbard’s views are unconventional. It’s that her long-standing pattern of embracing and amplifying Russian propaganda speaks to her poor judgment and tenuous allegiance to the truth ...

military service alone doesn’t ensure one is qualified to lead the intelligence community. Take the case of Michael Flynn, a three-star general and leader of the Defense Intelligence Agency who, after being fired 24 days into his service as Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, descended into a spiral of conspiratorial thinking, endorsing QAnon and promoting the idea that the United Nations is working to ban Christianity. Like Flynn, Gabbard has a troubling record of promoting disinformation that is damaging to U.S. interests and the intelligence community she is being asked to lead.

Consider Gabbard’s history with Syria. In 2017, she traveled to Damascus and met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at a time his army was perpetrating well-documented atrocities. Subsequently, whenever pressed, she refused to acknowledge that Assad was responsible for war crimes. She expressed skepticism about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Gabbard went so far as to accuse the United States of funding the Islamic State in Syria — a baseless assertion that again aligned with Russian disinformation efforts. She even wrongfully accused the U.S. military of itself committing war crimes in Syria, citing an attack clearly perpetrated by the Syrian government as evidence.

Consider Gabbard’s history with Syria. In 2017, she traveled to Damascus and met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at a time his army was perpetrating well-documented atrocities. Subsequently, whenever pressed, she refused to acknowledge that Assad was responsible for war crimes. She expressed skepticism about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Gabbard went so far as to accuse the United States of funding the Islamic State in Syria — a baseless assertion that again aligned with Russian disinformation efforts. She even wrongfully accused the U.S. military of itself committing war crimes in Syria, citing an attack clearly perpetrated by the Syrian government as evidence ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/15/gabbard-intelligence-propaganda-judgment-disqualified/