by Andrew Walden

Director of National Intelligence?  Syriously?

It looks like Tulsi Gabbard won’t be getting a free ride through the US Senate.

Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union:

“We’ll have lots of questions.  She met with Bashar Assad. We’ll want to know what the purpose was and what the direction for that was as a member of Congress.”

What was the direction?

According to its website, “the US State Department Congressional Travel Office (CTO) facilitates official foreign travel arrangements for Members’ of Congress and their staff. The CTO is responsible for all logistical aspects of Congressional travel including notification to Posts abroad, compilation of itineraries and scheduling.”

But in the case of Gabbard’s Syria visit, it seems 'the direction' came from murderous Syrian National Socialists.

The KeyWiki biography of Tulsi Gabbard has all the details:

Gabbard initially declined to say who financed her trip to Syria. However, in a press release Gabbard revealed her delegation (which also included former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich) had been “led and sponsored by” an outfit called the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services (AACCESS—Ohio). Her statement added she and the rest of the delegation had been accompanied by two men, Elie Khawam and Bassam Khawam.

Bassam Khawam, a former executive director and current board member of the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services (AACCESS-Ohio), said that Tulsi Gabbard's 2017 trip to Syria wasn’t the first trip his Cleveland-based organization has coordinated for U.S. lawmakers to the Middle East. Founded in 1991 to serve the Arab American community in Ohio, AACCESS has organized three trips to the region for Dennis Kucinich, the former Democratic congressman from Ohio, between 2006 and 2011; Khawam said the group did the same for Gabbard, a two-term Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, because of her expressed interest in the region.[58]

A 2006 article refers to “Sam Khawam,” an alias of Bassam Khawam’s, as the “chairman of the Arab American Community Center for Social and Economic Services.” It would suggest, then, despite the slight naming discrepancy (“Social and Economic” rather than “Economic and Social”), that the Messrs. Khawam are part of AACCESS.The Guardian reported that Bassam Khawam was the executive director of the organization.

Gabbard’s press release described the pair as “longtime peace advocates.”

In truth, Bassam Khawam and Elie Khawam are both officials in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a political party and paramilitary organization founded in Lebanon in 1932, and currently actively engaged in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Assad regime.

According to the SSNP website, Elie enjoys a senior position in the politburo; “Chief of Cross-Border Affairs;” while Bassam was given the honor of presenting Syria’s ambassador to the UN, Bashar al-Ja`fari, with a gift and a toast at a New York dinner in 2015. The pair, in other words, are two of the key U.S.-based point men for the party—and, by extension, the Syrian dictatorship.

Highlights of the party’s activities since its founding include assassinating the first Lebanese prime minister, Riad al-Solh, in 1951; and participating in the brief civil war of 1958 as well as its much less-brief successor from 1975-90, during which period they earned the distinction of recruiting Lebanon’s first female suicide bomber, 16-year-old Sana’ Mehaidli, who drove an explosives-laden Peugeot into a convoy of Israeli troops in 1985.

In May 2008, the SSNP assisted the Islamist militants of Hezbollah in their armed takeover of Beirut’s western half, and has ruled its fiefdom of Hamra with an iron fist ever since, famously assaulting and attempting to kidnap the late Christopher Hitchens in 2009, and less famously hospitalizing the Lebanese journalist Omar Harqous.

When the Syrian uprising began in 2011, it fell to the SSNP to violently disperse anti-regime demonstrators outside the Syrian embassy in Beirut, using “fists, sticks, and belts.” Most recently, the party has dispatched an estimated 6,000-8,000 fighters to the Syrian battlefield to help the Assad regime annihilate its opponents, to whom the SSNP officially refers as the “Jews of the interior” and “an essential arm of the racist Jewish enemy.”[59]

Does Tulsi Gabbard seem like somebody to trust with all of America's intelligence secrets?   

Let's give Chris Hitchens 'Swastika and the Cedar' the final word:

Not at all the sort of place you would expect to find a spinning red swastika on prominent display. Yet, as I strolled in company along (the Beirut street) Hamra on a sunny Valentine's Day last February, in search of a trinket for the beloved and perhaps some stout shoes for myself, a swastika was just what I ran into. I recognized it as the logo of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a Fascist organization (it would be more honest if it called itself "National Socialist") that yells for a "Greater Syria" comprising all of Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and swaths of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. It's one of the suicide-bomber front organizations--the other one being Hezbollah, or "the party of god"--through which Syria's Ba'thist dictatorship exerts overt and covert influence on Lebanese affairs.