Tulsi Gabbard, Bashar Al-Assad and me – Asia Times

In the first decades of 2017, two American traveled to Syria where they met individually with that country’s despot, Bashar Al-Assad.

One of them was Tulsi Gabbard, therefore a Hawaii Democratic congressman, then President-elect Trump’s find to be director of national intelligence. &nbsp, Another American, arriving in Damascus less than two weeks later, &nbsp, was me.

It’s fair to say our discussions with Assad, and the information we after relayed to the world about what was taking area inside his land, &nbsp, couldn’t have been more diverse.

Gabbard flew covertly to Syria in the middle of January that year, becoming the first member of Congress to do so since 2011, when Syrian forces massacred peaceful protesters and imprisoned thousands of others at the top of the Egyptian Spring. The fight between anti-Assad troops and the Arab military escalated into something unprecedented, and it even got worse in 2015 when Russia’s Vladimir Putin dispatched unique causes and aircraft to battle “rebel” neighborhoods in cities like Aleppo. &nbsp,

However, Gabbard was unimpressed by Assad’s repeated use of chemical arms against his own citizens or the indiscriminate Russian attack. Her journey — privately&nbsp, funded&nbsp, by a Cleveland-based Muslim United group friendly to Assad — turned into a propaganda coup for the Arab program. Gambard and Assad met twice, but nothing was revealed about what they truly said to one another.

These classes with the tyrant were, to say the least, questionable. ” To say I’m disgusted would be an understatement”, said Republican senator Adam Kinzinger on the House floor. ” By meeting with the large criminal of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, Tulsi Gabbard has legitimized his tyranny and, in turn, legitimized his murder against the Arab people”.

Gabbard, for her part, defended&nbsp, herself, &nbsp, writing in a blog&nbsp, post&nbsp, ( and in a later CNN&nbsp, interview&nbsp, ) 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&nbsp, said&nbsp, Assad is” certainly the army of the United States” .&nbsp,

However, what she said about him and how she addressed the world about the Palestinian issue itself was what really added to Assad during this journey. &nbsp, She adopted wholesale the Syrian ( and Russian ) government&nbsp, line that the main forces resisting Assad were not the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups&nbsp, pledged&nbsp, to creating a&nbsp, democratic free Syria but Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists — supported by the United States government, no less. ( It should be noted that the US military was attempting to target and destroy the ISIS caliphate in Iraq at the time. ) &nbsp,

” 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.

Even more impressive, she later released a three minute YouTube&nbsp, video&nbsp, about her journey, showing bombed-out structures as well as babies in hospitals&nbsp, and maimed citizens with amputated limbs, portraying them all as victims of the Arab “terrorist” rebels. &nbsp, ( Fact check: According to the UK based Arab Network for Human Rights, as of 2022, &nbsp, 228, 893&nbsp, residents had been killed in the government’s civil war — with more than 90 percent of these deaths caused by the Syrian government or its Russian allies. )

&nbsp, On her legislative website, she posted&nbsp, photos&nbsp, from the trip, including one of her meeting with Palestinian religious leaders, each of whom, she wrote, called for” an end to international support of terrorists who are trying to rid Syria of its liberal, pluralistic, completely 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&nbsp, and Iran, &nbsp, calling it “one of the world’s most oppressive regimes” which “harshly&nbsp, 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. In 2015, Mouaz Moustafa, a Washington-based anti-regime activist serving as the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Forces, traveled with Gabbard and other House members to the Syrian-Turkish border with a congressional delegation two years prior to her meeting with Assad. They had a conversation with displaced civilians there who described how constant Syrian and Russian bombings had driven them from their homes. Much to Moustafa’s astonishment, Gabbard was openly skeptical. How do you know whether Assad or the Russians carried out the bombings? she asked them. ” How do you know it wasn’t ISIS”?

Moustafa could barely stop&nbsp, himself from blurting out the blindingly obvious: ISIS doesn’t have an Air Force! &nbsp, He&nbsp, came away clear-eyed about Gabbard’s world view. ” She’s like the perfect product of RT propaganda”, he said. &nbsp,

Confronting Assad&nbsp,

I arrived in Damascus in early February, not long after Gabbard had left in late January. The Lebanese American brother of the Cleveland-based organization that paid for Gabbard’s trip, which I was working for at the time, only paid the brother as a fixer in my situation. If he was expecting another sympathetic report on Assad and his regime, however, he was soon to be sorely disappointed. &nbsp,

The trip was tense and at times nerve-wracking. The Damascus airport was shut down because Syria was a war zone. A Yahoo News cameraman and I had to travel by armed caravan through the Bekaa Valley to the Syrian border from Beirut to Beirut. Our fixer — with clear approvals from up high — had arranged for the Syrian military to provide us with safe passage, avoiding “rebel” areas, &nbsp, as we made our&nbsp, way to the capital. I stayed there before arriving at a five-star Intercontinental hotel constructed in the days before Assad’s regime became a global pariah. &nbsp,

But on the morning of my scheduled interview, I was torn. My reporting on the so-called Caesar photos, which were tens of thousands of brutal photos taken inside Assad’s torture chambers, showed rows of naked, bruised, burned, and emaciated bodies, shocking images that immediately drew comparisons to those from Nazi concentration camps. &nbsp, ( Indeed, they would later go on display in a special exhibit at the&nbsp, Holocaust Museum. ) A regime photographer, codenamed Caesar, who had taken the photos had defected and smuggled them out of the country in thumb drives concealed in his shoes because he was so sickened by what he was given the task of documenting: the torture and murder of Assad’s prisoners. The late Senator John McCain claimed he looked at the photos every day and kept them on his desk as a reminder of the regime’s atrocities.

I contacted Moustafa before I left on my trip and requested copies of some of the Caesar photos to bring with me. I had watched past interviews of Assad and knew that, whenever confronted with questions about the grotesque excesses of his regime, he invariably responded:” Oh, do you have the evidence? Can you show me the evidence”? I wanted to have the evidence to show him if I was going to ask him about the Caesar photos. &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

And then, I hesitated. What if the bodyguards of Assad’s regime attacked me when I arrived and discovered the photos? My only purpose for attending the interview would be blown up. I was genuinely uncertain whether it was worth the risk — until I logged onto the internet in the hotel’s business center and saw the lead&nbsp, story&nbsp, in that day’s New York Times.

&nbsp,” Amnesty Report Accuses Syria of Executing Thousands Since War Began”, read the headline. Up to 13, 000 people were executed in mass hangings at Assad’s infamous Saydnaya military prison, according to a new report from the Amnesty International organization. Further, the report further details how the detainees at Saydnaya were subjected to severe and repeated beatings, most of whom were imprisoned for organizing anti-government demonstrations, were later found guilty while blindfolded in sham military trials that sometimes lasted just a few minutes.

In short, Assad’s brutality was very much international news on the day of my interview. I was now determined to advance the narrative. I could be the first journalist to confront him with the Caesar photos in addition to posing questions to him about the Amnesty International report. &nbsp,

Vest pocket weapon

I hopped into my fixer’s car on the way to Assad’s presidential office, &nbsp, and hurried caution to the wind by putting my copies of the photos in the inside pocket of my jacket as well as another document I figured would be useful. &nbsp,

It was all strange, of course. I’m relieved to find that I passed through security without any issues because the Syrian security personnel never looked through the pocket of my jacket. &nbsp, Assad, tall, awkward and somewhat herky-jerky in his&nbsp, movements — odd, I thought for a London-trained&nbsp, ophthalmologist — greeted me as I walked in, &nbsp, asking if we could&nbsp, have an informal chat before the interview began. He wanted to talk about the state of the American media, relating in the course of our somewhat stilted conversation how he liked to watch conservative BillO’Reilly’s Fox News show and, no doubt for balance, the leftwing&nbsp,” Young Turks” YouTube show.

After that, we moved to a nearby office where Syrian TV cameras would record the interview and give us a copy of the tape, repeatedly assuring us that no editorial content would be removed. This was done in exchange for the assurance that no editorial content would be removed. I started the&nbsp, session&nbsp, slowly and respectfully, asking Assad whether he had had any communications with the new Trump administration in Washington ( no, he hadn’t ) and whether he saw a path to an improvement in US-Syria relations under the new president. ( Sure, he said, as long as the US works with his government, the Russians and the Iranians to fight the “terrorists” threatening his country. ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

And when it came to the Syrian civil war, he offered his standard talking points, the same ones that&nbsp, had just been repeated to the world by Tulsi Gabbard, using virtually the identical language. &nbsp,

Who backed the rebels and referred to them as “moderate rebels” as they transitioned from Syria to ISIS and Al-Nusra? he said. ” We didn’t. So it’s not our responsibility…. Your country supported them”. ( Fact check: the US not only didn’t support Al-Nusra, it had designated it as a terrorist group. In the complexity of the war, however, some US aid to opposition groups indirectly benefited Al-Nusra. ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

About&nbsp, halfway in, I started to press him about his human rights record. Things&nbsp, started to get testy. I brought up the Amnesty International Report which described the military prison at Saydnaya as a “human slaughterhouse” .&nbsp, &nbsp,

” What do you know about what’s going on in that prison”? I asked. &nbsp,

He dismissed the question as irrelevant. Why question him about human rights when the United States has” this close, very close relation” with Saudi Arabia? &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

” I’m not interviewing the King of Saudi Arabia right now”, I responded. ” I’m interviewing you. I’m asking you about reports of human rights abuses in your prison, in your country”.

” Yeah, of course. You own the question. I own the answers. So that’s my answer”, Assad, replied with a nervous laugh.

” The United States is in no position to talk about human rights”, he said. ” Since the Vietnam War til this moment, they killed millions of civilians. You don’t talk about the 1.5 million]killed ] in Iraq without any assignment by the]UN] Security Council” authorizing the invasion of that country, he added. &nbsp, As for Amnesty International, “it’s always biased and politicized” .&nbsp,

I made it clear that the report was based on interviews with former prisoners, doctors, and, as a bonus, three former Syrian judges, who claimed the Syrian government’s minister of defense or Army chief of staff had both been “deputized acting on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.”

” It means nothing”, he replied.

“Nothing?” 

” No. When you need to make a report, you need evidence, concrete evidence”. Then he suggested that Amnesty had compensated the witnesses who spoke to him for their testimony. &nbsp,” You can forge anything these days”.

Photo finish

It was now time to move on to the Caesar photos, questions he was likely not expecting. I informed him that a Syrian woman had just filed a lawsuit in Spain against nine senior Syrian government and intelligence officials who claimed her brother had vanished from one of his prisons, and that she was using Caesar photos to support her claims of abuse. &nbsp,

” Have you seen the photos? I asked him. &nbsp,

” No, I didn’t. Do you have a photo?”

” I do have the photos.”

” Can you show it to me?”

” Yes, I’d be happy to,” I replied, reaching into my inside jacket pocket and handing them to him”. Here.”

And just as I did, the cameras went off, the lights went out, and the room became completely dim. &nbsp,

It was a surreal moment. Without saying a word, I was sitting face to face with Assad in the dark, hardly giving a second to the tortured victims. His press release quickly announced that a fuse had blown and that they were putting things right. Given the timing, I was, to say the least, skeptical. I assumed nervous aides were deliberating whether to allow the interview to continue in a back room of a presidential suite. &nbsp,

But after a few minutes, they decided they&nbsp, would — likely concluding, &nbsp, quite correctly, that if they cut off the interview at that moment it would be the principal focus of my story. The interview was resumed as the lights turned on. ( You can watch the entire exchange&nbsp, here &nbsp, with the interregnum in darkness cut out in the edit room by Syrian TV producers. )

” Have you verified” the photos? Assad demanded”. You can’t mention a picture like that without checking who those are, where, and everything else. ” The photos were no doubt doctored, he argued. &nbsp,

I made it clear that the US State Department had sent 242 of the photos to the FBI Crime Lab for analysis. &nbsp, I then whipped out the other document I had taken with me in my jacket: &nbsp, the FBI report on the Caesar photos. I read it to him”. No artifacts or inconsistent patterns that would suggest they have been manipulated are present in the depicted bodies and scenes. As a result of the above observations, all of these 242 images appear to depict real people and events.”

” Who said that?”” The FBI. Have you seen the report? ” I handed it to him.

” Whether, if the FBI says something, it’s not some — something it’s not evidence for anyone, especially for us … It’s just propaganda. It’s just fake news.”

And with that, Assad gave me my&nbsp, lead. The now-US president was using a phrase titled “fake news” that had been coined on the 2016 campaign trail. It was a brand-new, lethal American export that authoritarians around the world were looking for to disprove and mock inconvenient truths for. &nbsp, &nbsp,

And Assad, no doubt emboldened by the PR boost he had just gotten from his new friend, the congresswoman from Hawaii, was happy to join the chorus.

The well-known author and investigative journalist Michael Isikoff has worked for Newsweek, NBC News, and Yahoo News. This article was first published in the Substack newsletter SpyTalk on November 21, 2024. It is republished with permission.