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TULSI GABBARD, BASHAR AL-ASSAD AND ME  
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Michael Isikoff
November 21, 2024
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_ Trump’s DNI pick and I were both in Damascus in the winter of
2017 to meet with the dictator of Syria. We came away with very
different takes _

Michael Isikoff confronts Syria President Bashar al-Assad with
photographs documenting the torture of political prisoners by his
government, Damascus, 2017, screen grab

 

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 Democratic 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 
[[link removed]]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 
[[link removed]]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 
[[link removed]](and
in a later CNN interview 
[[link removed])]) 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
[[link removed]] Assad
is “not the enemy of the United States.” 

But the real value to Assad from this trip is not what she said about
him, but what she told the world about the Syrian conflict itself. She
adopted wholesale the Syrian (and Russian) governments’ line that
the main forces resisting Assad were not the Free Syrian Army and
other rebel groups pledged 
[[link removed]]to
creating a  democratic free Syria but Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists
— supported no less by the United States government. (Never mind
that the U.S. 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.

[[link removed]]

Gabbard swallowed Assad’s proaganda wholesale after her secret
meeting with him in 2017. (HW-India)

Even more striking, she later released a three minute YouTube video 
[[link removed]]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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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, ranks
Assad’s Syria close to the bottom of its list, below North Korea,
China and Iran, calling it “
[[link removed]]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 who serves 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?”

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

CONFRONTING ASSAD 

I arrived in Damascus in early February, not long after Gabbard had
left in late January. I was working for Yahoo News at the time and my
trip was arranged by the Lebanese American brother of the director of
the Cleveland based group that paid for Gabbard’s trip— only in my
case, Yahoo News paid the brother as a fixer. If he was expecting
another sympathetic report on Assad and his regime, however, he was
soon to be sorely disappointed. 

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

But on the morning of my scheduled interview, I was torn. My interest
in in the Syrian civil war had been very much shaped by my reporting
on the so-called Caesar photos
[[link removed]]—
tens of thousands of gruesome photographs from inside Assad’s
torture chambers showing rows of naked, bruised, burned and emaciated
bodies, shocking images that were instantly reminiscent of those from
Nazi concentration camps. (Indeed, they would later go on display in a
special exhibit at the Holocaust Museum
[[link removed]].)
The photos had been taken by a regime photographer, codenamed Caesar,
who was so sickened by what he was assigned to document— the torture
and murder of Assad’s prisoners—that he defected and smuggled them
out of the country in thumb drives concealed in his shoes. The late
Senator John McCain told me he kept the photos on his desk and looked
at them every day as a reminder of the horrors of the Syrian regime.

[[link removed]]

A brave Syrian took photos in Assad’s torture and murder dungeons
and smuggled them to the West. This is just one of 50 thousand photos
he brought.

Before I left on my trip, I contacted Moustafa and asked him for
copies of some of the Caesar photos to take 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?” If I was going to ask him about the Caesar photos, I
wanted to have the evidence to show him.

And then, I hesitated. What if Assad’s bodyguards frisked me when I
showed up and found the photos? It would blow up the whole interview
and my sole purpose for being there. 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 story
[[link removed]] in
that day’s New York Times.

 “Amnesty Report Accuses Syria of Executing Thousands Since War
Began,” read the headline. It told of a new report from the Amnesty
International group that found that up to 13,000 people had been
executed in mass hangings at Assad’s notorious Saydnaya military
prison. The report further recounted how the detainees at Saydnaya —
most of them jailed for participating in anti-government
demonstrations — were subjected to severe and repeated beatings and
then convicted while blindfolded in sham military trials that
sometimes lasted only 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 story. Not
only would I question him about the Amnesty International report, but
I could be the first journalist to confront him with the Caesar
photos. 

VEST POCKET WEAPON

Throwing caution to the wind, I placed my copies of the photos in the
inside pocket of my sports jacket — as well as another document I
figured would come in handy—and hopped into my fixer’s car on the
way to Assad’s presidential office. 

It was all strange, of course. To my relief, I made it through
security flawlessly— the Syrian security guards never inspected what
was inside my jacket’s pocket. Assad, tall, awkward and somewhat
herky-jerky in his movements—odd, I thought for a London-trai
ophthalmologist— greeted me as I walked in, asking if we could 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 Bill
O’Reilly’s Fox News show and, no doubt for balance, the leftwing
“Young Turks” YouTube show.

We then moved to a nearby office where, as a pre-condition for the
interview, Syrian TV cameras would record it and provide us with a
copy of the tape afterwards, repeatedly assuring us that no editorial
content would be removed. I started the session 
[[link removed]]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 U.S-Syria relations under
the new president. (Sure, he said, as long as the U.S. works with his
government, the Russians and the Iranians to fight the
“terrorists” threatening his country.)

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

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

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

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

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? 

“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 [U.N.]Security Council”
authorizing the invasion of that country, he added. As for Amnesty
International, “it’s always biased and politicized.” 

I pointed out that the report was based on interviews with former
prison officials and doctors as well as three former Syrian judges who
related that the mass hangings were approved by either the Syrian
Minister of Defense or Army Chief of Staff— both of whom had been
“deputized to act 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.” He then suggested that the witnesses interviewed by
Amnesty had been paid for their report. “You can forge anything
these days.”

PHOTO FINISH

It was now time to move onto the Caesar photos, questions he was
likely not expecting. I told him that a Syrian woman had just filed
suit in Spain against nine senior Syrian government and intelligence
officials alleging her brother had disappeared in one of his
prisons— and she was backing up the claims of abuse by citing the
Caesar photos, one of which showed her beaten brother. 

“Have you seen the photos? I asked him. 

“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 lights went out, the cameras went off and the
room was plunged into darkness. 

It was a surreal moment. I was sitting there face to face with Assad
in the dark while he was holding in his hands photos of his tortured
victims, not saying a word, barely giving them a glance. In a moment,
his press aide rushed into the room and announced that a fuse had
blown and they were working on fixing it. Given the timing, I was, to
say the least, skeptical. In a back room somewhere in a presidential
suite, I figured nervous aides were no doubt debating whether to allow
the interview to continue. 

But after a few minutes, they decided they would— likely
concluding, quite correctly, that if they cut off the interview at
that moment it would be the principal focus of my story. The lights
came back on and the interview continued. (You can watch the entire
exchange here 
[[link removed])]with
the interregnum in darkness cut out in the edit room by Syrian TV
producers.)

“Have you verified” the photos? Assad demanded. “You cannot
mention such a picture without verifying who are those and where and
everything about it.” The photos were no doubt doctored, he
argued. 

I pointed out that the U.S. State Department had given 242 of the
photos to the FBI Crime Lab for analysis. I then whipped out the other
document I had taken with me in my jacket: the FBI report on the
Caesar photos. I read it to him. “The bodies and the scenes depicted
exhibit no artifacts or inconsistencies that would indicate they have
been manipulated. 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 lead
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The dictator of Syria was using a phrase—“fake news”—that had
been coined on the campaign trail by the now U.S. president. It was a
new and lethal American export, a gift to authoritarians around the
world looking for a way to dismiss and ridicule inconvenient truths. 

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

_Michael Isikoff is an award-winning investigative journalist and
best-selling author who has reported for The Washington Post,
Newsweek, NBC News and Yahoo News._

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* Tulsi Gabbard
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* Bashar al-Assad
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* Michael Isikoff
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* Syria
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