Tulsi Gabbard reveals she met Assad in Syria, without informing top Democrats

Full Article:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/tulsi-gabbard-bashar-al-assad-syria-democrats

Excerpts:

“Initially I hadn’t planned on meeting him,” Gabbard told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so, because I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace. And that’s exactly what we talked about.”

Democratic leaders were mum on the decision by one of their sitting lawmakers to meet with a dictator whom the US government has dubbed a war criminal for his use of chemical weapons against civilians.

Gabbard’s trip raised alarms over a potential violation of the Logan Act, a federal statute barring unauthorized individuals from conferring with a foreign government involved in a dispute with the US. The US currently has no diplomatic relations with Syria.

Gabbard’s office said her visit was approved by the House ethics committee. A spokesman for the committee declined to comment, although under its rules members have a period of 15 days following the completion of a trip to make public their approval letter and financial disclosures related to privately funded travel.

The offices of Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, did not respond to requests for comment when reached by the Guardian. The White House did not immediately return an email inquiry, nor did a spokeswoman for House speaker Paul Ryan.

Pelosi told reporters on Wednesday that she had no knowledge of Gabbard’s unannounced trip, which drew scrutiny over who arranged and paid for the travel.

“She hasn’t reported or brought anything to our office as far as I know,” Pelosi said at a press conference held before Gabbard’s revelation about her meeting with Assad.

“So when I know more about it, I’ll have something to say about it.”

Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois, was among few lawmakers to immediately condemn Gabbard’s actions.
“It is sad and a shame and a disgrace,” Kinzinger told reporters at a Republican policy retreat in Philadelphia. “In no way should any member of Congress, should any government official, ever travel to meet with a guy that has killed 500,000 people and 50,000 children.”

Kinzinger called on leadership in both parties to condemn Gabbard’s trip and questioned how it was financed. But Kinzinger – like Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran – said he would need to know more to file an ethics complaint against his colleague.
“She has the audacity to say that everywhere she went people supported Assad,” Kinzinger said. “Of course, when you have an Assad-led tour, he’s only going to take you to places where people like him”.

Evan McMullin, a former independent candidate for president in the 2016 presidential election, asked on Twitter: “Why are so many of our leaders becoming stooges of foreign dictators and war criminals? @TulsiGabbard @realDonaldTrump This is America!”

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Gabbard’s office claims her trip was funded by the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services (Aaccess) – Ohio; however, the group has not reported any financial revenue to the US government since 2006.
Bassam Khawam, the executive director of Aaccess who traveled with Gabbard, reportedly belongs to a pro-Assad Lebanese political party, the Syrian Social Nationalist party (SSNP). The party has dispatched its members to fight on behalf of the Assad regime during the nearly six-year war.

The mystery surrounding Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s trip to Syria

Full Article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/26/the-mystery-surrounding-democratic-rep-tulsi-gabbards-trip-to-syria/?utm_term=.bc1fc9fd75a2

Excerpt:

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) just did something few members of Congress dare to do these days: Go to Syria and meet with the man the United States has actively been trying to oust, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Besides the fact a sitting member of Congress met with the leader of a nation that Washington has no diplomatic relations with — a man whom former president Barack Obama described as the main roadblock to peace in Syria — the timing of Gabbard’s trip is perplexing.

Consider: President Trump has not yet signaled whether he plans to shift U.S. policy in Syria, nor how. Gabbard raised eyebrows in Washington when she met with Trump in November to share her view that the United States should stop arming and assisting rebels, a policy that candidate Trump expressed support for. Then, the week Trump is inaugurated, we find out one of the few Democrats to knowingly talk foreign policy with Trump is in Syria potentially meeting with its president.

Gabbard returned this week and said the seven-day trip — which also featured former Ohio congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich — was led and paid for by the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Ohio. It’s common for lawmakers to take trips abroad via advocacy groups but not common for them to meet with foreign leaders without explicit permission from the president.

Melissa Dalton, a Middle East defense expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies described Gabbard’s trip as “odd” and “premature.” She said it does not appear to be connected to any broader policy deliberations about how to approach Syria. If that’s the case, Dalton warned that Gabbard risks undermining those deliberations by taking things into her own hands.

Quoting from the above Guardian article:
“Bassam Khawam, the executive director of Aaccess who traveled with Gabbard, reportedly belongs to a pro-Assad Lebanese political party, the Syrian Social Nationalist party (SSNP)”

Behind the Terror
June 1987

Full Article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1987/06/behind-the-terror/376326/

Excerpt:

To inspire his troops to seek martyrdom, the Ayatollah Khomeini promises them a room next to his in paradise. The suicide bombers of the Hizballah (Party of God), whose terrorist arm is better known as the Islamic Jihad, look forward to everlasting life in the bosom of the merciful Allah. But there is a more bizarre growth spreading in the landscape of international terrorism: a party whose members go knowingly and willingly to their deaths without the comfort of a hereafter, out of pure conviction, in the service of an idea. It is a party whose leaders, men approaching their seventies, send pregnant teenagers on suicide missions in booby-trapped cars. And it is a party whose members, mostly Christians from churchgoing families, dream of resuming the war of the ancient Canaanites against Joshua and the Children of Israel. They greet their leaders with a Hitlerian salute; sing their Arabic anthem, “Greetings to You, Syria,” to the strains of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”; and throng to the symbol of the red hurricane, a swastika in circular motion.

These are the hallmarks of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), the oldest terrorist organization in existence today and one of the most secret and deadly. Despite its long history of violence, Western security organs were recently taken by surprise when they learned that a well-camouflaged arm of the SSNP had succeeded in setting up a large terror network in Western Europe—complete with safe houses, weapons caches, and forged passports—and that it was the SSNP that had set off a series of deadly explosions in the heart of Paris, to gain the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah. The United States, too, has felt the effects of the SSNP. The explosion aboard a TWA flight nearing Athens in April of 1986, which cost the lives of four passengers—one of them an infant—has been traced to May Mansur, of Tripoli, a veteran member of the SSNP, who debarked at a previous stopover after placing a bomb under her seat.

Syrian Social Nationalist Party
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Social_Nationalist_Party