Former Director of Counterterrorism of the CIA Bernard Hudson in an op-ed published Friday endorsed Army Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as President-elect Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, praising her as an independent thinker who will restore trust in the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

Hudson wrote in the National Review: “She has the experience, temperament, and professional integrity necessary for the American intelligence community to win and keep the trust of the American people.”

He added:

Gabbard is a career public servant who served in the Hawaii state legislature and for four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the latter capacity, she was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. She was also the vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. She has also worn her country’s uniform for over two decades in the U.S. Army, with a combat deployment to Iraq. As a soldier, she knows both the importance of patriotism and the cost that all military interventions inevitably require.

In addition to serving her country in a combat zone, Gabbard has a different and equally rare form of courage. The DNI needs to be willing to say unpopular — and, sometimes, unwelcome — things in pursuit of accuracy, free of the Beltway conventional wisdom that often serves as blinders.

He noted that Gabbard, a former Democrat, bucked her party in 2015 when she criticized the Obama administration for refusing to say “radical Islamic terrorism” even amid the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an offshoot of terrorist organization al-Qaeda.

Hudson noted that Gabbard is being smeared as a Russian agent, despite the fact she maintains a top-secret clearance as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves.

He called claims about her supporting hostile leaders such as former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad — whom she visited in 2017 amid a civil war in Syria that threatened deeper U.S. involvement — “misleading.”

“Rather than being soft on America’s adversaries, she has been willing to ask hard questions of an often-flawed elite foreign policy consensus,” Hudson wrote.

He said not long after her visit to Syria, “Washington’s elite foreign policy caste itself came to abandon regime change as a priority, due to concern about just who might take over in Syria.”

He said the intelligence community could have used a voice like Gabbard’s before the Iraq War, which was “erroneously justified by using flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.”

“It could use a similar internal skeptic of its consensus today,” he wrote.

He noted other intelligence community failures, that the removal of Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi would improve regional stability and that the Afghan government could sustain itself after U.S. troops were pulled out.

“Unique within the IC, the DNI is the one official who can, and must, ask hard questions about the conclusions and recommendations that America’s vital security services are chartered to provide the president and policy-makers,” Hudson wrote.

“It is wrong to fault Tulsi Gabbard for refusing to reflexively assent to every bit of elite, foreign policy conventional wisdom. Rather, independent thinking is an essential requirement of the job to which she has been nominated. The career intelligence community should take this opportunity to welcome a genuine, thorough review of its enterprise to win and keep the trust of the American people,” he concluded.

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