HAMILTON, Canada

US President Donald Trump's pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, faced strong questioning at a Senate hearing on Thursday where she pledged to end what she called the "complete failure of intelligence."

In her opening remarks, Gabbard said: "For too long, faulty, inadequate or weaponized intelligence have led to lot costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution."

"The most obvious example of one of these failures is our (2003) invasion of Iraq based upon a total fabrication or complete failure of intelligence," she told the Senate, referring to debunked US claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Listing her first priority as intelligence chief "to assess the global threat environment, identify where gaps in our intelligence exist, integrate intelligence elements, increase information sharing," Gabbard pledged an "unbiased, apolitical, objective" approach.

She struck back at claims of her being "Trump's puppet, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's puppet, (Bashar) Assad's puppet," and said: "The fact is, what truly unsettles my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet."

In 2017, Gabbard revealed that she had paid a secret trip to Syria and met with Assad, a former leader sanctioned by the US who is blamed for the deaths of thousands of Syrians and was deposed last December.

While Gabbard faced doubts about her position on Assad, she also faced strong criticisms about her previous comments on pardoning whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Asked several times whether she believed Snowden was a traitor or not, she refused to give a direct answer.

"Edward Snowden broke the law. I do not agree with or support with all of the information and intelligence that he released, nor the way in which he did it," Gabbard said, and repeated the same answer several times.

Prior to the hearing, Snowden wrote on that "Tulsi Gabbard will be required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation today. I encourage her to do so."

"Tell them I harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff. In (Washington) D.C., that's what passes for the pledge of allegiance," he said.

He also said after the hearing that "courts have been ruling for ten years that NSA (National Security Agency) broke the law, guys. Move on."

Computer expert and former CIA systems administrator Snowden's leaks in 2013 first exposed the collaboration between social media companies and the US government, shedding light on government influence over these platforms.