-Caveat Lector-
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To the List:
I have interviewed Karen two times on my
nationally-syndicated talk radio program, A Closer Look. To hear this
courageous woman, follow the link below to the website and check out the July
19, 2003 show and February 6, 2004. She says a lot, most people ignore
it.
We also have the archive of the interview with our
fearless leader, Kris Milligan, as well. :-)
Best,
Michael Corbin
Host
A Closer Look
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 4:45
PM
Subject: [CTRL] Karen Kwiatkowski -
Soldier For The TRUTH
-Caveat Lector- http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php
Soldier for the
Truth Exposing Bushâs talking-points war by Marc
Cooper
Busting the liars: Karen Kwiatkowski
After two
decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43,
knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when â in the
months leading up to the war in Iraq â she felt she was being âpropagandizedâ
by her own bosses.
With masterâs degrees from Harvard in government and
zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself
transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk
officer at the Defense Departmentâs office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a
policy arm of the Pentagon.
Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was
spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of
Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off,
expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans.
The OSPâs task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the
Iraq crisis.
She would soon conclude that the OSP â a pet project of
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld â was more akin
to a nerve center for what she now calls a âneoconservative coup, a hijacking
of the Pentagon.â
Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found
herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her
superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent,
overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with
Iraq.
Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty,
took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon
dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth,
Americaâs most decorated veteran.
As war inevitably approached, and as
she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the only
way she could viably resist what she now terms the âexpansionist, imperialistâ
policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and
taking up a public fight against them.
She left the military last
March, the same week that troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her
real name on her Web reports and began
accepting speaking invitations. âIâm now a soldier for the truth,â she said in
a speech last week at Cal Poly Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with
her.
L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship
between NESA and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the group set up
by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney? Was the OSP, in
reality, an intelligence operation to act as counter to the
CIA?
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq
desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region. It is under Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the
Iraq desk was there. We shared the same space, and we were all part of the
same general group. At that time it was expanding. Contractors and employees
were coming though it wasnât clear what they were doing.
In August of
2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new spaces and moved into them. It was told
to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office
of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing
intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the
Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.
But developing policy is
not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And
actually, thatâs more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and
they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout
government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon â to try and
make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United
States.
You retired when the war broke out and have
been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports
anonymously while still in uniform and while still on active service. Why did
you take that rather unusual step?
Due to my frustration over what
I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Lutiâs organization, what I
was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being
pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy â an invasion of a
sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned
about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.
So I
started writing what I considered to be funny, short essays for my own sanity.
Eventually, I e-mailed them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the
Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them under the title
âInsider Notes From the Pentagon.â I wrote 28 of those columns from August
2002 until I retired.
There you were, a career
military officer, a Pentagon analyst, a conservative who had given two decades
to this work. What provoked you to become first a covert and later a public
dissident?
Like most people, Iâve always thought there should be
honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, Iâm sure I saw some
things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree
that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.
This was creatively
produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network
of policymakers â the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice Presidentâs
Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not
normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National
Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter
Libby, the vice presidentâs chief of staff; a network of think tanks who
advocated neoconservative views â the American Enterprise Institute, the
Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles
Krauthammer â was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the
Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead
pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across
media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative
compadres.
How did you experience this in your
day-to-day work?
There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted
storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam
Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by
the time I joined them, in May of 2002.
You heard this
in staff meetings?
The discussions were ones of this sort of
inevitability. The concerns were only that some policymakers still had to get
onboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong â but that
we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example.
There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things
about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush
to go back to the U.N. and forced a four-month delay in their invasion
plans.
General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the combatant
commander of Central Command, Tommy Franksâ predecessor â a very
well-qualified guy who knows the Middle East inside out, knows the military
inside out, a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as President Bushâs
Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw. Before he was removed by
Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very
anti-anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They
were the spin enforcers.
How did this atmosphere
affect your work? To be direct, were you told by your superiors what you could
say and not say? What could and could not be discussed? Or were opinions they
didnât like just ignored?
I can give you one clear example where we
were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North
Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite
something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper
on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect
of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I
quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and
change it. Theyâd make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could
present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its
neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They
edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said,
âJust send me the file.â And I donât know what the report ended up looking
like, because I imagine more changes were made.
On Libya, really a
small player, the facts did not fit their paradigm that we have all these
enemies.
One person youâve written about is Abe
Shulsky. You describe him as a personable, affable fellow but one who played a
key role in the official spin that led to war.
Abe was the director
of the Office of Special Plans. He was in our shared offices when I joined, in
May 2002. He comes from an academic background; heâs definitely a
neoconservative. He is a student of Leo Strauss from the University of Chicago
â so he has that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final proving
authority on all the talking points that were generated from the Office of
Special Plans and that were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to
staff officers. And it appears to me they were also distributed to the Vice
Presidentâs Office and to the presidential speechwriters. Much of the
phraseology that was in our talking points consists of the same things I heard
the president say.
So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the
disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the propaganda flow. From where you
sat, did you see him manipulate the information?
We had a whole
staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you
one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill
Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that
we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we
prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special
Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on
these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.
It was very clear to me
that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved
intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is
that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported
on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York
Times.
Can you be specific?
One item
that was dropped was in November [2002]. It was the issue of the meeting in
Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Husseinâs
intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September
through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just
gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from
that, that the CIA said it didnât happen.
Letâs
clarify this. Talking points are generally used to deal with media. But you
were a desk officer, not a politician who had to go and deal with the press.
So are you saying the Office of Special Plans provided you a schematic, an
outline of the way major points should be addressed in any report or analysis
that you developed regarding Iraq, WMD or terrorism?
Thatâs right.
And these did not follow the intent, the content or the accuracy of
intelligence . . .
They were political . .
.
They were political, politically manipulated. They did have
obviously bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize.
So we inside the Pentagon, staff officers and senior administration officials
who might not work Iraq directly, were being propagandized by this same Office
of Special Plans.
In the 10 months you worked in that
office in the run-up to the war, was there ever any open debate? The public,
at least, was being told at the time that there was a serious assessment going
on regarding the level of threat from Iraq, the presence or absence of WMD, et
cetera. Was this debated inside your office at the Pentagon?
No.
Those things were not debated. To them, Saddam Hussein needed to
go.
You believe that decision was made by the time you
got there, almost a year before the war?
That decision was made by
the time I got there. So there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations
Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and so on. They spent their
energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline,
which is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney
tell the American people in the fall of 2002.
The very phrases they
used are coming back to haunt them because they are blatantly false and not
based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice Presidentâs Office were
critical in this propaganda effort â to convince Americans that there was some
just requirement for pre-emptive war.
What do you
believe the real reasons were for the war?
The neoconservatives
needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a
government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq.
There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons,
of course, were presented to the American people or to
Congress.
So you donât think there was a genuine
interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq?
Itâs not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of
both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to
mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from
the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didnât
know.
The truth is, we know [Saddam] didnât have these things. Almost a
billion dollars has been spent â a billion dollars! â by David Kayâs group to
search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didnât find anything,
they didnât expect to find anything.
So if, as you
argue, they knew there werenât any of these WMD, then what exactly drove the
neoconservatives to war?
The neoconservatives pride themselves on
having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were
three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a
friendly government and occupy Iraq.
One of those reasons is that
sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many
companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in
anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been
bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we
would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any
post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam
would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.
The
second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had
been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the
restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people
of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond
Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the
days of Carter â to secure the energy lines of communication in the region.
Bases in Iraq, then, were very important â that is, if you hold that is
Americaâs role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us
in.
The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made
in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the
way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 â selling his oil for euros. The oil
sales permitted in that program arenât very much. But when the sanctions would
be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on
the planet would have been moving to the euro.
The U.S. dollar is in a
sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still
popular, but itâs not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid
commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial,
shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive
orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraqâs oil back to
the dollar.
At the time you left the military, a year
ago, just how great was the influence of this neoconservative faction on
Pentagon policy?
When it comes to Middle East policy, they were in
complete control, at least in the Pentagon. There was some debate at the State
Department.
Indeed, when you were still in uniform and
writing a Web column anonymously, you expressed your bitter disappointment
when Secretary of State Powell â in your words â eventually
âcapitulated.â
He did. When he made his now-famous power-point
slide presentation at the U.N., he totally capitulated. It meant he was
totally onboard. Whether he believed it or not.
You
gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say
you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel
like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?
Know what
it feels like? It feels like duty. Thatâs what it feels like. Iâve thought
about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that â
at least under this administration â turned out to be something I wasnât
working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution.
We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the
Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress
was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the
Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need
is not what this country stands for.
What I feel now is that Iâm not
retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and
correct the problem.
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
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CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substanceânot soap-boxingâplease! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'âwith its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright fraudsâis used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
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always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
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Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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