|
Teddy Kennedy's New Expert
The hottest foreign policy authority on the left is Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked for several months in the Pentagon's Near East-South Asia office during the run-up to the war in Iraq. She was prominently cited by Senator Ted Kennedy in a March 5 address to the Council on Foreign Relations questioning the president's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Her work is getting the full promotional treatment from Salon and its new Washington Bureau chief Sidney Blumenthal, the former head conspiratorialist of the Clinton White House. Salon celebrated the opening of the new bureau by publishing a heavily hyped Kwiatkowski opus headlined "The new Pentagon papers."
Kwiatkowski claims she witnessed "neoconservative agenda bearers within [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] usurp measured and carefully considered assessment, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president."
Whether she's a reliable witness is something her new patrons may or may not have inquired into. But Kennedy staffers may want to Google her work for the antiwar libertarians at lewrockwell.com as well as the pseudonymous pieces she's acknowledged publishing on hackworth.com and Soldiers for the Truth when she was still in uniform and working at the Department of Defense. They will find no evidence of Kwiatkowski's reliability as a judge of "measured and carefully considered assessment." They will find plenty of evidence that their boss could use a new speechwriter.
Consider: In her writings for Soldiers for the Truth, which ran under the heading "Deep Throat Returns," Kwiatkowski accused the Pentagon of planning to "build greater Zion" in the Middle East and decried the "Zionist political cult that has lassoed the E-Ring"--a reference to the Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking Pentagon officials.
In a later article on lewrockwell.com, written after she'd retired, Kwiatkowski conceded that these anonymous articles barely did justice to the frustration she'd experienced at the Pentagon: "Hard core anarchists and other purists might criticize me for not just throwing a few hand grenades over the office dividers and letting the chips fall where they may. But by this time I had already submitted my retirement request, and selfishly after my twenty [years of service], I wanted to spend the money, not time in Leavenworth."
Other gems from Kwiatkowski's oeuvre:
* "We went to war in Afghanistan--planned of course before 9/11/2001 due to some Taliban non-cooperation regarding a certain trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline, and the requisite security for said pipeline."
* "We once had something like a free market Republic, but all evidence now points to a maturing fascist state flexing its muscles."
* "Bush and his neoconservative foreign policy implementers believe they are today's men of destiny. But the claim of destiny for a whole nation or a constructed state has long been the ultimate tool of the fascist, the super-nationalist, the propagandist worthy of a Lenin or a Hitler or a Pol Pot."
* "Two invasions and occupations in two years to reshape the Islamic world in preparation for World War IV is anything but conservative. Fascist imperialism touched by Sparta revived can never, even with pretty please and sugar on top, be conservatism."
Normally a collegial sort, THE SCRAPBOOK can't bring itself to congratulate Salon on the opening of its new bureau.
Carl Levin's Faulty Memory
Carl Levin gave a typical performance during Senate Armed Services Committee hearings last week. With the exception of Ted Kennedy, Levin has been the most outspoken of the many Democrats who warned ominously about Iraq's WMD threat before the war and now accuse the Bush administration of making it all up.
Levin's thesis is simple: Warmongers in the Pentagon and the White House lied about intelligence to go to war. But Levin himself has been--there's no way to say it politely--less than honest about the same intelligence. At last week's hearing, he praised the "caution and the nuance" of the CIA's then-classified July 2002 assessment of the threat from Iraq and al Qaeda. Levin read it aloud:
Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States. Fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war, Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge. Such attacks, more likely with biological than chemical agents, probably would be carried out by Iraq's special forces or intelligence operatives. Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct. In such circumstances, he might decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamic terrorists in conducting a CBW attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.
Most people might think this was good and sufficient reason to take out Saddam. Levin refers to it as "the CIA's doubts about Iraq's collaboration with al Qaeda," and he complains that the assessment was "buried in classification from the public eye on the eve of our going to war."
Was it, really? Well, no.
On October 7, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet sent an unclassified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee that committee Democrats hyped to the media. Because war was being considered, he said, "We have made unclassified material available to further the Senate's forthcoming open debate on a Joint Resolution concerning Iraq." Then, in unclassified language that alert readers will remember from three paragraphs ago, Tenet lays out the alleged doubts:
Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States. Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or CBW. Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.
As Tenet's letter makes clear, the CIA's "doubts" were not "buried in classification" before the war. They were publicly available some six months before the war. Is it possible that Levin was simply unaware the information had been declassified--making him less a political prevaricator and more a clueless congressman? Possible? Yes. Likely? No. Levin is cited by name in Tenet's declassification letter. Not to mention, Levin has repeatedly mischaracterized the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in his public statements. "The intel didn't say there was a direct relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq."
If "the intel" didn't make that claim, the Director of Intel came close. In the same Oct. 7 letter, Tenet wrote of "senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade." He wrote of "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad." The same "credible reporting" reveals that "Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." Most striking, Tenet reported that "Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action."
Levin never mentions these assessments. He's right about one thing: Someone isn't being honest about pre-war intelligence. |
