Busting the liars:
Karen Kwiatkowski
(Photo by Jack Gould)
Posted on 04/18/2004 7:01:13 PM PDT by Spotsy
Inside the neo-con Pentagon
Officer reveals how Bush appointees suppressed facts and twisted truth to drive America to war with Iraq
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In July of last year, after just over 20 years of service, I retired as a lieutenant-colonel in the U.S. Air Force.
My career started in 1978 with the smooth seduction of a full four-year ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10 months of duty in a strange new country, observing up close and personal a process of decision-making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution.
~snip~
The education I would receive there was intense, fascinating and frightening.
While the people were very much alive, I saw a dead philosophy — Cold War anti-communism and neo-imperialism — walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the clothing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war between good and evil.
The evil was recognized by the leadership to be resident mainly in the Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics and radicals. But there were other enemies within: anyone who dared voice any skepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of State Colin Powell.
From May, 2002, until February, 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) and watched the latter stages of the neo-conservative capture of the policy/intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1082239810772&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
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."
It's probably just something else they're crediting the Clinton Administration for. Maybe the left thinks Wesley Clark is who really won the Cold War when he bombed Yugoslavia from 30,000 feet :-)
What was her promotion record during the Clinton Administration ?
Absolutely not.
Plus we've heard something else about her, I just cannot remember what.
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>It's probably just something else they're crediting the Clinton Administration for.
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W.W.IV is a neocon coined term. They call the cold war W.W.III and the war on terror W.W.IV.
Gee .. any comments from Powell about this?
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