Breaking: The New Pentagon Papers (Salon.com)

This got locked on LBN, I'm taking the liberty of reposting it here in GD.

I'm very happy this story is continuing to spread. This is good news. Now if the mainstream media will pick it up and ---

WHY THE FUCK HASN'T THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE INTERVIEWED THIS WOMAN YET?

There. Had to shout that one out.


http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon /

they have not interviewed her? Many of their interviews are behind closed doors. What I do know is that the mainstreem Cable/TV media is ignoring her. I guess the media feels and says, "why have her on when they can talk to Richard Perle, James Woolsley, William Bennett, etc..."

and they don't want the information she will give them. That would only screw up the report they have ready to go to the printers.

No problem here....let's move on.

Karen Kwiatkowski

Her columns are here
http://lewrockwell.com/

Her LA Times interview is here:
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=51202


Soldier for the Truth
Exposing Bush’s talking-points war
by Marc Cooper

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, I’ve always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, I’m 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 — the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President’s 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 president’s chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views — the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer — 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.
(more)
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=51202

So why isn't she being courted on the political talkshow circuit? What she has less interesting things to say than--oh--Ann Coulter?

Let's see...

Last year...
Time Magazine proclaimed The Year of the Whistleblowers



But you will never find Bev Harris, Karen Kwiatkowski or Katherine Gun
among the whistleblowers the GOP loves to lionize?

it's a huge huge story and could bring down Bushco.

Great article! Keep her story alive by sending it out to everybody who cares, and those who don't know they care.

Soldier for the Truth
Exposing Bush’s talking-points war

by Marc Cooper

Busting the liars:

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 — in the months leading up to the war in Iraq — she felt she was being “propagandized” by her own bosses.

With master’s 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 Department’s 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 OSP’s task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.

She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

CONTINUED...



Lt. Col Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF, ret.)

I thought that Black Box Voting was supposed to be the new Pentagon Papers...

"Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role."

read this one!

(and then read the BBV expose in Vanity Fair)

during his speech to the Council On Foreign Relations. I'd love to see her testifying before the Senate Intel Committee. :D

:kick:

and quoted Karen K. on Crossfire ..

:bounce:

I really don't get this at all.

Because tv stations are not independent with honest journalists - they are owned by large (republican) corporations who get massive tax breaks from the bushies et. al so why help bring him down?

That would be tres cool.

The parent company of NBC (and MSRNC) gives oodles of money to the little general and his henchmen:

General Electric
Contributions directly to President Bush: $49,125
Soft Money contributions to the Republican Party: $756,987

I doubt they'll report anything negative regarding their "investment", err, pResident.

The NEW PENTAGON PAPERS on page 3 of general discussion? For shame. LOOK PEOPLE!

Maybe if we just chant that name over and over, people will learn.

:kick:

to be on page 5!


War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance for an honest debate.

President Bush has now appointed a commission to look at American intelligence capabilities and will report after the election. It will "examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and related 21st century threats ... compare what the Iraq Survey Group learns with the information we had prior..." The commission, aside from being modeled on failed rubber stamp commissions of the past and consisting entirely of those selected by the executive branch, specifically excludes an examination of the role of the Office of Special Plans and other executive advisory bodies. If the president or vice president were seriously interested in "getting the truth," they might consider asking for evidence on how intelligence was politicized, misused and manipulated, and whether information from the intelligence community was distorted in order to sway Congress and public opinion in a narrowly conceived neoconservative push for war. Bush says he wants the truth, but it is clear he is no more interested in it today than he was two years ago.