Here it is -- the truth as to why we invaded Iraq -- amazing interview

[maggrwaggr]

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php

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

Busting the liars:
Karen Kwiatkowski
(Photo by Jack Gould)

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.”

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

(more at link)




This is an amazing interview, succinct and to the point as to the reasons why the neocons invaded Iraq.

It is 100% damning. It is the smoking gun. I don't understand why there's not a congressional inquiry going on RIGHT NOW with this woman testifying on live television.

She busts it wide open.

[Occulus]

1. My letter to Levin

regarding this:

Dear Senator Levin:

laweekly.com has published, in its Feb. 20-26 issue, an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a former political/military desk officer at the Defense Department's NESA office.

The interview can be found at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php and I would recommend you read it if you have the time and haven't already done so.

Senator, I am writing you today not only to inform you of this interview, but also to express my alarm at what this woman is saying. If she's telling even half the truth, there needs to be a Congressional investigation into the entire Iraq situation and the run-up to the invasion. Figuratively speaking, the Office of Special Plans in particular should be publicly dissected with surgical steel. What this woman has to say is deeply alarming:

"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. They’d 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, “Just send me the file.” And I don’t 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."

This is along the lines of an open accusation. While I have long presumed that the people are not told certain things, I had been hoping that outright lying, manipulation of official intelligence to promote a political agenda, and collusion between multiple agencies to do the same were only figments of my imagination. I am saddened and troubled to find this to be the case.

The following quote only bolsters this argument:

"LA Weekly: Let’s 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?

Kwiatkowski: That’s right. And these did not follow the intent, the content or the accuracy of intelligence . . .



LA Weekly: They were political . . .

Kwiatkowski: 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."

Thiese statements should not go unanswered. Please, look into this. I cannot have faith into my government if I know that it is cherry-picking intelligence to support a political agenda.

Thank you for your time.

me

-----

What ya think?

[maggrwaggr]

3. cool! Let's keep sending it out

See if we can figure out how to send it to 60 minutes, Washington Post, whoever we can think of

[pinto]

2. thanks for the post, what a great interview, she is one articulate woman.

[bacchant]

4. This is what I pray for everyday

That more brave and honest people "in the know" come forward to help save our country. This is the only way we will ever find out what really happened on 9/11.

[loudnclear]

5. If it's going to be discussed, IT'S UP TO US!!!

The mainstream media outlets (print and broadcast) are never going to give this the airing it deserves. We truly have to take Dean's advice and exercise the power that we have to spread the truth any way we can...underground publications, call-in to talk shows, e-mails to TV forums, flyers in shopping malls and churches, letters and flyers to campus groups and local radio stations, and by all means use those local community newspapers to get out the truth. It may take another four years or longer but the survival of our nation is at stake. It's not Islamic fundamentalists or other Muslims that endanger our way of life...it is those currently in charge and in control...both foreign and domestic.

[phiddle]

6. Great Interview

Let's get her on 60 minutes!

[pinto]

7. kick

[Poiuyt]

8. I love hearing from insiders

We at DU can spout of til the end of time, but it won't have near the impact of someone like Paul O'neil or Kwiatkowski.

[diamond14]

9. additional info....a short TWO minute video and photo...

bush* war comes out of many years of work from his father, and other criminals in the bush* cabal...it will be extremely hard to stop it, but we should and must put in our hard work to SAVE AMERICA....


watch flash video here...very short two minute history of saddam hussein and the USA, highlightling the CIA, which was headed by pappy bush* and donald rumsfeld, who served under reagun/bush...it's an eye-opener...

http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html


relentlessly pursuing BLOOD FOR OIL....

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah
being chauffeured by the shrub....

photo taken at the exotic expensive Egyptian resort
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt
June 03, 2003....shortly after the aircraft stunt on May 01, 2003

[G_j]

10. Mother Jones article:

www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
January/February 2004 Issue of Mother Jones

It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full.
But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
...more...

[Stephanie]

20. This is a really excellent article - Highly recommended

I think this is written by the same guy who wrote the piece about PNAC and the neocons, with the quote "it's Kissinger's plan." Kissinger came up with it but everyone dismissed it in his day as ridiculous. Now the great geniuses of the George Jr. administration decided to plow ahead with it, casting all reason aside.

[maggrwaggr]

11. here's a start for e-mailing courtesy od dArKeR

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[e-mail] -To Dr. Nile Gardiner - To Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.

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[Killarney]

12. Thank you!

I just sent a mass email stating that I believe this woman needs to be heard and media please pay att!

[robertpaulsen]

26. Thanks maggrwaggr

I am bookmarking this and I will hit all these sites. Time to bring the monkey down!

[9215]

13. Another solid punch to the BFEE solar plexus.

We know there are many more brave patriots out there who have experienced similar things like this woman. The pattern of deception is unquestionable, this be treason.

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.

This is corroborated elsewhere. Cheney's Halliburton had skirted the sanctions against Iraq and he had fought lifting them as a way to "beat the competition". There was a similar thing going on before the first Gulf War with Bectel, Kissinger and Associates and Bushie boys: gaming the sanctions for profit.

[maggrwaggr]

14. Yes. In Colin Bowel's own words:

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm

"And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors"

[Hamlette]

15. sanctions were about to be lifted?

where is the evidence for that? I'm not doubting her, I just don't remember any talk about that.

Does anyone else know?

[nolabels]

19. This is why they had operation Desert Fox

The UN was getting close to wrapping up it's work and determination that Iraq was in compliance with the UN mandate, so they set up Desert Fox to make reasons why the UN inspectors had to be pulled out of Iraq before they could complete their work. In effect keeping the embargo on Iraq
Scott Ritter has stated things to that going that way many times

Albright (should have been DIM) and the scorched earth policy

http://www.fair.org/extra/0003/crossette-iraq.html
March/April 2000
New York Times on Iraq Sanctions

A case of journalistic malpractice

By Seth Ackerman
(snip)
Selective sourcing

What makes the Times' failure to report challenges to the State Department's spin all the more inexcusable is Sponeck's outspoken predecessor, Denis Halliday. Since his resignation from the U.N.'s humanitarian program in September 1998, Halliday has traveled around the United States giving speeches, writing articles, and issuing press releases about the sanctions. He has declared that "the some 150 U.N. observers throughout Iraq" who worked under him "have not reported any maldistribution of food and related items (cooking oil, soaps, etc.) during the entirety of the oil-for-food program," and that "for anyone to imply that the men and women of the Baghdad government, Ministry of Health in particular, deliberately withhold basic medicines from children in great need, is monstrous and says more about the unhealthy mind of the accusers than anything else." (Press release, 9/20/99)

Although Halliday has tried, with some limited success, to garner media attention for his views on the embargo, he has been completely ignored by Crossette and the New York Times. It is useful to compare Crossette's utter lack of interest in Halliday, who quit the U.N.'s humanitarian program in protest, to her fleeting fascination with Scott Ritter following his August 1998 protest resignation from the U.N.'s disarmament program in Iraq. Ritter, a leading U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, left the program to protest what he called a lack of seriousness about disarming Iraq.

In the four months between his resignation in August 1998 and the U.S. bombing of Iraq in December, Ritter-- with his dramatic revelations about tracking down Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction—became a favorite source for Crossette, appearing in 11 of her articles. By contrast, although Halliday appeared in a few Crossette articles before he left his post, she has completely ignored him since he began speaking out against sanctions.

But even Ritter has not been immune from Crossette's fondness for hawkish sources. Following Operation Desert Fox, Ritter gradually changed his tone, becoming a spirited advocate of lifting of the embargo, and declaring that "from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has been disarmed. Iraq today possesses no meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability." Crossette promptly dropped Ritter as a source, and hasn't mentioned him since the bombing-- though she continues to cover the U.N. debate over Iraqi disarmament for the New York Times
(snip)

[9215]

21. Good stuff, thanks

[welshTerrier2]

16. Cheney's Days are Numbered

one way or another, the Veep is going down ...

the plan will be to use him to absorb all the "stains" (like this article), and then toss him off the ticket ... someone's got to take the hit for all the Iraq lies and daddy's not about to let junior go down without a fight ...

it's got to happen soon though ... i'm sure they don't want to put a new horse in the race but the risks of keeping Cheney are getting too high ... 50% approval was a logical cut-off ... with bush below that, and many months to go before election day, it's time to cut his losses ... Cheney's days are numbered ...

thanks for posting this ... no surprises here ... still nice to confirm what we knew ...

[maggrwaggr]

17. A kick for the night crowd. Write in, folks!

Write to all the media outlets that you have time for.

If this gets out there, Bush is toast.

[maggrwaggr]

18. shameless late-night kick before bed

so those in the morning can write their congresspeople.

It's easy. Go here:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/

[G_j]

22. shameless mid afternoon..kick

:kick:

edit, never mind, I lost the link I was going to post

but this thread is highly recommended reading!

[proud patriot]

23. Wooooo Hooooo Thank You Karen a true Patriot

:loveya:

[G_j]

24. we have been blessed by

women 'patriots' recently

Code Pink or Katherine Gunn just for example and you too PP!
and lets never forget Cynthia McKinney

[maggrwaggr]

25. monday morning kick

start calling those congresspeople and media outlets, folks.

If this hits the major press, Bush is toast.