Who Is Karen Kwiatkowski ? Read Her Take on the Senate Intelligence Report

[G_j]

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.

(*on edit: it is worth reading the article at the link because it is full of further links)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski82.html

Bagged and Tagged!

by Karen Kwiatkowski

The Senate has gingerly examined, apparently for the first time, what the CIA told them two years ago. Before this, they didn’t have time to question, to peruse, to use common sense, perhaps even to read what the CIA reports said and not just follow blindly the commands of the majority whip and our wild-eyed President.

Its preliminary report indicates that much of the information was bad, and blames the CIA. The CIA was a victim of groupthink; it "interpret ambiguous elements . . . as conclusive evidence…"; its corporate culture is broken. Ouch!

The CIA wasn’t pressured by anyone, either. It just produced boatloads of bulls%*t all on its own. Wrong, unreasonable, made no sense, by the boatload.

Normal people (this apparently excludes most members of Congress) would wonder why you would believe anything from the CIA or DIA on Iraq anyway, given we had had no real in-country assets or visibility for years. Not even a military attaché, or a tiny hovel of a CIA station in Baghdad or Basra. Last CIA agent we had in Ba-ath country was an illegal member of the Hans Blix team.

..more..

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



The Lie Factory

Late last year, a special Mother Jones investigation detailed how, 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

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.

<snip>



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Karen talks about the OSP

http://www.militaryweek.com/kk011904.shtml

[opihimoimoi]

1. This needs a major kick

:kick:

[DrBB]

2. Kwiatkowski always worth a read

Thanks for posting this.

[G_j]

3. kick

[IkeWarnedUs]

4. The rest of the story is in the second part of the report

And the Republican leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee (Senator Roberts) says the second part of their report won't be ready until after the November elections.

At their press conferences Friday Senators Rockefeller, Wyden and Feinstein all said the report can easily be finished now and must be finished and released ASAP.

They also said this can and will happen if the American people demand it.

Call Congress toll free - 800-839-5276


Link to my thread with press conference transcript:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1970315

[G_j]

5. very important

I too have been making phone calls on this.

[peace4all]

6. Karen rocks!

telling the truth that needs to be known.

[peace4all]

7. Its hard to believe this article

hasn't had more attention. whats up with that?

[G_j]

8. kick

[walldude]

9. Kicked again

The chain of command map is awesome...