Thursday, December 08, 2005

Remember Karen Kwiatkowski?

She was the Lieutenant Colonel who as 'volunteered' to work at the NESA during the run-up to the war. She published her frustrations with the politicization of the intelligence-gathering process first anonymously, then publicly on Salon.com in March of 2004.

Here's two quotes from that article:

" I asked John [Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst] who was feeding the president all the bull about Saddam and the threat he posed us in terms of WMD delivery and his links to terrorists, as none of this was in secret intelligence I had seen in the past years. John insisted that it wasn't an exaggeration, but when pressed to say which actual intelligence reports made these claims, he would only say, "Karen, we have sources that you don't have access to." It was widely felt by those of us in the office not in the neoconservatives' inner circle that these "sources" related to the chummy relationship that Ahmad Chalabi had with both the Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president."

"I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
"

The Office of Special Plans is the unit created by Donald Rumsfeld and led by Douglas Feith, created to deal with intelligence on Iraq. OSP was described by Kwiatkowski as "a censorship and disinformation organism controlling the NESA," and by former CIA officer Larry Johnson as "dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary."

In light of the current imbrolgio regarding Democratic legislators who now oppose the war, and are calling for a timetable, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit the article.


Yeharr
Link

1 Comments:

Blogger Cranky Yankee said...

Another evil of the shrubbist she exposed is the "character assination." They went after her full bore.

Kwiatkowski's right-wing critics could not challenge her facts, not a single one, so they immediately reached for the tar brush. The Wall Street Journal smeared her as "something of a right-wing crank." Max Boot, a conservative columnist for the Los Angeles Times, trashed her as "flaky." Then Clifford May, a hit man for the Republican National Committee, was given free reign by John Gibson, host of Fox News' "The Big Show," to drag the 20-year Air Force veteran through the mud after Fox turned off her microphone -- one more bold display of the network's commitment to fairness and balance. Once she was silenced, Gibson and May smeared Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski as an "anarchist" with "radical associations" to political weirdoes like Lyndon LaRouche.
The truth -- never an interest of these right-wing hatchet men -- is that the former Air Force intelligence officer comes from a politically conservative family and subscribes to a libertarian philosophy. She once gave an interview to a LaRouche publication -- the full extent of her "association" with this political fringe. By the RNC man's strained logic, the fact that she also spoke to Fox News should make her a Rupert Murdoch acolyte.


They really are a repugnant bunch.

2:34 PM, December 09, 2005  

Post a Comment

<< Home