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Karen Kwiatkowski

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Colonel Kwiatkowski during an interview in Honour Betrayed

Karen U. Kwiatkowski is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and in a variety of roles for the National Security Agency. Since retiring, she has become a noted critic of the U.S. government's involvement in Iraq. Kwiatkowski is primarily known for her insider essays that denounce a corrupting political influence on the course of military intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. She has said that she was the anonymous source used by Seymour Hersh and Warren Strobel in their respective exposés of pre-war intelligence. The Republican-controlled Senate Select Committee on Intelligence dismissed her allegations as baseless in its report on pre-war intelligence. [1] (pp. 282-283).

Colonel Kwiatkowski has an MA in Government from Harvard and a MS in Science Management from the University of Alaska. She has a Ph.D. in World Politics from Catholic University; her thesis was on overt and covert war in Angola, titled A Case Study of the Implementation of the Reagan Doctrine. She has also published two books about U.S. policy towards Africa: African Crisis Response Initiative: Past Present and Future (US Army Peacekeeping Institute, 2000) and Expeditionary Air Operations in Africa: Challenges and Solutions (Air University Press, 2001).[2]

Career

Raised in western North Carolina, Kwiatkowski began her military career in 1978 as a second lieutenant. She served at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, providing logistical support to missions along the Chinese and Russian coasts. She served in Spain and Italy, and was then assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA), eventually becoming a speechwriter for the agency's director. After leaving the NSA in 1998, she became an analyst on sub-Saharan Africa policy for the Pentagon. Karen was in her office in the Pentagon when it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. From May, 2002 to February, 2003, she served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia directorate (NESA).[3] While at NESA, she wrote a series of anonymous articles, Insider Notes from the Pentagon, that appeared on the website of David Hackworth.[4]

Kwiatkowski left NESA in February, 2003 and retired from the Air Force the following month. In April, 2003, she began writing a series of articles for the libertarian website LewRockwell.com. In June of that year, she published an article in the Ohio Beacon Journal, "Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Inside Pentagon" [5], which attracted additional notice. Since February, 2004, she has written a biweekly column, "Without Reservations", for the website MilitaryWeek.

Her most comprehensive writings on the subject of the corrupting influence of the Pentagon on intelligence analysis leading up to the Iraq War appeared in a series of articles in The American Conservative magazine in December, 2003 and in a March, 2004 article on Salon.com. In the latter piece, titled "The New Pentagon Papers", she wrote:

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.

Kwiatkowski exposed how a clique of officers led by retired Navy Captain Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA, and former aide to Dick Cheney when the latter was Secretary of Defense, took control of military intelligence, and how the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) grew and eventually turned into a censorship and disinformation organism controlling the NESA.[6]

Following the American Conservative and Salon articles, Kwiatkowski began to receive criticism from several conservative sources that supported President Bush's policies. Michael Rubin of the National Review argued that she had exaggerated her knowledge of the OSP's workings and that she had ties to Lyndon LaRouche[7]. Their criticisms were later backed by the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which found that Kwiatkowski could not cite a single example to support her claims [8] (pp. 282-283). Republican U.S. Senator John Kyl criticized her in a speech on the Senate floor [9]. On a Fox News program, host John Gibson and former Republican National Committee communications director Clifford May described her as an anarchist[10]. Kwiatkowski responded, saying, among other points, that she had never supported or dealt with LaRouche [11].

In addition to her writings, Kwiatkowski has appeared as a commentator in the documentaries Hijacking Catastrophe and Honor Betrayed. She has been a registered member of the U.S. Libertarian Party since 1994 and spoke at the party's national convention in 2004.[12] She is also a member of the Liberty and Power group weblog at the History News Network. Kwiatkowski currently lives with her family in the Shenandoah Valley and works part-time as a farmer.

Kwiatkowski has been widely seen as an attractive Libertarian presidential candidate [13] [14], especially given her military background and outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. In April 2006, Kwiatkowski entered the race for the Libertarian Party's 2008 vice-presidential nomination (the Libertarian Party chooses presidential and vice-presidential nominees on separate ballot, and campaigns for the two positions are often independent), with the endorsement of George Phillies, candidate for the Libertarian presidential nomination. [15] [16]

Quotations

  • "I came to share with many NESA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry. What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon" [17]
  • "Why we fight? I think we fight 'cause too many people are not standing up, saying 'I'm not doing this any more.'"
  • "If you join the United States military now, you are not defending the United States of America; you are helping certain policy-makers pursue an imperial agenda."
  • "At the end of the summer of 2002, new space had been found upstairs on the fifth floor for an "expanded Iraq desk." It would be called the Office of Special Plans. We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained, and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment. We were also told that one of the products of this office would be talking points that all desk officers would use verbatim in the preparation of their background documents."
  • "By August, only the Pollyannas at the Pentagon felt that the decision to invade Iraq, storm Baghdad, and take over the place (or give it to Ahmad Chalabi) was reversible."
  • ""It wasn't intelligence -- it was propaganda. 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." [18]
  • "Interestingly, the Downing Street Memo is actually being reported by CNN and FOX News. It is being discussed in the major papers. Congress intends to examine it. Hearing it mentioned on the half hour by CNN Headline News has not dispossessed me of the belief that a state suicide is impossible. Thus, my gentle thoughts are increasingly turning to murder. Murder of the state. In self-defense, of course!"[19]

On the Office of Special Plans:

  • "It's a propaganda office."

Books

  • African Crisis Response Initiative: Past Present and Future (US Army Peacekeeping Institute, 2000)
  • Expeditionary Air Operations in Africa: Challenges and Solutions (Air University Press, 2001)

Anonymous essays 2002-2003

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