The new Pentagon papers
A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department
extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the
country to war.

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By Karen Kwiatkowski

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature...sp/index3.html



March 10, 2004 | In July of last year, after just over 20 years of
service, I retired as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force. I had
served as a communications officer in the field and in acquisition
programs, as a speechwriter for the National Security Agency director,
and on the Headquarters Air Force and the office of the secretary of
defense staffs covering African affairs. I had completed Air Command and
Staff College and Navy War College seminar programs, two master's
degrees, and everything but my Ph.D. dissertation in world politics at
Catholic University. I regarded my military vocation as interesting,
rewarding and apolitical. My career started in 1978 with the smooth
seduction of a full four-year ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10 months
of duty in a strange new country, observing up close and personal a
process of decision making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution we
had all sworn to uphold. Ben Franklin's comment that the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia had delivered "a republic, madam, if
you can keep it" would come to have special meaning.

In the spring of 2002, I was a cynical but willing staff officer, almost
two years into my three-year tour at the office of the secretary of
defense, undersecretary for policy, sub-Saharan Africa. In April, a call
for volunteers went out for the Near East South Asia directorate (NESA).
None materialized. By May, the call transmogrified into a posthaste
demand for any staff officer, and I was "volunteered" to enter what
would be a well-appointed den of iniquity.

The education I would receive there was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie
-- intense, fascinating and frightening. While the people were very much
alive, I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold War anti-communism and
neo-imperialism -- walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the
clothing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war
between good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be
resident mainly in the Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics
and radicals. But there were other enemies within, anyone who dared
voice any skepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of
State Colin Powell and Gen. Anthony Zinni.

From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation
of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages
of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the
run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle
East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East
South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us
could do about it.

I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive
appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the
traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S.
intelligence agencies.

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.

While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence
production and American foreign policy matched closely with the
well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican
Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike,
felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been
openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line
was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take
Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on
false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really
understand. That is why I have gone public with my account.

To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of
defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed
me into the fold. I knew little about him. Because he was a recently
retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common
assumption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later
find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade
earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker
of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years and had completed
his Ph.D. at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. While his Navy
career had not granted him flag rank, he had it now and was not shy
about comparing his place in the pecking order with various three- and
four-star generals and admirals in and out of the Pentagon. Name
dropping included references to getting this or that document over to
Scooter, or responding to one of Scooter's requests right away. Scooter,
I would find out later, was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice
president's chief of staff.

Co-workers who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bu****e
shared conversations and stories indicating that something deliberate
and manipulative was happening to NESA. Key professional personnel,
longtime civilian professionals holding the important billets in NESA,
were replaced early on during the transition. Longtime officer director
Joe McMillan was reassigned to the National Defense University. The
director's job in the time of transition was to help bring the newly
appointed deputy assistant secretary up to speed, ensure office
continuity, act as a resource relating to regional histories and
policies, and help identify the best ways to maintain course or to
implement change. Removing such a critical continuity factor was not
only unusual but also seemed like willful handicapping. It was the first
signal of radical change.

At the time, I didn't realize that the expertise on Middle East policy
was not only being removed, but was also being exchanged for that from
various agenda-bearing think tanks, including the Middle East Media
Research Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and
the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Interestingly, the
office director billet stayed vacant the whole time I was there. That
vacancy and the long-term absence of real regional understanding to
inform defense policymakers in the Pentagon explains a great deal about
the neoconservative approach on the Middle East and the disastrous
mistakes made in Washington and in Iraq in the past two years.

I soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by debate
or experience with the early Bush administration replacement of the
civilian head of the Israel, Lebanon and Syria desk office with a young
political appointee from the Washington Institute, David Schenker. Word
was that the former experienced civilian desk officer tended to be
evenhanded toward the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel,
but there were complaints and he was gone. I met David and chatted with
him frequently. He was a smart, serious, hardworking guy, and the proud
author of a book on the chances for Palestinian democracy. Country desk
officers were rarely political appointees. In my years at the Pentagon,
this was the only "political" I knew doing that type of high-stress and
low-recognition duty. So eager was the office to have Schenker at the
Israel desk, he served for many months as a defense contractor of sorts
and only received his "Schedule C" political appointee status months
after I arrived.

I learned that there was indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My first
day in the office, a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily advised
me that if I wanted to be successful here, I'd better remember not to
say anything positive about the Palestinians. This belied official U.S.
policy of serving as an honest broker for resolution of Israeli and
Palestinian security concerns. At that time, there was a great deal of
talk about Bush's possible support for a Palestinian state. That the
Pentagon could have implemented and, worse, was implementing its own
foreign policy had not yet occurred to me.

Throughout the summer, the NESA spaces in one long office on the fourth
floor, between the 7th and 8th corridors of D Ring, became more and more
crowded. With war talk and planning about Iraq, all kinds of new people
were brought in. A politically savvy civilian-clothes-wearing lieutenant
colonel named Bill Bruner served as the Iraq desk officer, and he had
apparently joined NESA about the time Bill Luti did. I discovered that
Bruner, like Luti, had served as a military aide to Speaker Gingrich.
Gingrich himself was now conveniently an active member of Bush's Defense
Policy Board, which had space immediately below ours on the third floor.

I asked why Bruner wore civilian attire, and was told by others, "He's
Chalabi's handler." Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the president
of the Iraqi National Congress, who was the favored exile of the
neoconservatives and the source of much of their "intelligence." Bruner
himself said he had to attend a lot of meetings downtown in hotels and
that explained his suits. Soon, in July, he was joined by another Air
Force pilot, a colonel with no discernible political connections, Kevin
Jones. I thought of it as a military-civilian partnership, although both
were commissioned officers.

Among the other people arriving over the summer of 2002 was Michael
Makovsky, a recent MIT graduate who had written his dissertation on
Winston Churchill and was going to work on "Iraqi oil issues." He was
David Makovsky's younger brother. David was at the time a senior fellow
at the Washington Institute and had formerly been an editor of the
Jerusalem Post, a pro-Likud newspaper. Mike was quiet and seemed a bit
uncomfortable sharing space with us. He soon disappeared into some other
part of the operation and I rarely saw him after that.

In late summer, new space was found upstairs on the fifth floor, and the
"expanded Iraq desk," now dubbed the "Office of Special Plans," began
moving there. And OSP kept expanding.

Another person I observed to appear suddenly was Michael Rubin, another
Washington Institute fellow working on Iraq policy. He and Chris Straub,
a retired Army officer who had been a Republican staffer for the Senate
Intelligence Committee, were eventually assigned to OSP.

John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was assigned to
handle Iraq intelligence for Luti. Trigilio had been on a one-year
career-enhancement tour with the office of the secretary of defense that
was to end in August 2002. DIA had offered him routine intelligence
positions upon his return from his OSD sabbatical, but none was as
interesting as working in August 2002 for Luti. John asked Luti for help
in gaining an extension for another year, effectively removing him from
the DIA bureaucracy and its professional constraints.

Trigilio and I had hallway debates, as friends. The one I remember most
clearly was shortly after President Bush gave his famous "mushroom
cloud" speech in Cincinnati in October 2002, asserting that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction as well as ties to "international
terrorists," and was working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons with
"nuclear holy warriors." I asked John 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.

The newly named director of the OSP, Abram Shulsky, was one of the most
senior people sharing our space that summer. Abe, a kindly and gentle
man, who would say hello to me in the hallways, seemed to be someone I,
as a political science grad student, would have loved to sit with over
coffee and discuss the world's problems. I had a clear sense that Abe
ranked high in the organization, although ostensibly he was under Luti.
Luti was known at times to treat his staff, even senior staff, with
disrespect, contempt and derision. He also didn't take kindly to staff
officers who had an opinion or viewpoint that was off the
neoconservative reservation. But with Shulsky, who didn't speak much at
the staff meetings, he was always respectful and deferential. It seemed
like Shulsky's real boss was somebody like Douglas Feith or higher.

Doug Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, was a case study in
how not to run a large organization. In late 2001, he held the first
all-hands policy meeting at which he discussed for over 15 minutes how
many bullets and sub-bullets should be in papers for Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. A year later, in August of 2002, he held another all-hands
meeting in the auditorium where he embarrassed everyone with an
emotional performance about what it was like to serve Rumsfeld. He
blithely informed us that for months he didn't realize Rumsfeld had a
daily stand-up meeting with his four undersecretaries. He shared with us
the fact that, after he started to attend these meetings, he knew better
what Rumsfeld wanted of him. Most military staffers and professional
civilians hearing this were incredulous, as was I, to hear of such
organizational ignorance lasting so long and shared so openly. Feith's
inattention to most policy detail, except that relating to Israel and
Iraq, earned him a reputation most foul throughout Policy, with rampant
stories of routine signatures that took months to achieve and lost
documents. His poor reputation as a manager was not helped by his
arrogance. One thing I kept hearing from those defending Feith was that
he was "just brilliant." It was curiously like the brainwashed refrain
in "The Manchurian Candidate" about the programmed sleeper agent Raymond
Shaw, as the "kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I've
ever known."

I spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative worldview and
trying to grasp what was happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what
could explain this rush to war and disregard for real intelligence.
Neoconservatives are fairly easy to study, mainly because they are few
in number, and they show up at all the same parties. Examining them as
individuals, it became clear that almost all have worked together, in
and out of government, on national security issues for several decades.
The Project for the New American Century and its now famous 1998
manifesto to President Clinton on Iraq is a recent example.
***
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm --- Worth a read
***
But this statement was preceded by one written for Benyamin Netanyahu's
Likud Party campaign in Israel in 1996 by neoconservatives Richard
Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith titled "A Clean Break: Strategy
for Securing the Realm."

David Wurmser is the least known of that trio and an interesting example
of the tangled neoconservative web. In 2001, the research fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute was assigned to the Pentagon, then moved
to the Department of State to work as deputy for the hard-line
conservative undersecretary John Bolton, then to the National Security
Council, and now is lodged in the office of the vice president. His
wife, the prolific Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of the Middle East
Media Research Institute, is also a neoconservative team player.

Before the Iraq invasion, many of these same players labored together
for literally decades to push a defense strategy that favored military
intervention and confrontation with enemies, secret and unconstitutional
if need be. Some former officials, such as Richard Perle (an assistant
secretary of defense under Reagan) and James Woolsey (CIA director under
Clinton), were granted a new lease on life, a renewed gravitas, with
positions on President Bush's Defense Policy Board. Others, like Elliott
Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, had apparently overcome previous negative
associations from an Iran-Contra conviction for lying to the Congress
and for utterly miscalculating the strength of the Soviet Union in a
politically driven report to the CIA.

Neoconservatives march as one phalanx in parallel opposition to those
they hate. In the early winter of 2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain
and I were discussing the service being rendered by Colin Powell at the
time, and we were told by the neoconservative political appointee David
Schenker that "the best service Powell could offer would be to quit
right now." I was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti called
Marine Gen. and former Chief of Central Command Anthony Zinni a
"traitor," because Zinni had publicly expressed reservations about the
rush to war.

After August 2002, the Office of Special Plans established its own
rhythm and cadence separate from the non-politically minded
professionals covering the rest of the region. While often accused of
creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent products of this office:
war planning guidance for Rumsfeld, presumably impacting Central
Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD and terrorism. These internal
talking points seemed to be a mélange crafted from obvious past
observation and intelligence bits and pieces of dubious origin. They
were propagandistic in style, and all desk officers were ordered to use
them verbatim in the preparation of any material prepared for higher-ups
and people outside the Pentagon. The talking points included statements
about Saddam Hussein's proclivity for using chemical weapons against his
own citizens and neighbors, his existing relations with terrorists based
on a member of al-Qaida reportedly receiving medical care in Baghdad,
his widely publicized aid to the Palestinians, and general indications
of an aggressive viability in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program
and his ongoing efforts to use them against his neighbors or give them
to al-Qaida style groups. The talking points said he was threatening his
neighbors and was a serious threat to the U.S., too.

I suspected, from reading Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative
columnist for the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard, and hearing
a Cheney speech or two, that these talking points left the building on
occasion. Both OSP functions duplicated other parts of the Pentagon. The
facts we should have used to base our papers on were already being
produced by the intelligence agencies, and the war planning was already
done by the combatant command staff with some help from the Joint Staff.
Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was
used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo
war planning.

As a result of my duties as the North Africa desk officer, I became
acquainted with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) support staff for
NESA. Every policy regional director was served by a senior executive
intelligence professional from DIA, along with a professional
intelligence staff. This staff channeled DIA products, accepted tasks
for DIA, and in the past had been seen as a valued member of the
regional teams. However, as the war approached, this type of
relationship with the Defense Intelligence Agency crumbled.

Even the most casual observer could note the tension and even animosity
between "Wild Bill" Luti (as we came to refer to our boss) and Bruce
Hardcastle, our defense intelligence officer (DIO). Certainly, there
were stylistic and personality differences. Hardcastle, like most senior
intelligence officers I knew, was serious, reserved, deliberate, and
went to great lengths to achieve precision and accuracy in his speech
and writing. Luti was the kind of guy who, in staff meetings and in
conversations, would jump from grand theory to administrative minutiae
with nary a blink or a fleeting shadow of self-awareness.

I discovered that Luti and possibly others within OSP were dissatisfied
with Hardcastle's briefings, in particular with the aspects relating to
WMD and terrorism. I was not clear exactly what those concerns were, but
I came to understand that the DIA briefing did not match what OSP was
claiming about Iraq's WMD capabilities and terrorist activities. I
learned that shortly before I arrived there had been an incident in NESA
where Hardcastle's presence and briefing at a bilateral meeting had been
nixed abruptly by Luti. The story circulating among the desk officers
was "a last-minute cancellation" of the DIO presentation. Hardcastle's
intelligence briefing was replaced with one prepared by another Policy
office that worked nonproliferation issues. While this alternative
briefing relied on intelligence produced by DIO and elsewhere, it was
not a product of the DIA or CIA community, but instead was an OSD Policy
"branded" product -- and so were its conclusions. The message sent by
Policy appointees and well understood by staff officers and the defense
intelligence community was that senior appointed civilians were willing
to exclude or marginalize intelligence products that did not fit the agenda.

Staff officers would always request OSP's most current Iraq, WMD and
terrorism talking points. On occasion, these weren't available in an
approved form and awaited Shulsky's approval. The talking points were a
series of bulleted statements, written persuasively and in a convincing
way, and superficially they seemed reasonable and rational. Saddam
Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his people, and was continuing
in that mode, becoming an imminently dangerous threat to his neighbors
and to us -- except that none of his neighbors or Israel felt this was
the case. Saddam Hussein had harbored al-Qaida operatives and offered
and probably provided them with training facilities -- without
mentioning that the suspected facilities were in the
U.S./Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and
had WMD of the type that could be used by him, in conjunction with
al-Qaida and other terrorists, to attack and damage American interests,
Americans and America -- except the intelligence didn't really say that.
Saddam Hussein had not been seriously weakened by war and sanctions and
weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and in fact was plotting to hurt
America and support anti-American activities, in part through his
carrying on with terrorists -- although here the intelligence said the
opposite. His support for the Palestinians and Arafat proved his
terrorist connections, and basically, the time to act was now. This was
the gist of the talking points, and it remained on message throughout
the time I watched the points evolve.

But evolve they did, and the subtle changes I saw from September to late
January revealed what the Office of Special Plans was contributing to
national security. Two key types of modifications were directed or
approved by Shulsky and his team of politicos. First was the deletion of
entire references or bullets. The one I remember most specifically is
when they dropped the bullet that said one of Saddam's intelligence
operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague, supposedly salient
proof that Saddam was in part responsible for the 9/11 attack. That
claim had lasted through a number of revisions, but after the media
reported the claim as unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied by
the Czech government, and that Atta's location had been confirmed by the
FBI to be elsewhere, that particular bullet was dropped entirely from
our "advice on things to say" to senior Pentagon officials when they met
with guests or outsiders.

The other change made to the talking points was along the line of
fine-tuning and generalizing. Much of what was there was already so
general as to be less than accurate.

Some bullets were softened, particularly statements of Saddam's
readiness and capability in the chemical, biological or nuclear arena.
Others were altered over time to match more exactly something Bush and
Cheney said in recent speeches. One item I never saw in our talking
points was a reference to Saddam's purported attempt to buy yellowcake
uranium in Niger. The OSP list of crime and evil had included Saddam's
attempts to seek fissionable materials or uranium in Africa. This point
was written mostly in the present tense and conveniently left off the
dates of the last known attempt, sometime in the late 1980s. I was
surprised to hear the president's mention of the yellowcake in Niger in
his 2002 State of the Union address because that indeed was new and in
theory might have represented new intelligence, something that seemed
remarkably absent in any of the products provided us by the OSP
(although not for lack of trying). After hearing of it, I checked with
my old office of Sub-Saharan African Affairs -- and it was news to them,
too. It also turned out to be false.

It is interesting today that the "defense" for those who lied or
prevaricated about Iraq is to point the finger at the intelligence. But
the National Intelligence Estimate, published in September 2002, as
remarked upon recently by former CIA Middle East chief Ray McGovern, was
an afterthought. It was provoked only after Sens. Bob Graham and Dick
Durban noted in August 2002, as Congress was being asked to support a
resolution for preemptive war, that no NIE elaborating real threats to
the United States had been provided. In fact, it had not been written,
but a suitable NIE was dutifully prepared and submitted the very next
month. Naturally, this document largely supported most of the outrageous
statements already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld
about the threat Iraq posed to the United States. All the caveats,
reservations and dissents made by intelligence were relegated to
footnotes and kept from the public. Funny how that worked.

Starting in the fall of 2002 I found a way to vent my frustrations with
the neoconservative hijacking of our defense policy. The safe outlet was
provided by retired Col. David Hackworth, who agreed to publish my short
stories anonymously on his Web site Soldiers for the Truth, under the
moniker of "Deep Throat: Insider Notes From the Pentagon." The "deep
throat" part was his idea, but I was happy to have a sense that there
were folks out there, mostly military, who would be interested in the
secretary of defense-sponsored insanity I was witnessing on almost a
daily basis. When I was particularly upset, like when I heard Zinni
called a "traitor," I wrote about it in articles like this one.

In November, my Insider articles discussed the artificial worlds created
by the Pentagon and the stupid naiveté of neocon assumptions about what
would happen when we invaded Iraq. I discussed the price of public
service, distinguishing between public servants who told the truth and
then saw their careers flame out and those "public servants" who did not
tell the truth and saw their careers ignite. My December articles became
more depressing, discussing the history of the 100 Years' War and
"combat lobotomies." There was a painful one titled "Minority Reports"
about the necessity but unlikelihood of a Philip Dick sci-fi style
"minority report" on Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney's insanely
grandiose vision of some future Middle East, with peace, love and
democracy brought on through preemptive war and military occupation.

I shared some of my concerns with a civilian who had been remotely
acquainted with the Luti-Feith-Perle political clan in his previous work
for one of the senior Pentagon witnesses during the Iran-Contra
hearings. He told me these guys were engaged in something worse than
Iran-Contra. I was curious but he wouldn't tell me anything more. I
figured he knew what he was talking about. I thought of him when I read
much later about the 2002 and 2003 meetings between Michael Ledeen,
Reuel Marc Gerecht and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- all
Iran-Contra figures.

In December 2002, I requested an acceleration of my retirement to the
following July. By now, the military was anxiously waiting under the bed
for the other shoe to drop amid concerns over troop availability,
readiness for an ill-defined mission, and lack of day-after clarity. The
neocons were anxiously struggling to get that damn shoe off. That other
shoe fell with a thump, as did the regard many of us had held for Colin
Powell, on Feb. 5 as the secretary of state capitulated to the
neoconservative line in his speech at the United Nations -- a speech not
only filled with falsehoods pushed by the neoconservatives but also
containing many statements already debunked by intelligence.

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 ... [and] 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.

Proving that the truth is indeed the first casualty in war,
neoconservative member of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle called
this February for "heads to roll." Perle, agenda setter par excellence,
named George Tenet and Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Adm. Lowell
Jacoby as guilty of failing to properly inform the president on Iraq and
WMD. No doubt, the intelligence community, susceptible to politicization
and outdated paradigms, needs reform. The swiftness of the
neoconservative casting of blame on the intelligence community and away
from themselves should have been fully expected. Perhaps Perle and
others sense the grave and growing danger of political storms unleashed
by the exposure of neoconservative lies. Meanwhile, Ahmad Chalabi,
extravagantly funded by the neocons in the Pentagon to the tune of
millions to provide the disinformation, has boasted with remarkable
frankness, "We are heroes in error," and, "What was said before is not
important."

Now we are told by our president and neoconservative mouthpieces that
our sons and daughters, husbands and wives are in Iraq fighting for
freedom, for liberty, for justice and American values. This cost is not
borne by the children of Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush's
daughters do not pay this price. We are told that intelligence has
failed America, and that President Bush is determined to get to the
bottom of it. Yet not a single neoconservative appointee has lost his
job, and no high official of principle in the administration has
formally resigned because of this ill-planned and ill-conceived war and
poorly implemented occupation of Iraq.

Will Americans hold U.S. policymakers accountable? Will we return to our
roots as a republic, constrained and deliberate, respectful of others?
My experience in the Pentagon leading up to the invasion and occupation
of Iraq tells me, as Ben Franklin warned, we may have already failed.
But if Americans at home are willing to fight -- tenaciously and
courageously -- to preserve our republic, we might be able to keep it.

About the writer
Karen Kwiatkowski now lives in western Virginia on a small farm with her
family, teaches an American foreign policy class at James Madison
University, and writes regularly for militaryweek.com on security and
defense issues.

Transparently political!

One can read the "High Ranking Military Officer's" politics in a single term
she uses: "neoconservative"!

.. . . . Sigh, at least we were spared "Fat Cats", "Imperialists" and "Right
Wingers"




"Jim" wrote in message
...
The new Pentagon papers
A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department
extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the
country to war.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Karen Kwiatkowski

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature...sp/index3.html



March 10, 2004 | In July of last year, after just over 20 years of
service, I retired as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force. I had
served as a communications officer in the field and in acquisition
programs, as a speechwriter for the National Security Agency director,
and on the Headquarters Air Force and the office of the secretary of
defense staffs covering African affairs. I had completed Air Command and
Staff College and Navy War College seminar programs, two master's
degrees, and everything but my Ph.D. dissertation in world politics at
Catholic University. I regarded my military vocation as interesting,
rewarding and apolitical. My career started in 1978 with the smooth
seduction of a full four-year ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10 months
of duty in a strange new country, observing up close and personal a
process of decision making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution we
had all sworn to uphold. Ben Franklin's comment that the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia had delivered "a republic, madam, if
you can keep it" would come to have special meaning.

In the spring of 2002, I was a cynical but willing staff officer, almost
two years into my three-year tour at the office of the secretary of
defense, undersecretary for policy, sub-Saharan Africa. In April, a call
for volunteers went out for the Near East South Asia directorate (NESA).
None materialized. By May, the call transmogrified into a posthaste
demand for any staff officer, and I was "volunteered" to enter what
would be a well-appointed den of iniquity.

The education I would receive there was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie
-- intense, fascinating and frightening. While the people were very much
alive, I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold War anti-communism and
neo-imperialism -- walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the
clothing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war
between good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be
resident mainly in the Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics
and radicals. But there were other enemies within, anyone who dared
voice any skepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of
State Colin Powell and Gen. Anthony Zinni.

From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation
of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages
of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the
run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle
East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East
South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us
could do about it.

I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive
appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the
traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S.
intelligence agencies.

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.

While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence
production and American foreign policy matched closely with the
well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican
Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike,
felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been
openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line
was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take
Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on
false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really
understand. That is why I have gone public with my account.

To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of
defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed
me into the fold. I knew little about him. Because he was a recently
retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common
assumption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later
find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade
earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker
of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years and had completed
his Ph.D. at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. While his Navy
career had not granted him flag rank, he had it now and was not shy
about comparing his place in the pecking order with various three- and
four-star generals and admirals in and out of the Pentagon. Name
dropping included references to getting this or that document over to
Scooter, or responding to one of Scooter's requests right away. Scooter,
I would find out later, was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice
president's chief of staff.

Co-workers who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bu****e
shared conversations and stories indicating that something deliberate
and manipulative was happening to NESA. Key professional personnel,
longtime civilian professionals holding the important billets in NESA,
were replaced early on during the transition. Longtime officer director
Joe McMillan was reassigned to the National Defense University. The
director's job in the time of transition was to help bring the newly
appointed deputy assistant secretary up to speed, ensure office
continuity, act as a resource relating to regional histories and
policies, and help identify the best ways to maintain course or to
implement change. Removing such a critical continuity factor was not
only unusual but also seemed like willful handicapping. It was the first
signal of radical change.

At the time, I didn't realize that the expertise on Middle East policy
was not only being removed, but was also being exchanged for that from
various agenda-bearing think tanks, including the Middle East Media
Research Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and
the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Interestingly, the
office director billet stayed vacant the whole time I was there. That
vacancy and the long-term absence of real regional understanding to
inform defense policymakers in the Pentagon explains a great deal about
the neoconservative approach on the Middle East and the disastrous
mistakes made in Washington and in Iraq in the past two years.

I soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by debate
or experience with the early Bush administration replacement of the
civilian head of the Israel, Lebanon and Syria desk office with a young
political appointee from the Washington Institute, David Schenker. Word
was that the former experienced civilian desk officer tended to be
evenhanded toward the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel,
but there were complaints and he was gone. I met David and chatted with
him frequently. He was a smart, serious, hardworking guy, and the proud
author of a book on the chances for Palestinian democracy. Country desk
officers were rarely political appointees. In my years at the Pentagon,
this was the only "political" I knew doing that type of high-stress and
low-recognition duty. So eager was the office to have Schenker at the
Israel desk, he served for many months as a defense contractor of sorts
and only received his "Schedule C" political appointee status months
after I arrived.

I learned that there was indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My first
day in the office, a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily advised
me that if I wanted to be successful here, I'd better remember not to
say anything positive about the Palestinians. This belied official U.S.
policy of serving as an honest broker for resolution of Israeli and
Palestinian security concerns. At that time, there was a great deal of
talk about Bush's possible support for a Palestinian state. That the
Pentagon could have implemented and, worse, was implementing its own
foreign policy had not yet occurred to me.

Throughout the summer, the NESA spaces in one long office on the fourth
floor, between the 7th and 8th corridors of D Ring, became more and more
crowded. With war talk and planning about Iraq, all kinds of new people
were brought in. A politically savvy civilian-clothes-wearing lieutenant
colonel named Bill Bruner served as the Iraq desk officer, and he had
apparently joined NESA about the time Bill Luti did. I discovered that
Bruner, like Luti, had served as a military aide to Speaker Gingrich.
Gingrich himself was now conveniently an active member of Bush's Defense
Policy Board, which had space immediately below ours on the third floor.

I asked why Bruner wore civilian attire, and was told by others, "He's
Chalabi's handler." Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the president
of the Iraqi National Congress, who was the favored exile of the
neoconservatives and the source of much of their "intelligence." Bruner
himself said he had to attend a lot of meetings downtown in hotels and
that explained his suits. Soon, in July, he was joined by another Air
Force pilot, a colonel with no discernible political connections, Kevin
Jones. I thought of it as a military-civilian partnership, although both
were commissioned officers.

Among the other people arriving over the summer of 2002 was Michael
Makovsky, a recent MIT graduate who had written his dissertation on
Winston Churchill and was going to work on "Iraqi oil issues." He was
David Makovsky's younger brother. David was at the time a senior fellow
at the Washington Institute and had formerly been an editor of the
Jerusalem Post, a pro-Likud newspaper. Mike was quiet and seemed a bit
uncomfortable sharing space with us. He soon disappeared into some other
part of the operation and I rarely saw him after that.

In late summer, new space was found upstairs on the fifth floor, and the
"expanded Iraq desk," now dubbed the "Office of Special Plans," began
moving there. And OSP kept expanding.

Another person I observed to appear suddenly was Michael Rubin, another
Washington Institute fellow working on Iraq policy. He and Chris Straub,
a retired Army officer who had been a Republican staffer for the Senate
Intelligence Committee, were eventually assigned to OSP.

John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was assigned to
handle Iraq intelligence for Luti. Trigilio had been on a one-year
career-enhancement tour with the office of the secretary of defense that
was to end in August 2002. DIA had offered him routine intelligence
positions upon his return from his OSD sabbatical, but none was as
interesting as working in August 2002 for Luti. John asked Luti for help
in gaining an extension for another year, effectively removing him from
the DIA bureaucracy and its professional constraints.

Trigilio and I had hallway debates, as friends. The one I remember most
clearly was shortly after President Bush gave his famous "mushroom
cloud" speech in Cincinnati in October 2002, asserting that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction as well as ties to "international
terrorists," and was working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons with
"nuclear holy warriors." I asked John 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.

The newly named director of the OSP, Abram Shulsky, was one of the most
senior people sharing our space that summer. Abe, a kindly and gentle
man, who would say hello to me in the hallways, seemed to be someone I,
as a political science grad student, would have loved to sit with over
coffee and discuss the world's problems. I had a clear sense that Abe
ranked high in the organization, although ostensibly he was under Luti.
Luti was known at times to treat his staff, even senior staff, with
disrespect, contempt and derision. He also didn't take kindly to staff
officers who had an opinion or viewpoint that was off the
neoconservative reservation. But with Shulsky, who didn't speak much at
the staff meetings, he was always respectful and deferential. It seemed
like Shulsky's real boss was somebody like Douglas Feith or higher.

Doug Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, was a case study in
how not to run a large organization. In late 2001, he held the first
all-hands policy meeting at which he discussed for over 15 minutes how
many bullets and sub-bullets should be in papers for Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. A year later, in August of 2002, he held another all-hands
meeting in the auditorium where he embarrassed everyone with an
emotional performance about what it was like to serve Rumsfeld. He
blithely informed us that for months he didn't realize Rumsfeld had a
daily stand-up meeting with his four undersecretaries. He shared with us
the fact that, after he started to attend these meetings, he knew better
what Rumsfeld wanted of him. Most military staffers and professional
civilians hearing this were incredulous, as was I, to hear of such
organizational ignorance lasting so long and shared so openly. Feith's
inattention to most policy detail, except that relating to Israel and
Iraq, earned him a reputation most foul throughout Policy, with rampant
stories of routine signatures that took months to achieve and lost
documents. His poor reputation as a manager was not helped by his
arrogance. One thing I kept hearing from those defending Feith was that
he was "just brilliant." It was curiously like the brainwashed refrain
in "The Manchurian Candidate" about the programmed sleeper agent Raymond
Shaw, as the "kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I've
ever known."

I spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative worldview and
trying to grasp what was happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what
could explain this rush to war and disregard for real intelligence.
Neoconservatives are fairly easy to study, mainly because they are few
in number, and they show up at all the same parties. Examining them as
individuals, it became clear that almost all have worked together, in
and out of government, on national security issues for several decades.
The Project for the New American Century and its now famous 1998
manifesto to President Clinton on Iraq is a recent example.
***
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm --- Worth a read
***
But this statement was preceded by one written for Benyamin Netanyahu's
Likud Party campaign in Israel in 1996 by neoconservatives Richard
Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith titled "A Clean Break: Strategy
for Securing the Realm."

David Wurmser is the least known of that trio and an interesting example
of the tangled neoconservative web. In 2001, the research fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute was assigned to the Pentagon, then moved
to the Department of State to work as deputy for the hard-line
conservative undersecretary John Bolton, then to the National Security
Council, and now is lodged in the office of the vice president. His
wife, the prolific Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of the Middle East
Media Research Institute, is also a neoconservative team player.

Before the Iraq invasion, many of these same players labored together
for literally decades to push a defense strategy that favored military
intervention and confrontation with enemies, secret and unconstitutional
if need be. Some former officials, such as Richard Perle (an assistant
secretary of defense under Reagan) and James Woolsey (CIA director under
Clinton), were granted a new lease on life, a renewed gravitas, with
positions on President Bush's Defense Policy Board. Others, like Elliott
Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, had apparently overcome previous negative
associations from an Iran-Contra conviction for lying to the Congress
and for utterly miscalculating the strength of the Soviet Union in a
politically driven report to the CIA.

Neoconservatives march as one phalanx in parallel opposition to those
they hate. In the early winter of 2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain
and I were discussing the service being rendered by Colin Powell at the
time, and we were told by the neoconservative political appointee David
Schenker that "the best service Powell could offer would be to quit
right now." I was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti called
Marine Gen. and former Chief of Central Command Anthony Zinni a
"traitor," because Zinni had publicly expressed reservations about the
rush to war.

After August 2002, the Office of Special Plans established its own
rhythm and cadence separate from the non-politically minded
professionals covering the rest of the region. While often accused of
creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent products of this office:
war planning guidance for Rumsfeld, presumably impacting Central
Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD and terrorism. These internal
talking points seemed to be a mélange crafted from obvious past
observation and intelligence bits and pieces of dubious origin. They
were propagandistic in style, and all desk officers were ordered to use
them verbatim in the preparation of any material prepared for higher-ups
and people outside the Pentagon. The talking points included statements
about Saddam Hussein's proclivity for using chemical weapons against his
own citizens and neighbors, his existing relations with terrorists based
on a member of al-Qaida reportedly receiving medical care in Baghdad,
his widely publicized aid to the Palestinians, and general indications
of an aggressive viability in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program
and his ongoing efforts to use them against his neighbors or give them
to al-Qaida style groups. The talking points said he was threatening his
neighbors and was a serious threat to the U.S., too.

I suspected, from reading Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative
columnist for the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard, and hearing
a Cheney speech or two, that these talking points left the building on
occasion. Both OSP functions duplicated other parts of the Pentagon. The
facts we should have used to base our papers on were already being
produced by the intelligence agencies, and the war planning was already
done by the combatant command staff with some help from the Joint Staff.
Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was
used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo
war planning.

As a result of my duties as the North Africa desk officer, I became
acquainted with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) support staff for
NESA. Every policy regional director was served by a senior executive
intelligence professional from DIA, along with a professional
intelligence staff. This staff channeled DIA products, accepted tasks
for DIA, and in the past had been seen as a valued member of the
regional teams. However, as the war approached, this type of
relationship with the Defense Intelligence Agency crumbled.

Even the most casual observer could note the tension and even animosity
between "Wild Bill" Luti (as we came to refer to our boss) and Bruce
Hardcastle, our defense intelligence officer (DIO). Certainly, there
were stylistic and personality differences. Hardcastle, like most senior
intelligence officers I knew, was serious, reserved, deliberate, and
went to great lengths to achieve precision and accuracy in his speech
and writing. Luti was the kind of guy who, in staff meetings and in
conversations, would jump from grand theory to administrative minutiae
with nary a blink or a fleeting shadow of self-awareness.

I discovered that Luti and possibly others within OSP were dissatisfied
with Hardcastle's briefings, in particular with the aspects relating to
WMD and terrorism. I was not clear exactly what those concerns were, but
I came to understand that the DIA briefing did not match what OSP was
claiming about Iraq's WMD capabilities and terrorist activities. I
learned that shortly before I arrived there had been an incident in NESA
where Hardcastle's presence and briefing at a bilateral meeting had been
nixed abruptly by Luti. The story circulating among the desk officers
was "a last-minute cancellation" of the DIO presentation. Hardcastle's
intelligence briefing was replaced with one prepared by another Policy
office that worked nonproliferation issues. While this alternative
briefing relied on intelligence produced by DIO and elsewhere, it was
not a product of the DIA or CIA community, but instead was an OSD Policy
"branded" product -- and so were its conclusions. The message sent by
Policy appointees and well understood by staff officers and the defense
intelligence community was that senior appointed civilians were willing
to exclude or marginalize intelligence products that did not fit the
agenda.

Staff officers would always request OSP's most current Iraq, WMD and
terrorism talking points. On occasion, these weren't available in an
approved form and awaited Shulsky's approval. The talking points were a
series of bulleted statements, written persuasively and in a convincing
way, and superficially they seemed reasonable and rational. Saddam
Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his people, and was continuing
in that mode, becoming an imminently dangerous threat to his neighbors
and to us -- except that none of his neighbors or Israel felt this was
the case. Saddam Hussein had harbored al-Qaida operatives and offered
and probably provided them with training facilities -- without
mentioning that the suspected facilities were in the
U.S./Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and
had WMD of the type that could be used by him, in conjunction with
al-Qaida and other terrorists, to attack and damage American interests,
Americans and America -- except the intelligence didn't really say that.
Saddam Hussein had not been seriously weakened by war and sanctions and
weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and in fact was plotting to hurt
America and support anti-American activities, in part through his
carrying on with terrorists -- although here the intelligence said the
opposite. His support for the Palestinians and Arafat proved his
terrorist connections, and basically, the time to act was now. This was
the gist of the talking points, and it remained on message throughout
the time I watched the points evolve.

But evolve they did, and the subtle changes I saw from September to late
January revealed what the Office of Special Plans was contributing to
national security. Two key types of modifications were directed or
approved by Shulsky and his team of politicos. First was the deletion of
entire references or bullets. The one I remember most specifically is
when they dropped the bullet that said one of Saddam's intelligence
operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague, supposedly salient
proof that Saddam was in part responsible for the 9/11 attack. That
claim had lasted through a number of revisions, but after the media
reported the claim as unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied by
the Czech government, and that Atta's location had been confirmed by the
FBI to be elsewhere, that particular bullet was dropped entirely from
our "advice on things to say" to senior Pentagon officials when they met
with guests or outsiders.

The other change made to the talking points was along the line of
fine-tuning and generalizing. Much of what was there was already so
general as to be less than accurate.

Some bullets were softened, particularly statements of Saddam's
readiness and capability in the chemical, biological or nuclear arena.
Others were altered over time to match more exactly something Bush and
Cheney said in recent speeches. One item I never saw in our talking
points was a reference to Saddam's purported attempt to buy yellowcake
uranium in Niger. The OSP list of crime and evil had included Saddam's
attempts to seek fissionable materials or uranium in Africa. This point
was written mostly in the present tense and conveniently left off the
dates of the last known attempt, sometime in the late 1980s. I was
surprised to hear the president's mention of the yellowcake in Niger in
his 2002 State of the Union address because that indeed was new and in
theory might have represented new intelligence, something that seemed
remarkably absent in any of the products provided us by the OSP
(although not for lack of trying). After hearing of it, I checked with
my old office of Sub-Saharan African Affairs -- and it was news to them,
too. It also turned out to be false.

It is interesting today that the "defense" for those who lied or
prevaricated about Iraq is to point the finger at the intelligence. But
the National Intelligence Estimate, published in September 2002, as
remarked upon recently by former CIA Middle East chief Ray McGovern, was
an afterthought. It was provoked only after Sens. Bob Graham and Dick
Durban noted in August 2002, as Congress was being asked to support a
resolution for preemptive war, that no NIE elaborating real threats to
the United States had been provided. In fact, it had not been written,
but a suitable NIE was dutifully prepared and submitted the very next
month. Naturally, this document largely supported most of the outrageous
statements already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld
about the threat Iraq posed to the United States. All the caveats,
reservations and dissents made by intelligence were relegated to
footnotes and kept from the public. Funny how that worked.

Starting in the fall of 2002 I found a way to vent my frustrations with
the neoconservative hijacking of our defense policy. The safe outlet was
provided by retired Col. David Hackworth, who agreed to publish my short
stories anonymously on his Web site Soldiers for the Truth, under the
moniker of "Deep Throat: Insider Notes From the Pentagon." The "deep
throat" part was his idea, but I was happy to have a sense that there
were folks out there, mostly military, who would be interested in the
secretary of defense-sponsored insanity I was witnessing on almost a
daily basis. When I was particularly upset, like when I heard Zinni
called a "traitor," I wrote about it in articles like this one.

In November, my Insider articles discussed the artificial worlds created
by the Pentagon and the stupid naiveté of neocon assumptions about what
would happen when we invaded Iraq. I discussed the price of public
service, distinguishing between public servants who told the truth and
then saw their careers flame out and those "public servants" who did not
tell the truth and saw their careers ignite. My December articles became
more depressing, discussing the history of the 100 Years' War and
"combat lobotomies." There was a painful one titled "Minority Reports"
about the necessity but unlikelihood of a Philip Dick sci-fi style
"minority report" on Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney's insanely
grandiose vision of some future Middle East, with peace, love and
democracy brought on through preemptive war and military occupation.

I shared some of my concerns with a civilian who had been remotely
acquainted with the Luti-Feith-Perle political clan in his previous work
for one of the senior Pentagon witnesses during the Iran-Contra
hearings. He told me these guys were engaged in something worse than
Iran-Contra. I was curious but he wouldn't tell me anything more. I
figured he knew what he was talking about. I thought of him when I read
much later about the 2002 and 2003 meetings between Michael Ledeen,
Reuel Marc Gerecht and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- all
Iran-Contra figures.

In December 2002, I requested an acceleration of my retirement to the
following July. By now, the military was anxiously waiting under the bed
for the other shoe to drop amid concerns over troop availability,
readiness for an ill-defined mission, and lack of day-after clarity. The
neocons were anxiously struggling to get that damn shoe off. That other
shoe fell with a thump, as did the regard many of us had held for Colin
Powell, on Feb. 5 as the secretary of state capitulated to the
neoconservative line in his speech at the United Nations -- a speech not
only filled with falsehoods pushed by the neoconservatives but also
containing many statements already debunked by intelligence.

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 ... [and] 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.

Proving that the truth is indeed the first casualty in war,
neoconservative member of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle called
this February for "heads to roll." Perle, agenda setter par excellence,
named George Tenet and Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Adm. Lowell
Jacoby as guilty of failing to properly inform the president on Iraq and
WMD. No doubt, the intelligence community, susceptible to politicization
and outdated paradigms, needs reform. The swiftness of the
neoconservative casting of blame on the intelligence community and away
from themselves should have been fully expected. Perhaps Perle and
others sense the grave and growing danger of political storms unleashed
by the exposure of neoconservative lies. Meanwhile, Ahmad Chalabi,
extravagantly funded by the neocons in the Pentagon to the tune of
millions to provide the disinformation, has boasted with remarkable
frankness, "We are heroes in error," and, "What was said before is not
important."

Now we are told by our president and neoconservative mouthpieces that
our sons and daughters, husbands and wives are in Iraq fighting for
freedom, for liberty, for justice and American values. This cost is not
borne by the children of Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush's
daughters do not pay this price. We are told that intelligence has
failed America, and that President Bush is determined to get to the
bottom of it. Yet not a single neoconservative appointee has lost his
job, and no high official of principle in the administration has
formally resigned because of this ill-planned and ill-conceived war and
poorly implemented occupation of Iraq.

Will Americans hold U.S. policymakers accountable? Will we return to our
roots as a republic, constrained and deliberate, respectful of others?
My experience in the Pentagon leading up to the invasion and occupation
of Iraq tells me, as Ben Franklin warned, we may have already failed.
But if Americans at home are willing to fight -- tenaciously and
courageously -- to preserve our republic, we might be able to keep it.

About the writer
Karen Kwiatkowski now lives in western Virginia on a small farm with her
family, teaches an American foreign policy class at James Madison
University, and writes regularly for militaryweek.com on security and
defense issues.

ed wrote:
Transparently political!

One can read the "High Ranking Military Officer's" politics in a single term
she uses: "neoconservative"!

. . . . Sigh, at least we were spared "Fat Cats", "Imperialists" and "Right
Wingers"


Except for the fact that this is a first person report -- as in she was there;
she lived it.