"Plamegate and the missing link" -- Wheeler focuses on Col. Kwiatkowski

[understandinglife]

As the Financial Times indicated on October 17, 2005, the Fitzgerald investigation appears to be moving in a very important, essential direction -- “CIA Leak Probe ‘Widening to Include Use of Intelligence’”

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Regardless of how far reaching Fitzgerald’s expansion goes, there is an extremely good reason for his investigation to grow in this direction. It is simple. Karen Kwiatkowski. Some might call her missing link that could implode the Bush administration’s house of deceptive and treasonous cards. Kwiatkowski is probably not Fitzgerald’s reason for questioning a majority of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), for chances are that like most other American’s he is unaware of who she is. But if he knew her story, he just might indict the entire neoconservative administration. Seriously.

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Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret.) worked for the Pentagon, in the office of the Secretary of Defense, Near East South Asia (NESA) directorate. She began working there in May of 2002, for Bill Luti and Doug Feith and also worked in conjunction with Abe Schulsky’s, Office of Special Plans (OSP) (which Donald Rumsfeld set up in September 2003, and was renamed Northern Gulf Affairs Office (NGAO) in July of 2003). In a January 6, 2004 video interview included in MEF’s documentary film Hijacking Catastrophe (available at hijackingcatastrope.org), Kwiatkowski spoke about her experience with witnessing firsthand how the US govt. had a secret foreign policy agenda (especially with regard to Iraq) and how they cooked the intelligence books in order to “justify” a “legal” war.

The next part of this blog entry includes a brief transcription of key parts of Karen’s interview (which by the way, was also printed in Interlink Publishing’s Hijacking Catastrophe book, a collection of interviews from 28 distinguished political thinkers).

I have included sections that provide a hive of cross-supportive reasoning into the allegation that CIA operative Valerie Plame’s top secret identity was exposed in order to punish Joe Wilson, and to, as the Reagan administration's National Security Agency director has said, to protect “The Lies That Took The Country Into 'The Greatest Strategic Disaster In US History'". Also, I have included key sections which reinforce the underlying need for Fitzgerald’s (or somebody, please somebody) to investigate how intelligence was really handled.

As hard as this may be to swallow, let the iceberg be exposed.

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Much more at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-wheeler/plamegate-a...

A must read.

And, for those of you who have not seen Hijacking Catastrophe now would be a good time to watch it:

http://www.hijackingcatastrophe.org


Peace.

[hiley]

1. recommend

[BeHereNow]

2. GREAT!

I am also wondering about Sibel's report
to Congress in all this as well as Perle's resignation-
Follow me?
Knew you would.
The implications are "HUGH1111
and series1111!1"
BHN

[Eurobabe]

3. In the astrology forum there is a thread "woman will bring down Bu$h"

check it out.

[BeHereNow]

4. Make that WOMEN-

Karen, Valerie AND Sibel!
BHN

[G_j]

5. I always felt

that these thugs may be at least in part, brought down by women in the end.


Karen knows a lot and she has been quite fierce in her fight for the truth.

[BeHereNow]

6. I wrote to Karen and she wrote back-

I'm going to frame that email.
BHN

[G_j]

19. :-)

she is one of just three "public" figures who have personally written back to me in the last few years (all women)

Cinthy McKinney, Helen Thomas and Karen Kwiatkowski.

edit: Karen also writes articles featured in various places.

[mmonk]

30. Yes

I have read some of Karen's accounts.

[WilliamPitt]

7. Jesus. I'm gonna get a big head.

Everyone's playing catchup:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101705I.shtml

WHIG, and its intention to sell an unnecessary war to a shell-shocked public, is only half the story. The other half of the manipulative sales team could be found in the neighborhood occupied by the Department of Defense. The Office of Special Plans, or OSP, was created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret intelligence data to justify war in Iraq. Think of it like baseball: the OSP pitched, and WHIG caught.

The OSP was on no government payroll and suffered no Congressional oversight. Their tainted information and interpretations overtopped the Iraq data being provided by the State Department and CIA. The OSP was able to accomplish this thanks to devoted patronage from high-ranking members of the administration, most prominently Vice-President Cheney.

The highest levels of the OSP were staffed by heavy-hitters like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Cheney before joining the Pentagon. When the OSP wanted to intimidate analysts into shaping conclusions to fit the already-made war decision, Cheney went to CIA headquarters on unprecedented visits. Once there, he demanded "forward-leaning" interpretations of the evidence. When Cheney was unable to go to the CIA, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, went in his place.

That's it, right there. Mr. Libby may be a target of Mr. Fitzgerald, but no one should forget the trips Cheney personally made to Langley in order to wring war-supporting evidence out of the analysts. He went himself. His fingerprints are all over the scene.

One name that has been lost in the shuffle of history is that of Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement. Kwiatkowski charged two years ago that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith's office, and particularly those of the OSP, constituted "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress."

"What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote after her retirement. "If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense."

According to Kwiatkowsky, the political appointees assigned there and their contacts at State, the NSC, and Cheney's office tended to work as a "network." Feith's office often deliberately cut out, ignored or circumvented normal channels of communication both within the Pentagon and with other agencies. "I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the NSC because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel," wrote Kwiatkowsky.

That "different channel," we now know, was almost certainly WHIG.

[G_j]

10. and I think it may be safe to assume

that Fitzerald knows a whole lot of juicy facts about this now!

[BeHereNow]

14. You are allowed- you earned it

We love ya-
BHN

[lovuian]

8. The Military rebelling they got a glimpse at their Military

all underlings are all coming up as witnesses!!! They witnessed a crime they have to come forward!!!

its like the dam

breaking trickle and now a rush!!!

[leveymg]

9. Like Watergate, it takes three agencies to bring down a corrupt President

The CIA


The FBI


And, not least, the DIA

[BeHereNow]

12. The most beautiful women in the world

Valerie
Sibel
Karen.

Thanks for posting them.

BHN

[rateyes]

13. I would pay BIG money to attend an event...

with all of those pictured above telling all they know...BIG MONEY.

[BeHereNow]

16. Me too-

The three of them in one room sharing
what they know would pretty much
assure a new government from top to
bottom.
Think about it- Sibel gave her
report to Congress which at the very least
means that they are guilty too.
I have a feeling whatever was in her report
was grounds to start impeachment hearings
right then and there.

BHN

[leveymg]

22. I was fortunate to be in the room with Karen and Sibel 10 weeks ago

in a small hearing room on Capitol Hill at the roll-out of the National Security Whistleblowers Association.

Wow, what an honor.

[rateyes]

27. Keep riding that horse...

til it gets tired. That's great.

[G_j]

17. and of course there are those on the outside also

Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Medea Benjamin and MANY others

[cascadiance]

26. And some other women bringing him down too!...

Katrina, Rita, etc...

[understandinglife]

23. And, those three representatives of each agency will prevail.

Peace.

[DemReadingDU]

11. Recommended!

So many good, interesting articles. Thanks!

[G_j]

15. The OSP

"The Lie Factory"

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405....
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mideast/iraq/14...

[flyarm]

18. old article about karen and the new pentagon papers...

from my files..for others to see the full drift of this..

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp/ind...

snip:

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



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.

[flyarm]

20. great article archives of karen kwiatkowski at lew rockwell i had in files

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski-arch...


great article ..had in my files...by karen...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski68.ht...

snip:..great links inside this article!!

Hyenas in Washington


by Karen Kwiatkowski

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Conservatives and liberals alike are critical of neoconservative foreign policy, a creature crowned with empire envy and war-lust yet starkly naked of caution, conservatism or respect for sovereignty or human rights. We stand together in awe at the "creative destruction" invoked by the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen when no other rationale for the occupation of Iraq survives.

With black humor, we call them neo-conmen, neandra-cons, neo-Jacobins or neo-fascists, searching for a title that matches the philosophy. We agree that new conservatives they’ve never been. Liberals won’t claim them either.

It can be amusing and educational to analyze and criticize the neo-conmen – on their good days. They have names like Max Boot – crisp with his highbrow contempt for American traditionalism and entertaining with his Orwellian name. Or Joel Mowbray, David Frum or Jonah Goldberg whose collective prose once waded through reveals naïve youngsters trying on maturity like long pants for the first time, and giggling about it. Not yet at home in the world of adults, but no doubt earnest hopefuls.

The older crowd of neoconservatives can be almost as much fun. Or at least they used to be before they got worried about the upcoming U.S. election, invasions of Syria and Iran slipping like sand between manicured fingers and the outrageous treachery of Spaniards. These days, the experience of watching Charles Krauthammer grouse on Sunday morning that "the next big war is Iran" – while even FOX’s Brit Hume looks on in amazement – is surpassed only by observing the ignominious Defense Policy Board departure of the grubby Richard Perle in a last ditch attempt to maximize consulting profits before it’s too late. George Will, whose recent column attacked even little old me, has gone so far downhill as an essayist that one thinks perhaps he should retire and make way for new blood. Bill Safire seems grumpier than ever, and even the charm of Grandpa Don Rumsfeld is getting strained and tense.

[flyarm]

21. SPIES IN THE PENTAGON ..BY Karen Kwiatkowski

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski91.ht...

SNIP:



Spies in the Pentagon?

by Karen Kwiatkowski


When I think of spies in the Defense Department, I think of the pitiful debt-ridden Ron Pelton, who worked for 14 years at the National Security Agency, quit in 1979, and began selling secrets to the Soviets until he was arrested in 1986. I heard it was to complete construction on a home he had been building for years and years. Construction projects can be like that.

I think of Jonathan Pollard, a case study in poor hiring practices within the federal government and the Defense Department’s even poorer supervisory habits. Pollard was also a case study in the delusional and incompetent ideologue who becomes a traitor in the Department of Defense.

More recently, I think of the high clearances granted to publicly and at times, rabidly, pro-Likud past and present political appointees with names like Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, and a host of younger Likudniks who march through the halls of the five-sided asylum to a composition unfamiliar to most Americans.

I don’t think of Larry Franklin, a guy I like and respect. When I was there in 2002 and 2003, Larry was the Iran desk officer with the Defense Under Secretary for Policy, Near East South Asia, moving later to the Office of Special Plans, where ostensibly Iraq policy was made.


EDIT FOR SPELLING.FLY

[G_j]

24. kick

[BamaBecky]

25. I had long since given up hope

of "getting the neo-cons" indicted for their part in the sex up intelligence. I saw Hijacking Catastrophe a while ago. Karen is very very crediable! Perhaps we can expand these to Investigations the Pentagon, and ultimately get to the truth of 911 THIS WAY.

I hope everyone is working locally with their friends and neighbors helping them see the truth of 911......if not.....get started....we are the media....

Bama

[Octafish]

28. Coleen Rowley -- FBI in Minneapolis -- is running for Congress.

Remember, she's the one who wondered why no one in FBI Washington wanted to investigate the 20th hijacker Moussaoui pre-9-11? Her letter even wondered if there was a mole at FBI HQ. Her word carries great weight.

[BamaBecky]

33. Yes I remember! I hope she wins!...n/t

[Octafish]

29. A bit on Kwiatkowski spells out her relationship with SOG...

From Mother Jones:

The Lie Factory

This special Mother Jones investigation late last year 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.

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.

CONTINUED...

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

Thanks for the heads-up, understandinglife.

Kwiatkowski is a true hero -- one of many who are today saving the Republic.

[Gabi Hayes]

31. EXCELLENT!!! she's one of the unknown heroes, along with Sibel and Indira

two interviews from thisishell.com

first from August 2003.
http://server.wnur.org/thisishell/archive/20030809_2.ra...
forty five minutes in
then, continued:
http://server.wnur.org/thisishell/archive/20030809_3.ra...
special bonus on this clip...Greg Palast!

then, from March 2004
http://server.wnur.org/thisishell/archive/20040313_1.ra...
about seven minutes in

it's where I first heard about her, then started reading her stuff in Lew Rockwell

listening to the 2004 one right now, and it's COMPELLING. she's calling for Feith, Lutti, etal to get their asses hauled before congress to explain WTF they were doing

[Poiuyt]

32. kick

[Gabi Hayes]

34. ........

'''''''

[G_j]

35. ==