Lieutenant Karen Kwiatkowski hasn’t let two decades of serving
in the U.S. Air Force blur her true colors. The lifelong
conservative calls herself a ‘Soldier of the Truth’ after jumping
ship from her position as an officer at the Defense Department’s
office for Near East/South Asia, a part of which was renamed ‘the
Office of Special Plans’ in the buildup to the war in Iraq. Calling
the Orwellian OSP a ‘neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the
Pentagon’, Kwiatkowski went underground and wrote an anonymous
column of internal dissent that decorated veteran and former
colonel David Hackworth posted on the Internet. Based on an
interview
with Kwiatkowski, Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly
concludes that she ‘found herself appalled as the radical wing of
the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon
planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own
intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with
Iraq.’
Kwiatkowski left the military last March, the same week that the
Bush administration invaded Iraq, and now pens her web reports
herself as well as accepting speaking invitations. She has
‘concluded the only way she could viably resist what she now terms
the ‘expansionist, imperialist’ policies of the neoconservatives
who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public
fight against them.’
Here are a few snippets from the LA Weekly‘s interview
with Kwiatkowski:
‘To them, Saddam Hussein needed to go… So there was no debate
over WMD, the possible relations Saddam Hussein may have had with
terrorist groups and so on. They spent their energy gathering
pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline, which is
the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney
tell the American people in the fall of 2002.‘The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them
because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence.
The OSP and the Vice President’s Office were critical in this
propaganda effort – to convince Americans that there was some just
requirement for pre-emptive war.’