THE NEW DANIEL
ELLSBERG? - An Analysis of the “New Pentagon Papers”
by Jack Ott
March 18, 2004
Former Air Force
Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski has become the new “darling” of the
“anti-War in Iraq” adherents in the United States.
A prolific author and commentator, her works have been widely promoted and
reproduced on the Internet. Lt. Col.
Kwiatkowski retired from the Air Force in July 2003, after 20 years of service. Her last duty assignment was in the
Pentagon’s Near East South Asia directorate (NESA), from
where she launched a crusade against the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war.
Her recent anti-war piece, “The New Pentagon Papers”, appeared last week on the Salon.com website.
In it, she attempts to make the case that dissent and disagreements within the Department
of Defense (DoD) resulted in the deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence information
by the Bush Administration to build its case for going to war in Iraq.
Kwiatkowski professes to be a true
political conservative who opposes the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld “neoconservative
tyranny” that she says had its roots in the Reagan Administration. The result is an
unlikely but informal alliance between the most conservative side of the Republican party,
exemplified by old-time members such as Pat Buchanan, and the farthest-left side of the
Democrat party that relies on publications such as Salon.com to fuel the anti-war,
anti-Bush feeding-frenzy.
In this week’s issue of Salon.com,
David Talbot goes after anyone who may have questioned Kwiatkowski’s paper or her
conclusions. Talbot states, “Kwiatkowski's
right-wing critics could not challenge her facts, not a single one, so they immediately
reached for the tar brush.” In reality,
they could not challenge her facts because she had presented no verifiable facts in her
paper that substantiate her ultimate claim that the Bush Administration misled the public
by using false intelligence to build its case for the war.
Early in her paper, Kwiatkowski discusses at great length the
political intrigues and personality conflicts going on within her division, as the
“neocons” get assigned to one significant post after another thanks to the
political influence of their fellow neoconservative arch-villains Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld. Inasmuch as Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld is the Head of the Department of Defense, and since both he and Vice-President
Cheney report to the same boss, it is only logical that they build their departments
around people in whom they have trust, confidence, and generally shared views. Any
effective “boss”, whether inside or outside of government, attempts to do the
same thing, and organizational cultures changes as management changes. This is not a
conspirational coup; it is the natural evolution that takes place in any effective
organization. Because the new leaders did not
share her views, Kwiatkowski portrays this as a takeover of the intelligence function that
eventually led to a distortion of the facts.
She provides some insight into her perceptions of her work
environment when she says:
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 counter
terrorism 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.
By trying to draw a picture of political
zombies doing nothing but the bidding of their ideologically bankrupt masters, what she
accomplishes here is to clarify her own ideology. Through
minimization, she apparently considers the confrontations against the Soviet Union during
the Cold War, as well as the current confrontation with Islamic terrorists, to be little
more than fantasies or war games made up by ideological zealots. There are no facts
presented here, just personal opinion.
In what could have been the most
significant statement in her paper, Kwiatkowski writes:
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.
She provides no evidence or examples to support this claim. Therefore,
it can be considered to be nothing more than additional personal opinion. No doubt there was a measure of disagreement
between individual assessments, and it is the responsibility of those who Kwiatkowski
refers to as the “neoconservative agenda bearers”, i.e. the directors, to weigh
these differences and compare them to known facts or the preponderance of all of
assessment data. They then decide which assessments to use for the overall development of
policies or strategies.
At times, her paper reflects a naiveté that is surprising for someone
with her experience. Perhaps instead of reflecting naiveté, she is using a technique that
tells her audience what they want to hear; that which supports their own preconceived
notions, and therefore they will not run require them to run the assertions through a test
of rationality. For example, she says:
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.
The
supposed dichotomy of the two positions that she tries to portray as a disagreement
between the President and the DoD again displays either a political naiveté or a
purposeful intent to build something out of nothing in order to vent her frustration. The Bush Administration clearly recognizes and has
stated that peace in the Middle East can be achieved only after the settlement of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the eventual establishment of an independent
Palestinian state with American help. To have any hope of accomplishing this, a recognized
“neutral approach” by America is required. Colonel
Kwiatkowski worked for the DoD, which deals with military issues; she did not work for the
Department of State, which deals with political issues.
There is no reason whatsoever for the DoD to reflect a “neutral”
position on this issue, since the only military aspect of the Palestinian side of the
equation is terrorism. In fact, if the DoD had
expressed neutrality on this issue, it would have contradicted the Administration’s
overall goal of eliminating terrorism.
On the issue of output provided by the OSP, Kwiatkowski states:
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….
(Italics provided by this author)
The
author’s statement that she saw only two pieces of output from the OSP leads to the
question of how she knows that there were only two. This may be correct, but it leaves
open the question of whether these were the only products of this group. She implies but
does not explain the charge that had been given to the group at this time; what it was
that its superiors expected from it. Surprisingly,
she also appears to exonerate this group from “creating intelligence”. Her use
of the word “accused” implies that she was referring to providing false
intelligence. Finally, she says that the “talking points” were the product of
“intelligence bits and pieces of dubious origin” If they were of dubious origin,
how can she judge their authenticity?
She goes
on to say:
….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.
It is unclear what she means by her use of the word
“propagandistic”. Does she consider
them to be lies? Half-truths? Spin? Assertive? It is a well-known fact that Saddam used
chemical weapons against his own people and his neighbors. Saddam’s
documented support for terrorist organizations includes the payments of reward monies to
the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. No Administration spokesperson ever
claimed that Saddam had nuclear weapons, only that they were attempting to develop a
nuclear program. This fact was at the time substantiated by Hans Blix, the Chief UN
Weapons Inspector, and was reiterated on FOX News on March 15, 2004. Similarly, it has
been proved that Saddam still had a program and the capabilities to produce chemical and
biological weapons, again substantiated by Hans Blix. The only unanswered question today
is whether Saddam actually had stockpiles of existing chemical and biological weapons. But this question is largely irrelevant, since
having the capability in place to produce
these weapons means that it would be only a matter of weeks before these weapons could
start being deployed, if only in limited amounts. Limited amounts of chemical or
biological weapons are all that are required for a terrorist attack on a city or small
country.
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….
The mass graves that have been found in Iraq in the last few months,
captured films that we all saw on television of prisoner torture, and the documented
brutalities of Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay all attest to the validity of these
“talking points”. Apparently,
Kwiatkowski and her anti-war friends prefer that these events be ignored and swept under
the rug. Al Qaeda-trained Abu Mussab Zarqawi established the terrorist training
base in northeastern Iraq with Saddam’s knowledge. This base was bombed during the
first days of the current war. Zarqawi received medical treatment in Baghdad in May and
June of 2002 for wounds suffered while fighting for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Zarqawi is
now leading the foreign terrorist fighters in Iraq; and recently had a $10 million reward
put on his head by the coalition forces. She
erred when she stated that the facility was in the U.S./Kurdish controlled part of Iraq.
It was located in that part of Iraq that was within the Northern No-Fly Zone, the area
established by the UN to protect the Kurds from Hussein. Although the skies over the zone
were patrolled by U.S. aircraft, the United States never physically controlled the area.
One vital fact that Kwiatkowski overlooked was that the intelligence
assessments and the talking points used by the Bush Administration in 2002/2003 presented
the same information as that which President Clinton used in his TV address to the American people over four years earlier on December 16, 1998 to justify the
launching of cruise missiles against Iraq. This was long before her
dreaded “neocons” had staged their coup that took over the Pentagon. Whether or not one agrees with the justifications
used for the War in Iraq
or with Clinton’s
use of cruise missiles in 1998, the fact remains that these points existed long before the
Bush Administration came into being.
Kwiatkowski’s flagrant overuse
of the pejorative buzzwords “neoconservative” and its shortened form
“neocon” gives her paper a very propagandistic tone, the same accusation that
she makes about the “talking points”. It leaves the distinct impression that she
had a personal axe to grind. Secondly, in an
attempt to enhance her own intellectual credibility and appeal to the self-proclaimed
“intellectual elite” of the Left, she uses words such as
“transmogrified” to describe how, after an initial call for volunteer staffing
for NESA was unsuccessful, a subsequent but modified call was again sent out for
volunteers. She did not bother to explain just
how the appeal was “transmogrified”.
She describes what she learned in her
Pentagon job as being “…like an M. Night Shyamalan movie -- intense, fascinating
and frightening….” and later draws on the main character in the movie “The
Manchurian Candidate” to describe the
perceived inadequacies of a department director in the Pentagon. If the intelligence assessments that she submitted
utilized this pseudo-intellectual writing style, it is no wonder that they were
disregarded.
The most damning assessment that can be
made of “The New Pentagon Papers”, and one that will never be understood by many
of the subscribers to publications like Salon.com, is the author’s admission that:
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.
Any person who, while still wearing a
military uniform, makes surreptitious attempts to undermine the official policy of the United States is totally devoid of
even the slightest shred of honor. He or she is a disgrace to that uniform, and is a
disgrace to the men and woman in the military who have given their lives for their
country.
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