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March 10, 2004  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 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
(right) 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, (left) the vice president's chief
of staff. Co-workers who had watched the transition from
Clintonista to Bushite 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,
(above, with Powell), 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, (right),
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 (right) 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. 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. 
Also by Karen Kwiatkowski: August
3, 2003 : Job reveals faults in
decision-making  -
Statistics: The burden
of Empire: countries with a US military
presence
-
US Army War College
Quarterly predicted in Summer 1997:
Constant
Conflict: There will be no peace | Statistics
on the US world empire
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