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[return
to part 1] ... 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 2003 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,
[Condoleeza]
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. 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.
Karen Kwiatkowski is a recently retired Air
Force lieutenant colonel who spent most of her
final three years of military service in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense's Under
Secretariat for Policy. 
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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