[lit-ideas] The New Pentagon Papers

  • From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 11:30:45 -0800

The New Pentagon Papers
By Karen Kwiatkowski
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp/index.html

A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists
suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war.

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.

  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, 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, 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, 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 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.

  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, 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.

  - - - - - - - - - - - -


About the writer
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.

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