No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Ltc. Kwiatkowski describes the propaganda used by the Bush Administration in lieu of Intelligence

Now retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is a lifelong conservative who was in the Pentagon for four and a half years as a political/military desk officer at the Defense DepartmentÂ’s office for Near East South Asia (NESA). That is a policy arm of the Pentagon. She describes the process used by Bush conservatives to push their agenda to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein.
LA Weekly

"Like most people, I've always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, IÂ’m sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia."

The Pentagon's Office of Special Plans pushed an agenda on Iraq, and "they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States. "

"This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers, the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President's Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres."

The article reports a number of instances when the Bush administration revised the intelligence reports to show that there were a number of nations who were enemies of the US when the intelligence showed that they were actually trying to become accepted by the world as responsible nations. Libya was particularly pointed out.

"Abe was the director of the Office of Special Plans. He comes from an academic background; he's definitely a neoconservative. He is a student of Leo Strauss from the University of Chicago, so he has that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final proving authority on all the talking points that were generated from the Office of Special Plans and that were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to staff officers. And it appears to me they were also distributed to the Vice President's Office and to the presidential speechwriters. Much of the phraseology that was in our talking points consists of the same things I heard the president say."

"We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved."

"It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times."

As an example, "one item that was dropped was in November [2002]. It was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein's intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn't happen."

In other words, the war on Iraq was based on lies put out or approved by Vice President Dick Cheney. He knew what he wanted, and facts and reality need not apply, because it was not to be considered.

posted by Richard at 4:21 PM