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Teddy Kennedy's New Expert
The hottest foreign policy authority on the left is Karen
Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked for
several months in the Pentagon's Near East-South Asia office during
the run-up to the war in Iraq. She was prominently cited by Senator
Ted Kennedy in a March 5 address to the Council on Foreign Relations
questioning the president's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Her
work is getting the full promotional treatment from Salon and
its new Washington Bureau chief Sidney Blumenthal, the former head
conspiratorialist of the Clinton White House. Salon
celebrated the opening of the new bureau by publishing a heavily
hyped Kwiatkowski opus headlined "The new Pentagon papers."
Kwiatkowski claims she witnessed "neoconservative agenda bearers
within [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] usurp measured and
carefully considered assessment, and through suppression and
distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact
falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the
president."
Whether she's a reliable witness is something her new patrons may
or may not have inquired into. But Kennedy staffers may want to
Google her work for the antiwar libertarians at
lewrockwell.com as well as the pseudonymous pieces she's
acknowledged publishing on hackworth.com and Soldiers for
the Truth when she was still in uniform and working at the
Department of Defense. They will find no evidence of Kwiatkowski's
reliability as a judge of "measured and carefully considered
assessment." They will find plenty of evidence that their boss could
use a new speechwriter.
Consider: In her writings for Soldiers for the Truth,
which ran under the heading "Deep Throat Returns," Kwiatkowski
accused the Pentagon of planning to "build greater Zion" in the
Middle East and decried the "Zionist political cult that has lassoed
the E-Ring"--a reference to the Secretary of Defense and other
high-ranking Pentagon officials.
In a later article on lewrockwell.com, written after she'd
retired, Kwiatkowski conceded that these anonymous articles barely
did justice to the frustration she'd experienced at the Pentagon:
"Hard core anarchists and other purists might criticize me for not
just throwing a few hand grenades over the office dividers and
letting the chips fall where they may. But by this time I had
already submitted my retirement request, and selfishly after my
twenty [years of service], I wanted to spend the money, not time in
Leavenworth."
Other gems from Kwiatkowski's oeuvre:
* "We went to war in Afghanistan--planned of course before
9/11/2001 due to some Taliban non-cooperation regarding a certain
trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline, and the requisite security for said
pipeline."
* "We once had something like a free market Republic, but all
evidence now points to a maturing fascist state flexing its
muscles."
* "Bush and his neoconservative foreign policy implementers
believe they are today's men of destiny. But the claim of destiny
for a whole nation or a constructed state has long been the ultimate
tool of the fascist, the super-nationalist, the propagandist worthy
of a Lenin or a Hitler or a Pol Pot."
* "Two invasions and occupations in two years to reshape the
Islamic world in preparation for World War IV is anything but
conservative. Fascist imperialism touched by Sparta revived can
never, even with pretty please and sugar on top, be
conservatism."
Normally a collegial sort, THE SCRAPBOOK can't bring itself to
congratulate Salon on the opening of its new bureau.
Carl Levin's Faulty Memory
Carl Levin gave a typical performance during Senate Armed
Services Committee hearings last week. With the exception of Ted
Kennedy, Levin has been the most outspoken of the many Democrats who
warned ominously about Iraq's WMD threat before the war and now
accuse the Bush administration of making it all up.
Levin's thesis is simple: Warmongers in the Pentagon and the
White House lied about intelligence to go to war. But Levin himself
has been--there's no way to say it politely--less than honest about
the same intelligence. At last week's hearing, he praised the
"caution and the nuance" of the CIA's then-classified July 2002
assessment of the threat from Iraq and al Qaeda. Levin read it
aloud:
Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line
short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or
[chemical and biological weapons] against the United States.
Fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide
Washington a stronger cause for making war, Iraq probably would
attempt clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland if Baghdad
feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were
imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge. Such attacks,
more likely with biological than chemical agents, probably would
be carried out by Iraq's special forces or intelligence
operatives. Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that
only an organization such as al Qaeda could perpetrate the type of
terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct. In such
circumstances, he might decide that the extreme step of assisting
the Islamic terrorists in conducting a CBW attack against the
United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by
taking a large number of victims with him.
Most people might think this was good and sufficient reason to
take out Saddam. Levin refers to it as "the CIA's doubts about
Iraq's collaboration with al Qaeda," and he complains that the
assessment was "buried in classification from the public eye on the
eve of our going to war."
Was it, really? Well, no.
On October 7, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet sent an
unclassified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee that
committee Democrats hyped to the media. Because war was being
considered, he said, "We have made unclassified material available
to further the Senate's forthcoming open debate on a Joint
Resolution concerning Iraq." Then, in unclassified language that
alert readers will remember from three paragraphs ago, Tenet lays
out the alleged doubts:
Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short
of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical and
biological weapons] against the United States. Should Saddam
conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he
probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist
actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with
Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or
CBW. Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting
Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United
States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a
large number of victims with him.
As Tenet's letter makes clear, the CIA's "doubts" were not
"buried in classification" before the war. They were publicly
available some six months before the war. Is it possible that Levin
was simply unaware the information had been declassified--making him
less a political prevaricator and more a clueless congressman?
Possible? Yes. Likely? No. Levin is cited by name in Tenet's
declassification letter. Not to mention, Levin has repeatedly
mischaracterized the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in his
public statements. "The intel didn't say there was a direct
relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq."
If "the intel" didn't make that claim, the Director of Intel came
close. In the same Oct. 7 letter, Tenet wrote of "senior level
contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade." He wrote of
"solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members,
including some that have been in Baghdad." The same "credible
reporting" reveals that "Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda
members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional
bombs." Most striking, Tenet reported that "Baghdad's links to
terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action."
Levin never mentions these assessments. He's right about one
thing: Someone isn't being honest about pre-war intelligence.
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