www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/4/3853
Go to Original The New Pentagon Papers By Karen Kwiatkowski Salon Wednesday 10 March 2004 A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremist s 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 US Air Force. I had served as a communications officer in the field and in acquisition pro grams, as a speechwriter for the National Security Agency director, and on the Headquarters Air Force and the office of the secretary of defen se staffs covering African affairs. I had completed Air Command and Sta ff College and Navy War College seminar programs, two master's degrees, and everything but my PhD 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 deci sion making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution we had all sworn to uphold. Ben Franklin's comment that the Constitutional Convention o f 1787 in Philadelphia had delivered "a republic, madam, if you can kee p it" would come to have special meaning. In the spring of 2002, I was a cynical but willing staff officer, a lmost 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). By May, the call transmogrified into a postha ste 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 ve ry much alive, I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold War anti-communism and n eo-imperialism -- walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the cl othing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war between good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be residen t mainly in the Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics and radi cals. But there were other enemies within, anyone who dared voice any s kepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of State Colin P owell and Gen. From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formati on of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter sta ges of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of US M iddle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Nea r 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 a ppointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditi onal relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and US intelli gence agencies. I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measure d and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and dis tortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehood s to both Congress and the executive office of the president. While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence p roduction and American foreign policy matched closely with the well-pub lished desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, man y of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that th is agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presente d to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a fear-ped dling 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. To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary o f defense for NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcome d me into the fold. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level Bush appointee, the common ass umption was that he had connections, if not capability. I would later f ind out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade ea rlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker o f the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years and had completed hi s PhD at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. While his Navy care er had not granted him flag rank, he had it now and was not shy about c omparing his place in the pecking order with various three- and four-st ar generals and admirals in and out of the Pentagon. Name dropping incl uded references to getting this or that document over to Scooter, or re sponding 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 Bushi te shared conversations and stories indicating that something deliberat e and manipulative was happening to NESA. Key professional personnel, l ongtime civilian professionals holding the important billets in NESA, w ere replaced early on during the transition. Longtime officer director Joe McMillan was reassigned to the National Defense University. The dir ector's job in the time of transition was to help bring the newly appoi nted 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. Remo ving such a critical continuity factor was not only unusual but also se emed like willful handicapping. At the time, I didn't realize that the expertise on Middle East pol icy was not only being removed, but was also being exchanged for that f rom 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 inf orm defense policymakers in the Pentagon explains a great deal about th e neoconservative approach on the Middle East and the disastrous mistak es made in Washington and in Iraq in the past two years. I soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by deb ate or experience with the early Bush administration replacement of the civilian head of the Israel, Lebanon and Syria desk office with a youn g political appointee from the Washington Institute, David Schenker. Wo rd was that the former experienced civilian desk officer tended to be e venhanded toward the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, but there were complaints and he was gone. He was a smart, serious, hardworking guy, and the pro ud author of a book on the chances for Palestinian democracy. Country d esk officers were rarely political appointees. In my years at the Penta gon, this was the only "political" I knew doing that type of high-stres s 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 mon ths after I arrived. I learned that there was indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My f irst day in the office, a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily a dvised me that if I wanted to be successful here, I'd better remember n ot to say anything positive about the Palestinians. This belied officia l US 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 th e Pentagon could have implemented and, worse, was implementing its own foreign policy had not yet occurred to me. Throug...
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