Home | Hegemony | Archives | Blogroll | Resume | Links | RSS Feed | subscribe by email    

Flagrancy

to Reason

 

blog roll


    tax me if you can..., 2004-02-19 22:18:45 | Main | how to sell land reform to a capitalist..., 2004-02-22 19:36:48

    Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski:

    took early retirement from an analyst post in the Pentagon February of last year, where she worked alongside the Office of Special Plans. She has a number of anti-war columns at lewrockwell.com, a series of three articles on preparations for the Iraq war inside the Pentagon published at MilitaryWeek.com and elsewhere, and only by some random string of other people have I come across a recent interview with her in the LA Weekly. The interesting bits:

    The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress....

    The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent — a billion dollars! — by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.

    ...there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq.

    One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions...

    The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter — to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important — that is, if you hold that is America’s role in the world...

    The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 — selling his oil for euros....

    You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?

    Know what it feels like? It feels like duty.

    Her counter-propaganda tracts, written while still working in the Pentagon, can be found at the Soldiers for the Truth website in their archive: Insider Notes from the Pentagon, in case anybody needs a quick refresher course on how to high-step it to war.

    I've never heard of her until now, and I watch a lot of CNN. Ya'd think she'd end up on the talkies here and there. She, of course, was right about the WMD before the war, there were none: interestingly she had access to all the sensitive information about those WMD that couldn't be released to the public for security reasons, but having access to this didn't manage to convince her. Must have been some real quality stuff.


:: posted by buermann @ 2004-02-21 17:15:41 CST | link





    go ahead, express that vague notion
    Name:
    Email:
    Homepage:
    Comment

    your turing test:

journals, notes,
and
other curmudgeonry

Enforcing
American
Hegemony
- A Timeline -

Oil for Nothing:
US Holds On Humanitarian Supplies
Iraq: 1997-2001


the good book
and other cultural
artifacts


The Autobiography
of
Mother Jones


Contact Info:
buermann@mastodon