Interesting interview with Pentagon whistleblower

[Calcas]

http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/

 

[Azure]

Funny thing is, the CIA doesn't brief the Pentagon with their intelligence before they take it to the President.

Anyone with half a brain knows the relationship each intelligence service has with the other, and anyone with quarter of a brain knows that Tenet responded directly to the President.

I don't doubt that politics played a big part in how the intelligence was viewed, but the CIA did not go to the Pentagon with their evidence, and told the Joint Chiefs to take it to the President.

And we have this gem...

"We have a Congress that failed in every way to ask the right questions, to hold the President to account. Our Congress failed us miserably, and that's because many in Congress are beholden to the Military Industrial Complex."

Rrrright.

Oh nooo...

"The reason we're in Iraq first off has not honestly been told to the American people; it certainly had nothing to do with the liberation of the Iraqi people. It was never part of the agenda and it's not part of the agenda now."

I bet she believes Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks as well.

Blood for Oil!!!!!!!!!!

 

[davefoc]

I read the whole interview and it was interesting

I found this exchange about neocons particularly interesting:

JOSH SCHEER: Now, Karen, I heard you make a reference to [terrorism as a tactic] ...Chuck Hagel made reference to terrorism as a tactic in a speech, and [how] it’s not a country, and you talk about Ron Paul. Why have the neo-cons been allowed [to do this] , they’re not, to me, they don’t seem like the Republicans that I grew up with.
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: No, no, they’re not. And if you look at the history of neo-conservatism, it really traces its roots, well back to Trotsky, but if you go more recent, back to who was the guy, Senator from Boeing (Henry Jackson) they used to call him… big Democratic, 30 year Senator out of Washington State. And Richard Perle was on his staff, Wolfowitz I think was inspired by him. And he was a Democrat during the Cold War. And he was a pro, or I should say strongly anti-Communist democrat, kind of a strong defense democrat. And these guys migrated, particularly after Jimmy Carter, because Jimmy Carter, remember, what was he doing, he was trying to make peace. Remember that, somebody got a Peace Prize out of it, I don’t know what it was, some kind of approach between Arabs and Israelis, and Carter was part of that. And that alienated a great many of these folks who now we know as neo-conservatives because they have two things that they care about, one is strong defense, for whatever reason they like that, an activist foreign policy, and pro-Israel, no questions asked policy. So many of these conservative, pro-defense democrats, anti-Communist democrats abandoned the democratic party at the time of Jimmy Carter, particularly after the time of Jimmy Carter and his summit working on Middle East peace. And they came over to eth Republican party, and of course they came over with a great deal of money and a great deal of political influence and a great deal of voters. So now they’re in the Republican party, and absolutely, this happened, late 1970s. so it is not, these are not the Republicans that we grew up thinking about, but they are in the Republican party now. Of course the Republican party now isn’t anything like what I thought it was, it’s certainly no Goldwater party, it’s a party of big spending, it’s a party of corruption. What do you want me to say? They love big government, they haven’t seen a big government plan they didn’t like.

One of the things that I wonder about as a person that has been a Republican most of his life is whether I have changed or the Republicans have changed.

A significant portion of current Republican ideology seems dominated by neocon ideas. Was it always like this and I just missed it or is something different going on. I think her view is that something different is going on now.

This portion of the interview really goes to what her central point was:

...And he announced to us that from now on, action officers, staff officers such as myself and all my peers, at least in that office, and I presume this went all the way through the rest of policy, but we were told that when we needed to fill in data, putting it in papers that we would send up, doing our job, as we did our daily job, we were no longer to look at CIA and DIA intelligence, we were simply to call the Office of Special Plans and they would send down to us talking points, which we would incorporate verbatim no deletions, no additions, no modifications into every paper that we did. And of course, that was very unusual and all the action officers are looking at each other like, well that’s interesting. We’re not to look at the intelligence any more, we’re simply to go to this group of political appointees and they will provide to us word for word what we should say about Iraq, about WMD and about terrorism. And this is exactly what our orders were. And there were people [Laughs] a couple of people, and I have to say, I was not one of these people who said, “you know, I’m not gonna do that, I’m not gonna do that because there’s something I don’t like about it, it’s incorrect in some way.” And they experimented with sending up papers that did not follow those instructions, and those papers were 100 percent of the time returned back for correction. So we weren’t allowed to put out anything except what Office of Special Plans was producing for us....

I think put in the context of the circumstances and facts that surround the pre Iraq war intelligence her story is very credible.

 

[Schneibster]

Fascinating interview. And a look into what someone who's been there and done that thinks a campaign against Iran would look like; no, we're not invading, we're just gonna fly over and blow stuff up. And the Air Force and Navy wanting to get their chance at some glory. Interesting viewpoint, especially from someone who's been there and seen how they think.