Looking for an interview..

[wtf]

with a woman who had worked for the Office of Special Plans. I think it appeared in the LA Times? Thanks for any help! :)

[papau]

1. Francis Brooke, the DC lobbyist for the group. (Newsweek, 12/15/03 )

Two other links:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq&iraq_themes=officeOfSpecialPlans

[papau]

4. Karen Kwiatkowski of DOD Intel indeed seems a better guess!

"After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when — in the months leading up to the war in Iraq — she felt she was being “propagandized” by her own bosses.

With master’s degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department’s office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon.

Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP’s task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis."

[Petrodollar Warfare]

2. I think you're looking for this article...

<<Karen has been a life-long conservative and a *real* patriot. Unfortuately she is an endangered species...>>>

'Soldier for the Truth'
Exposing Bush’s talking-points war
by Marc Cooper
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php

<<Snippet>>>

Marc: So if, as you argue, they knew there weren’t any of these WMD, then what exactly drove the neoconservatives to war?

Karen: The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And 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. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.

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. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.

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. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.

The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May <2003> switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.

[G_j]

3. The Lie Factory

is excellent:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

The Lie Factory
Late last year, a special Mother Jones investigation detailed how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest

January/February 2004 Issue


It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war. ..more..

----- & by Karen----------------------------------
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/31/clarke/index_np.html

That audacious Richard Clarke

The Bush-Cheney campaign is riding a rickety horse to November: Their approach to war on terror.
Editor's note: This column first appeared as the March 29 edition of 'Without Reservation', Karen Kwiatkowski's biweekly column for MilitaryWeek.com.

By Karen Kwiatkowski

-----------------------------------------

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Kwiatkowski-Pentagon-Kinght-Ridder31jul03.htm

Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Inside Pentagon

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI / Ohio Beacon Journal 31jul03