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Finding Neos
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By Paul Shrug, Section News
Posted on Mon Mar 15th, 2004 at 11:21:34 AM PDT
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It's probably not a stretch to assume that the majority of this board's users question the Bush Administration's justification for entering into war with Iraq. Recent Congressional testimonies by CIA director George Tenet brought new skepticism that, if the Bush administration didn't outright lie about the CIA's information on Iraq's capability for mass destruction, they might've simply overreacted.
It goes deeper than that, according to retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.
In a thickly detailed opinion column for Salon, Kwiatkowski tells her story of serving for the Near South East Asia directorate, and watching up close the development of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.
During that time, Kwiatkowski became the "Deep Throat" of the web -- secretly posting her observations and thoughts from inside the beast. According to her, the level of propaganda, neoconservative hysteria, and manipulation of information rivals anything the Soviet Union might've done at the height of the Cold War.
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"I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold War anti-communism and neo-imperialism -- walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the clothing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war between good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be resident mainly in the Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics and radicals. But there were other enemies within, anyone who dared voice any skepticism about their grand plans..."
Kwiatkowski's experience saw the implementation of key appointees whose purpose was to deliberately reshape and distort the flow of information from the Pentagon to the administration. By the time that information had gotten out to the public, it had become a simple message of fear and xenophobia. Inside the walls of the OSP, Kwiatkowski claims, most information that didn't support a strike against Iraq or Al-Qeida was relegated to footnotes in their documents -- for all intents and purposes, eliminated.
The climate in these proceedings appears frightening -- hardline neoconservatives are reported to have said that anyone who expressed skepticism about rushing to war was a "traitor."
Kwiatkowski had some nerve. While serving, she adopted a sort of "Deep Throat" persona, reporting on the "artificial worlds" and "the stupid naiveté of neocon assumptions" floating inside the Pentagon walls. The division between truth and fiction boiled down to a simple matter of careerism -- line-towers kept their jobs; truth-tellers did not.
Remember Pat Buchanan's "holy war" proclamation at the '92 Republican convention? The one that might've cost Bush Sr. his job? Looks like Buchanan wasn't kidding -- neoconservatives got their holy war, they just had to go behind the American public's back to get it. |
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