I came across an article by Karen Kwiatkowski today at "The Huffington Post" that I liked. What really impressed me is her credentials. How she feels about the current state of world affairs. Finally what she thinks of Ron Paul, like many of us do. I also find her to be a valuable information source for how the secret governments physical world mechanism functions and operates. This is all from a person who has the courage, honor, and integrity to expose key issues, but also the fact that she was there...

I will list some background on her, and then the article she wrote will be below that.

Karen U. Kwiatkowski (born 24 September 1960) is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency. Since retiring, she has become a noted critic of the U.S. government's involvement in Iraq. Kwiatkowski is primarily known for her insider essays which denounce a corrupting political influence on the course of military intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Colonel Kwiatkowski has an MA in Government from Harvard and a MS in Science Management from the University of Alaska. She has a PhD in World Politics from Catholic University; her thesis was on overt and covert war in Angola, A Case Study of the Implementation of the Reagan Doctrine. She has also published two books about U.S. policy towards Africa: African Crisis Response Initiative: Past Present and Future (US Army Peacekeeping Institute, 2000) and Expeditionary Air Operations in Africa: Challenges and Solutions (Air University Press, 2001).

Raised in western North Carolina, Kwiatkowski began her military career in 1982 as a second lieutenant. She served at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, providing logistical support to missions along the Chinese and Russian coasts. She also served in Spain and Italy. Kwiatkowski was then assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA), eventually becoming a speechwriter for the agency's director. After leaving the NSA in 1998 she became an analyst on sub-Saharan Africa policy for the Pentagon. Kwiatkowski was in her office in the Pentagon when it was attacked on September 11, 2001. From May, 2002 to February, 2003 she served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia directorate (NESA). While at NESA, she wrote a series of anonymous articles, Insider Notes from the Pentagon which appeared on the website of David Hackworth.

Kwiatkowski left NESA in February 2003 and retired from the Air Force the following month. In April 2003 she began writing a series of articles for the libertarian website LewRockwell.com. In June of that year she published an article in the Ohio Beacon Journal, "Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Inside Pentagon," which attracted additional notice. Since February 2004 she has written a biweekly column ("Without Reservations") for the website MilitaryWeek.

Her most comprehensive writings on the subject of a corrupting influence of the Pentagon on intelligence analysis leading up to the Iraq War appeared in a series of articles in The American Conservative magazine in December 2003 and in a March 2004 article on Salon.com. In the latter piece ("The New Pentagon Papers") she wrote:

I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.

Kwiatkowski described how a clique of officers led by retired Navy Captain Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA and former aide to Dick Cheney when the latter was Secretary of Defense, took control of military intelligence and how the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) grew and eventually turned into a censorship and disinformation organism controlling the NESA.

Following the American Conservative and Salon articles, Kwiatkowski began to receive criticism from several conservative sources that supported President Bush's policies. Michael Rubin of the National Review argued she had exaggerated her knowledge of the OSP's workings and claimed she had ties to Lyndon LaRouche. Republican U.S. Senator John Kyl criticized her in a speech on the Senate floor. On a Fox News program, host John Gibson and former Republican National Committee communications director Clifford May described her as an anarchist. Kwiatkowski responded by saying, among other points, that she had never supported or dealt with LaRouche. She requested and received a written apology from Senator John Kyl for his false statements about her.

In addition to her writings Kwiatkowski has appeared as a commentator in the documentaries Hijacking Catastrophe, Honor Betrayed and Why We Fight. She has been a registered member of the U.S. Libertarian Party since 1994 and spoke at the party's national convention in 2004. She is also a member of the Liberty and Power group weblog at the History News Network. Kwiatkowski currently lives with her family in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and works part-time as a farmer.

Kwiatkowski has been widely seen as an attractive Libertarian presidential candidate, especially given her military background and outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. In April 2006, Kwiatkowski received the New Hampshire Libertarian Party's 2008 vice-presidential nomination (the Libertarian Party chooses presidential and vice-presidential nominees on separate ballot, and campaigns for the two positions are often independent).

Quotations

"I came to share with many NESA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry. What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon."

"Why we fight? I think we fight 'cause too many people are not standing up, saying 'I'm not doing this any more.'"

"If you join the United States military now, you are not defending the United States of America; you are helping certain policy-makers pursue an imperial agenda."

"It wasn't intelligence — it was propaganda. 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."

"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."

"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"

Ron Paul, Iowa and the Presidency

by Karen Kwiatkowski

A lot of people are frightened of Dr. Ron Paul's possible presidency. They're scared to talk about it, to consider it, or recognize its possibility. Like so many frightened people, they are putting their heads in the sand, and hoping it will all just go away.

Give us a snarky political professional like Guiliani or Clinton, or a nicely coiffed white family man like Romney or Edwards. Give us a nice neoconservative grandpa like Fred Thompson, or a grouchy neoconservative grandpa like McCain. Give us an Obama -- for a change of pace in everything but currently established domestic and foreign policies.

But by golly, don't dare threaten the establishment with Jeffersonian democratic vision and Washingtonian non-interventionism. Don't boldly challenge the NYC/DC axis of politics with sheer constitutionalism. Better yet, don't remind us that the American president is not the commander-in-chief of everybody but a narrowly defined and legally constrained institution that is only equal -- and certainly subject -- to our judicial and legislative bodies.

Ron Paul, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich are the only candidates who seem to understand this. They are also the only candidates who will quickly, if not immediately, end the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Wait a sec -- I mean end it peacefully. Ultimately, Iraqis and their supporters around the world will bring down the American occupation -- but they will do so limb by limb, heart by heart, and soul by soul. They will kill thousands of us and themselves before it reaches that inevitable point of non-occupation and honest political independence. Only Paul and two underfunded Democratic contenders offer wisdom to Americans across the nation who are hungry for wisdom, at least in foreign policy.

However -- it is in domestic policy where Ron Paul completes the package. Unlike the democratic longshots, and the candidacy of GuiliClintoRomnObamThomEdwaCain, Ron Paul is about real freedom. Freedom to choose, freedom to live, freedom to decide for ourselves. He offers freedom from excessive government mandates, excessive rules and regulations, excessive confiscation of our life and property. In this, Paul is the only real conservative in the group, and yes, perhaps the only radical.

Social planners of all sorts -- some more Marxist in orientation, others more nationalist -- present themselves as the American presidential front runners. The media focuses cameras on their faces, murmurs over their every word, and wonders if America and the world will really like them as Most Supreme Leader of the World.

Ron Paul, humbly and simply, honors the Constitution -- and perhaps this makes him boring to mainstream media. When asked recently how he would use the great power of the executive office, circa 2009, Paul indicated he'd use his power to restrain the natural temptation to abuse that mostly unconstitutional concentration of power. He'd then work to restore a constitutionally established presidency -- in part by revoking the many executive orders to which we have all become inured.

Ron Paul may not excite the mainstream press, establishment policy cheerleaders, big investors in government programs, or the military-industrial complex. But Ron Paul really excites a whole heck of a lot of regular people -- and puts the scare in the rest of them.

Ron's latest odds in the Iowa Straw poll are 8 to 1 -- and the big Republican candidates who represent all-spending, all-war, all-the-time are worried. So worried, many of them aren't even coming to Iowa.

Those who wish to discredit Ron Paul as a viable candidate don't point out his popularity among traditional Republicans, Democrats and Independents. They don't point out that his "Don't Tread on Me" libertarian streak is shared by half the adults in this country, and three quarters of the teenagers. They ignore his grass roots support, the money and the passion that flows steadily into his campaign.

The Republican Party, its Democratic emulators, and mainstream media are living dinosaurs. All refuse to pull their heads out of the sand and face the issues that really touch Americans, and to deliver what Americans really want for themselves, their families and their government. And unlike in previous elections, nobody in American really, truly, cares what mainstream media thinks. It's not that Katie Couric and her ilk aren't nice people. It's just that times have changed.

These dinosaurs -- and the theropods that report the news -- are increasingly irrelevant. I believe that the other contenders for the Presidency will soon begin to adopt Paul's message and attempt to promote his agenda of freedom and peace, or they will become politically extinct. As a peace and freedom-loving American, I can't wait.

Anonymous essays 2002-2003

• Deep Throat Returns: Insider Notes from The Pentagon, Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski's anonymous essays while still at the Pentagon. (Anonymous essays number 1 to 39)
• Insider Notes from The Pentagon: Ready to go to war?, January 31, 2003. (Anonymous essay number 40)
• Insider Notes from The Pentagon: Fear of God, February 3, 2003. (No.41)
• Insider Notes from The Pentagon: Life is Tough All Over, February 8, 2003. (No.42)
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love CBW, March 10, 2003. (No.47)
• The Souffle has Fallen, March 29, 2003. (No.49)
• Insider Notes from The Pentagon: Those Awful Turks, May 28, 2003. (No.51)