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.

She would soon conclude that the OSP — a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld — was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.

Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still o­n active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted o­n the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran.

As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the o­nly way she could viably resist what she now terms the “expansionist, imperialist” policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public fight against them.

She left the military last March, the same week that troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her real name o­n her Web reports and began accepting speaking invitations. “I’m now a soldier for the truth,” she said in a speech last week at Cal Poly Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with her.

L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship between NESA and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the group set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney? Was the OSP, in reality, an intelligence operation to act as counter to the CIA?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region. It is under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the Iraq desk was there. We shared the same space, and we were all part of the same general group. At that time it was expanding. Contractors and employees were coming though it wasn’t clear what they were doing.

In August of 2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new spaces and moved into them. It was told to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.

But developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that’s more what they really did. They pushed an agenda o­n Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon — to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.

You retired when the war broke out and have been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports anonymously while still in uniform and while still o­n active service. Why did you take that rather unusual step?

Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Luti’s organization, what I was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy — an invasion of a sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.

So I started writing what I considered to be funny, short essays for my own sanity. Eventually, I e-mailed them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them under the title “Insider Notes From the Pentagon.” I wrote 28 of those columns from August 2002 until I retired.

There you were, a career military officer, a Pentagon analyst, a conservative who had given two decades to this work. What provoked you to become first a covert and later a public dissident?

Like most people, I’ve always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, I’m sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.

This was creatively produced propaganda spread not o­nly through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers — the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President’s Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views — the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer — was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres.

How did you experience this in your day-to-day work?

There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002.

You heard this in staff meetings?

The discussions were o­nes of this sort of inevitability. The concerns were o­nly that some policymakers still had to get o­nboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong — but that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush to go back to the U.N. and forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans.

US army private Jeremy Hinzman fought in Afghanistan and considers himself a patriot. But when his unit was ordered to Iraq, he refused to go and embarked o­n a radical journey that could make legal history.

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I vowed to myself, to my wife and son, that I would not go to Iraq. To me it was a war fought o­n false pretenses. Dr Blix [the former chief UN weapons inspector] went time and time again [to Iraq] and he said there are no weapons of mass destruction. They are exploiting the events of September 11, based o­n greed and our need for oil. .

Jeremy Hinzman fled to Canada with his wife, Nga Nguyen, and their son, Liam, in January.

<!--/endimage/-->Private first class Hinzman left the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, taking his wife and son to Canada. Officially, he is AWOL (absent without leave), and, instead of fighting insurgents, he is battling the US military in the Canadian courts.

This month Pvt Hinzman, 25, filed legal papers to become the first US soldier objecting to the Iraq war to be granted refugee status in Canada. His case is expected to be a test of new Canadian immigration laws and the country's traditional role of accepting refugees from the US military.

An estimated 250 Americans every year seek refugee status in Canada, the vast majority making mental health claims, according to Jeffrey House, a Toronto criminal defense lawyer who represents Pvt Hinzman.

"This is the first time a soldier from the Iraq war is seeking protection. He does not want to fight in Iraq and he will do any lawful thing to stay in Canada."

If he returns to the US, Pvt Hinzman could be prosecuted as a deserter, according to Sergeant Pam Smith, a spokes woman for the 82nd Airborne. "We don't have time to go and track down people who go AWOL," she told the Associated Press. "We're fighting a war."

On the telephone from Toronto, Pvt Hinzman said: "I signed up to defend my country, not carry out acts of aggression."

He hopes other soldiers will refuse to serve in Iraq and come to Canada: "I think I am the first, but I encourage others to do the same. I do not want to sound seditious, but there is strength in numbers."

Pvt Hinzman told the Fayetteville Observer that he had liked the subsidized housing and groceries offered by the army and the promises of money for college. "It seemed like a good financial decision," he said. "I had a romantic vision of what the army was."

From the start of basic training, he was upset by the continuous chanting about blood and killing, and what he called the dehumanization of the enemy. "It's like watching some kind of scary movie, except I was in it," he said.

"People would just walk around saying things like 'I want to kill somebody'."

Human rights lawyers and religious counselors in the US predict that the case is the start of a huge wave of protests and legal moves by military personnel and their families.

Volunteers at the GI Rights Hotline, a legal aid center for soldiers, are receiving about 3,500 calls a month from military personnel looking to leave the armed forces.

With a growing number of dead and wounded, the Pentagon is struggling to maintain troop levels in Iraq. Nearly 40% of those now deployed are national guard or reserve troops. "These guys are not going to re-enlist, that is for sure," said Giorgio DeShaun Ra'Shadd, a lawyer in Centennial, Colorado, who represents several military families. "Soldiers are fighting to get out of the service."

In late January the Pentagon canceled retirement dates for an estimated 40,000 soldiers. This unilateral move postpones soldiers' return to civilian life.

Military families erupted in protest at the decision and immediately launched websites and demonstrations.

"Can the US president with the signature of a pen indenture tens of thousands of US citizens? That is the question we are now investigating," said Luke Hiken, a lawyer in San Francisco. "This is a tremendous militarization of civilian families. Soldiers are now being asked to stay for two more years. This takes civilian families and turns them into military families."

Based o­n his work with US military personnel in Germany, Mr Hiken estimates that there are "thousands" of soldiers who want to escape from Iraq. "When they brought them home for vacation in the US, about 15%-20% simply never went back. They stayed with their families."

Pvt Hinzman said his family was part of his reason for going AWOL

"I vowed to myself, to my wife and son, that I would not go to Iraq. To me it was a war fought o­n false pretenses. Dr Blix [the former chief UN weapons inspector] went time and time again [to Iraq] and he said there are no weapons of mass destruction.

"They are exploiting the events of September 11, based o­n greed and our need for oil."

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

The corporate media doesn't talk about it much, but the United States is rapidly o­n its way to becoming three separate nations.

First, there are a small number of incredibly wealthy people who own and control more and more of our country. Second, there is a shrinking middle class in which ordinary people are, in most instances, working longer hours for lower wages and benefits. Third, an increasing number of Americans are living in abject poverty - going hungry and sleeping out o­n the streets.

There has always been a wealthy elite in this country, and there has always been a gap between the rich and the poor. But the disparities in wealth and income that currently exist in this country have not been seen in over a hundred years. Today, the richest o­ne percent own more wealth than the bottom ninety-five percent, and the CEOs of large corporations earn more than 500 times what their average employees make. The nation's 13,000 wealthiest families, 1/100th of o­ne percent of the population, receive almost as much income as the poorest 20 million families in America.

(07-06) 12:40 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

An envoy sent by the CIA to Africa to investigate allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program contends the Bush administration manipulated his findings, possibly to strengthen the rationale for war.

That conclusion came o­n Sunday from Joseph Wilson, former U.S. ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, who was dispatched in February 2002 to explore whether Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. That desert country is the world's third-largest producer of mined uranium.

Writing in a New York Times op-ed piece, Wilson said it did not take him long "to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place."

In an interview o­n NBC's "Meet the Press," Wilson insisted his doubts about the purported Iraq-Niger connection reached the highest levels of government, including Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

In fact, he said, Cheney's office inquired about the purported Niger-Iraq link.

"The question was asked of the CIA by the office of the vice president. The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked, and that response was based upon my trip out there," said Wilson.

Yet nearly a year after he had returned and briefed CIA officials, the assertion that President Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain uranium from Africa was included in President Bush's State of the Union address as the nation marched toward war with Saddam's Iraq.

The British and Italian governments initially reported the possible Niger-Iraq ties to the United States. Britain issued a public statement o­n the matter in September 2002, a few months before the president's speech.

If the British and Bush were referring to Niger, then "that information was erroneous, and ... they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British White Paper and the president's State of the Union address," Wilson said o­n NBC's "Meet the Press."

He said there are o­nly two conclusions to draw: "Either the administration has some information that it has not shared with the public, or, yes, they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision in a case that had already been made, a decision that had been made to go to war."

About a month after Bush's speech, the United Nations determined the uranium reports were based mostly o­n forged documents. The White House, however, has maintained Bush's assertion about Iraq and uranium was supported by more evidence than the forged material.

Wilson served as ambassador to Gabon in the first Bush administration and later helped direct Africa policy for President Clinton's National Security Council. More recently, he had argued against using force in Iraq as opposed to strict containment.

Discussing Wilson's comments, several lawmakers expressed misgivings as they made the rounds of Sunday's television talk shows about what transpired.

One of them -- Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, top Democrat o­n the Senate Intelligence Committee -- said o­n CNN's "Late Edition" that it goes to the question of, "was there an abuse in intelligence, or was the intelligence wrong?"

He said, "In either case, it's not a happy outcome, and has to be fixed."