JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Pentagon has some explaining to do. One of the former employees — one of its former employees recently published an article saying, quote, “I suggested to my boss that if this was as good as it got, some folks on the Pentagon’s E-ring may be sitting beside Saddam Hussein in the war crimes tribunals.”

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is a former senior Pentagon Middle East specialist who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement in April of this year. This is what she has to say: quote, “What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense.”

AMY GOODMAN: Kwiatkowski also charges that groupthink, characterized by uncritical acceptance of prevailing points of view, is the hallmark of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy development. In a lengthy defense published in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, the associate editor of the editorial page described OSD as, quote, “the world’s most effective think tank.”

Well, we turn now to Karen Kwiatkowski, recently retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, who spent most of the final three years of her military service in the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Under Secretariat for Policy.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, can you explain why you’ve come to the conclusions that you have?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: When I first was assigned into Near East-South Asia policy, I had already worked in OSD, in Office of Secretary of Defense, for almost two years. So I understood, you know, how it worked. I was kind of experienced in the bureaucratic process and the people and that kind of thing. And I worked sub-Saharan Africa, so I knew kind of what to expect. When I was assigned in May of 2002 over to Near East-South Asia under — I was still under Mr. Feith’s policy organization, but a different — it was Mr. Luti, Dr. Luti, at this time, who was in charge of Near East-South Asia. Things were very different as far as the bureaucratic process. And it was just very interesting. It opened my eyes. I didn’t understand why processes weren’t followed exactly as I expected. And not that we follow processes exactly, but certainly in terms of intelligence, in terms of working with our counterparts at the State Department, things were different there. And so I started observing and talking to people. And it was something that basically changed my view of what we were doing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the things you mentioned in your op-ed piece is that the professional civil service corps and the professional — the active-duty military personnel were somehow bypassed, and basically political appointees in various agencies were making decisions. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Yeah, that’s — political appointees in the Pentagon and political appointees throughout the Washington bureaucracy, that is normal. There’s nothing unusual about the fact that you will have political appointees certainly in key positions. But what we saw — what I saw, in Near East-South Asia in particular, were key offices that require functional expertise filled with political appointees who may or may not have been qualified. In some cases, they were somewhat qualified, but it was almost an entire lifting of jobs that you usually rely on, I would say, serious professionals, instead putting political appointees in those jobs. Now, political appointees fit very well in policy positions, in positions where you’re making — well, I hate to use the word “propaganda,” but where you’re putting forth, you know, an image, political — the Public Affairs Office is a fine place to put political appointees. But if you’re going to plan a war, if you’re going to plan an occupation, you really need to rely on the soldiers and the civilian professionals who have experience in that. That’s not what I saw in NESA. In NESA, key positions — all key positions, regardless of the depth of the requirement of that job, were filled with people that were handpicked from outside the organization, and very few of them had either military experience or civil servant experience, professional experience in the intelligence community, that kind of thing.

AMY GOODMAN: NESA being Near East-South Asia. NESA being —

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Yes. Near East-South Asia is Bangladesh to Marrakech, the way we have it organized. It’s just a series of country desks, which obviously includes, you know, the Middle Eastern countries.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in one of your pieces about a comment that you made to your supervisor. Can you talk about that, as you came to the end of your military service before you retired?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Yeah. At the end of my time at NESA, which was very shortly before I was retired anyway, they had — our deputy director had forwarded out what he saw as a helpful email to all the people in NESA. And he said, “This email will help you understand what’s going on,” because in February, you know, we didn’t know — the war was imminent, and nobody knew exactly when it would start, but certainly it was on everyone’s mind. And there were a lot of questions. Of course, the media was lots of things. So people didn’t know what was going on. And he sent this email out, which the contents of email was the State Department’s response to a series of questions from a Middle Eastern country that, you know, was looking at this and saying, “Hey, how are you planning to do all these things?” And there were a number of questions relating to the aftermath, you know, the post-war scenarios. And there were, I think, 51 questions, something — there was a large number of questions. And the answers were there. Well, it was sent out in a helpful, constructive way to all of us, to read these questions and read these answers, and you guys will be — we’ll be all better informed and feel maybe more confident.

Well, when I read it, I didn’t feel better informed and more confident. I would say 25 to 30% of the questions had answers such as “To be determined. We’re thinking about that. We’re going to look into that. Yeah, we’ve been — you know, we’re aware that that’s a question you have,” that kind of thing. And so I responded back to my boss, just directly to him, in an email, in, you know, one email to my boss. I said, “Well, I appreciate you sending this, but it doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me very concerned.” And then, you know, I mentioned the — and it was an email that had, I guess, what you would call sarcasm. It’s not the best form of humor, but it was a sarcastic email. And it said, “If this is as good as it gets, then we’re going to have some problems.” So —

AMY GOODMAN: You actually suggested that —

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — maybe U.S. officials should be tried for war crimes?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: I didn’t say they shouldn’t be tried. I said, if this is the best they have at this late stage of the game, they will definitely be accused of them. And certainly we already know that some of the people in the Pentagon, the senior leaders, I mean, they are concerned, because there are, you know, international court cases around. And this is a concern. So, I mean, I was pushing a hot button when I said that, because certainly International Criminal Court is a concern to politicians in a lot of countries. But yeah, to me, it looked like the evidence of a lack of planning. I mean, this email went to —

AMY GOODMAN: And what kind of response did you get?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Well, he said, you know, “We need to talk.” And we talked. And he said, “I think that if you feel this strongly about this, you know, you shouldn’t be working here at this point in time when we’re getting ready to go, you know, to go into this war, this invasion of Iraq.” And I said, “Sir, I absolutely agree with you.” I had behind my desk a whole series of antiwar posters. And I’m not antiwar in general. But this war made no sense. And being close to retirement, I wasn’t shy about sharing my opinion. So my opinion was no secret in that office. It was no secret to my boss. But it was interesting that only until I specifically, I guess, made it clear enough to them that I had some serious concerns — and then, you know, I was moved back into my old office, and shortly thereafter, I retired as scheduled. But yeah, I mean, he did the right thing. I mean, I technically — I mean, like I said, good order and discipline are disrupted. I am an example of that, OK? I’m an example of that. I’m living proof that we have issues here beyond propaganda. This is a dysfunctional case.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You also mention that what you saw operating was groupthink. Could you elaborate a little bit more about what you mean by “groupthink”?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Well, I think that’s — yeah, I mean, it’s like anything. You have an opinion, you have an expectation, and everything that you see, all facts that you gather, or non-facts, any information that’s gathered, if it fits into the decision that you’ve already made or the ideas that you hold dear, you accept it, and if it doesn’t, you reject it. It’s like the mother looks at her child, and, you know, he brings the car home wrecked for the third time, and she goes, “Oh, those people out there are just so bad. My son never wrecks his car. People are always running into him.” You know, they make excuses for the thing that they hold precious and dear.

And there was — you know, the planning on Iraq has been going on for a long, long time, by the same people who are now in political positions, you know, the Wolfowitzes, Feiths, Rumsfeld. These people have been planning and concerned about doing something about Iraq since as early as, well, clearly, 1998, when they wrote a letter that they all signed to President Clinton, but before that, too. So, this is an idea. This is a concept, this changing of Iraq in order to stimulate some other kind of forced change in the Middle East. This idea is held very dear by a lot of the people in political power, certainly a lot of the ones in the Pentagon.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain the Office of Special Plans, the OSP, and who was making the decisions?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Well, the Office of Special Plans was — I think had been around in some form before last summer, looking at Iraq. But I know in the late summer of 2002, it broke off as a sister office to the Near East-South Asia. So, the Iraq desk, I think the Iran desk, a couple of the functional offices had already been expanded by supplemented people, a good many of those people political appointees, headed by Abe Shulsky. And they were still under the same guy that was in charge of Near East-South Asia, Dr. Luti, but they eventually became, I don’t know, maybe 17 to 20 people. They needed more space. And they moved separate and established themselves as a formal separate office to work. Well, it was called Special Plans, but I would say, you know, Iraq issues, certain Middle East issues. They handled some terrorism issues, although there’s other offices that do that. So, you know, it was just a bureaucratic organization. And they worked — they worked the war planning. And they worked with CENTCOM to do that. And you can ask CENTCOM people how they felt they did, but it was a functional thing to plan the war.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you very much for being with us. We’ve been speaking with Karen Kwiatkowski. She has just retired from the military. She was an Air Force lieutenant colonel, who spent much of her last three years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And you are listening to Democracy Now! When we come back from our break, Weapons of Mass Deception. We’ll talk with John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Mama’s Gun, “Didn’t Cha Know,” Erykah Badu, here on Democracy Now! She’s part of Black August, will be part of a big concert this weekend for political prisoners in this country, then headed to Cuba on Monday. I’m Amy Goodman, here with Juan González.