5th Anniversary tribute to Karen Kwiatkowski

[housewolf]

Back in the really dark days of early 2003, when I was driven to try to understand what the h- had happened to our country, I came across some writings from a woman named Karen Kwiatkowski. She doesn't know it, but she became a beacon of hope and sanity for me in those times. She was in the Pentagon and was assigned to the Office of Special Plans (you know, the Doug Feith group). She couldn't believe what she found going on there tried to publicize what was going on. Karen Kwiatkowski is a hero to me. From Wednesday's Huffington Post:

"Karen Kwiatkowski spent two decades as a career military officer in the United States Air Force before being assigned 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). Her new assignment was to work on policy papers for the Secretary of Defense and other top brass at the Pentagon. Shortly thereafter, she was assigned to a newly-formed bureau inside the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans, which was created to help the Pentagon deal with issues in Iraq.

As Huffington Post Senior Editor Marc Cooper wrote in a profile of Kwiatkowski for LA Weekly:

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."

Read more about Karen, a true hero:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/karen-kwiatkowski-the-so_n_92237.html