Free Republic

Since the outbreak of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, Pat Buchanan and other paleoconservatives have made themselves true exponents of populism: the Jew-baiting, conspiracy-driven demagoguery of 1890s agrarians. In two columns, posted at WorldNetDaily this week, Buchanan accused President Bush of being a puppet of nefarious Jewish warmongers. Outlets of the Hate America Right – especially Paul Craig Roberts and LewRockwell.com – have joined him, and then some. Nothing sets Buchanan’s imagination racing like a Bush-backed Israeli war. On Tuesday, Pat asked, “Who is whispering in his ear?” His answer: bloodthirsty Hebrews. That Tel Aviv is maneuvering us to fight its wars...

WASHINGTON -- House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic staff member because of concerns he may have leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to The New York Times last month. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press Thursday night, Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., a committee member, said that an unidentified staffer requested the document from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before the Sept. 23 story about its conclusions

Has Rep. Jane Harmen, a member of the House Intelligence Committee been divulging information to the MSM? Yesterday we learned that an unnamed democratic staffer had been suspended by House Intel Committee Chairman, Rep. Pete Hoekstra for possibly leaking a National Intelligence Estimate to the Ny Times. Of course the first to complain was in fact Jane Harman, who just happens to have been the one who pushed for it’s release from John Negreponte, and is even now pushing for a second NIE. The fact is that the staffer had been asked by someone, most likely Harmen to request the...

Those Unintended Consequences Like nothing else so far, the weekend polling in Iraq validated George W. Bush's repetitive claim about why he went to Iraq. Well, actually, bringing democracy to the Iraqi people was not one of the 27 different reasons the President and the Congress put forth. But never mind. The American president might have presented his fervent desire for Iraqi self-determination as the primary reason for the invasion before he spent $200 billion dollars, killed 1500 Americans, 100,000 Iraqis and sacrificed 20 thousand American military arms, legs and eyes to the altar of democracy. Instead, he insisted it...

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

On May 13, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy berated Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the Senate Armed Services Committee, condemning "disaster after disaster" in U.S. Iraq policy. Well before the Abu Ghraib revelations, Kennedy has sought to transform Iraqi freedom from a philosophical and strategic issue into a partisan debate, without regard either to reality or result. On April 6, Kennedy called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam." On March 5, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy, speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations, took the president to task for allegedly exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq: "The evidence so far leads to...

The Left has finally found a soldier it can support: Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, formerly of the Department of Defense. Of course, she's a crackpot who claims George W. Bush toppled Saddam Hussein, because Hussein's trade under the abused Oil-for-Food program was conducted in Euros, rather than dollars. This move by Saddam could cause “almost glacial shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar...(so) one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May (2003) switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.” She also circulates Lyndon LaRouche's tripe to the credulous, Hate America Left...and carved a handy (and, no doubt,...

<p>The hottest foreign policy authority on the left is Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked for several months in the Pentagon's Near East-South Asia office during the run-up to the war in Iraq. She was prominently cited by Senator Ted Kennedy in a March 5 address to the Council on Foreign Relations questioning the president's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Her work is getting the full promotional treatment from Salon and its new Washington Bureau chief Sidney Blumenthal, the former head conspiratorialist of the Clinton White House. Salon celebrated the opening of the new bureau by publishing a heavily hyped Kwiatkowski opus headlined "The new Pentagon papers."</p>

Ted Kennedy delivered another stemwinder last week, accusing the Bush administration of lying its way into Iraq for political gain. Ho-hum. Nothing new there. But one paragraph caught my attention. In trying to buttress his charge that the president twisted intelligence about Saddam Hussein, Kennedy cited "Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired Air Force intelligence officer who served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war." He quoted her as follows: "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...

Insider fires a broadside at Rumsfeld's office By Jim Lobe WASHINGTON - On most days, the Pentagon's "Early Bird", a daily compilation of news articles on defense-related issues mostly from the US and British press, does not shy from reprinting hard-hitting stories and columns critical of the United States Defense Department's top leadership. But few could help notice last week that the "Bird" omitted an opinion piece distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a senior Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith...