In the world of serious journalism, particularly investigative journalism concerning burning issues of social justice, the non-profit bi-monthly, Mother Jones, has very few peers. Perhaps only The Atlantic, Harper's, and often, The New Yorker, carries the imprimatur of integrity among both writers and discerning readers of journalism-in-depth as does Mother Jones.
Why do I give you this insider's assessment of the finest magazines known for the highest standards of periodical journalism? I do this because I am beseeching you to read one of the most important articles you will have an opportunity to read this year, on an issue that has direct implications for the nature of the future of this nation: Indeed the issue is whether our future will remain that of a free people with a government responsible to the will of the governed, or whether we will succumb to an oligarchy that will rule over us carrying out only the wishes of their own peculiarly elite self-interests and personal ideologies.
High-flown words indeed, I know. Think me to be crying "wolf," or that the "sky is falling"? Or guilty of unfounded hyperbole for the sake of presidential politics? Then call me on it. Start reading, if you are not drawn in by a level of truth that you find compelling, then pass on your way and mark me off as a willy-nilly alarmist.
But please give it a moment of your time; simply put, the future of our free nation is at stake. The article, "The Lie Factory" is accompanied by an illustration, "The Intelligence Chain," that will assist your reading of a story that, quite frankly, is almost too incredible to believe, with a structure worthy of a Ludlum novel:
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon established a secret intelligence unit to build the case against Iraq. The unit's members -- many of whom were recruited from neoconservative think tanks, primarily the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century -- funneled faulty information up the chain of command, often all the way to the White House. By early 2002, the unit had been incorporated into the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "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." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war. ...
Please read on for the sake of the future of the republic as we know it; and, yes, I am dead serious: MotherJones.com
