Teddy Kennedy's New Expert

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."

Kwiatkowski claims she witnessed "neoconservative agenda bearers within [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] usurp measured and carefully considered assessment, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president."

Whether she's a reliable witness is something her new patrons may or may not have inquired into. But Kennedy staffers may want to Google her work for the antiwar libertarians at lewrockwell.com as well as the pseudonymous pieces she's acknowledged publishing on hackworth.com and Soldiers for the Truth when she was still in uniform and working at the Department of Defense. They will find no evidence of Kwiatkowski's reliability as a judge of "measured and carefully considered assessment." They will find plenty of evidence that their boss could use a new speechwriter.

Consider: In her writings for Soldiers for the Truth, which ran under the heading "Deep Throat Returns," Kwiatkowski accused the Pentagon of planning to "build greater Zion" in the Middle East and decried the "Zionist political cult that has lassoed the E-Ring"--a reference to the Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking Pentagon officials.

In a later article on lewrockwell.com, written after she'd retired, Kwiatkowski conceded that these anonymous articles barely did justice to the frustration she'd experienced at the Pentagon: "Hard core anarchists and other purists might criticize me for not just throwing a few hand grenades over the office dividers and letting the chips fall where they may. But by this time I had already submitted my retirement request, and selfishly after my twenty [years of service], I wanted to spend the money, not time in Leavenworth."

Other gems from Kwiatkowski's oeuvre:

* "We went to war in Afghanistan--planned of course before 9/11/2001 due to some Taliban non-cooperation regarding a certain trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline, and the requisite security for said pipeline."

* "We once had something like a free market Republic, but all evidence now points to a maturing fascist state flexing its muscles."

* "Bush and his neoconservative foreign policy implementers believe they are today's men of destiny. But the claim of destiny for a whole nation or a constructed state has long been the ultimate tool of the fascist, the super-nationalist, the propagandist worthy of a Lenin or a Hitler or a Pol Pot."

* "Two invasions and occupations in two years to reshape the Islamic world in preparation for World War IV is anything but conservative. Fascist imperialism touched by Sparta revived can never, even with pretty please and sugar on top, be conservatism."

Normally a collegial sort, THE SCRAPBOOK can't bring itself to congratulate Salon on the opening of its new bureau.

Carl Levin's Faulty Memory

Carl Levin gave a typical performance during Senate Armed Services Committee hearings last week. With the exception of Ted Kennedy, Levin has been the most outspoken of the many Democrats who warned ominously about Iraq's WMD threat before the war and now accuse the Bush administration of making it all up.

Levin's thesis is simple: Warmongers in the Pentagon and the White House lied about intelligence to go to war. But Levin himself has been--there's no way to say it politely--less than honest about the same intelligence. At last week's hearing, he praised the "caution and the nuance" of the CIA's then-classified July 2002 assessment of the threat from Iraq and al Qaeda. Levin read it aloud: