"I witnessed neoconservative agenda- bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president."

From "The New Pentagon Papers," published in Salon.com, March 2004.

Position: Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Office of Secretary of Defense Near East and South Asia Directorate
Tenure: 2002 to 2003

Karen Kwiatkowski was a desk officer in the Office of Secretary of Defense Near East and South Asia directorate (NESA) from May 2002 to February 2003. A native of North Carolina, Kwiatkowski began her military career in 1978, as a second lieutenant and rose through the ranks to lieutenant colonel. Along the way, she held positions as a speechwriter for the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and as an analyst on sub-Saharan Africa.

During her time at the NESA, Kwiatkowski observed the establishment of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the agency set up within the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The OSP was the primary source of much of the since discredited intelligence used to justify the Iraqi invasion.

Kwiatkowski left NESA in February, 2003 and retired in March of that year. While still at NESA, she wrote a series of anonymous articles criticizing government handling of pre-war intelligence, Insider Notes from the Pentagon, for a political website. Kwiatkowski’s insider essays portray a small clique of civilian “neo-conservative” policymakers, operating out of the OSP, who exercised enormous influence over military intelligence. It was from this office, Kwiatkowski wrote, that desk officers writing policy papers had to get their talking points whenever they wrote something that might include reference to the Iraq threat, WMD and terrorism in general.

Kwiatkowski went public with her criticisms after her retirement, writing magazine articles and appearing as a commentator in the documentaries Hijacking Catastrophe, Honor Betrayed, and Why We Fight. She writes a bi-weekly column, Without Reservations, for the website MilitaryWeek.

Kwiatkowski, who has an M.A. in Government form Harvard and a Ph.D. in World Politics from Catholic University, is an adjunct professor at George Mason University. She lives with her family in the Shenandoah Valley and is a part-time farmer.