You're going to reap just what you sow

* Another installment of the worst album covers ever.

* LA Weekly interviews Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who has master’s degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit.

Kwiatkowski found herself transferred 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), a policy arm of the Pentagon. excerpt:

Q: So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

A: It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn’t know.

The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent — a billion dollars! — by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.
...

Q: You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?

A: Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That’s what it feels like. I’ve thought about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that — at least under this administration — turned out to be something I wasn’t working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution.

These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.

What I feel now is that I’m not retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and correct the problem.

* White House provided records it won't give to the Commission on 9/11, to Bob Wooward. excerpt:

"But there is little doubt that Woodward got details of documents that are central to the commission’s investigation—and more than a little sensitive for the Bush White House. One intelligence document that Woodward described in a May, 2002 Washington Post story , although not in his book, is the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB given to Bush while on vacation at his ranch in Crawford. This is the day that intelligence officials briefed Bush on the prospect of an upcoming Al Qaeda attack and the prospect that terrorists might seek to hijack commercial airliners—a warning that critics have long charged should have triggered a more vigorous response from the White House. The title of the PDB, according to Woodward’s story, was more prophetic than the White House has ever acknowledged: 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'"