Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) Former Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Also served on the staff of the Director of the National Security Agency. 20-year Air Force career. Member adjunct faculty, Political Science Department, James Madison University. Instructor, University of Maryland University College and American Public University System. Author of African Crisis Response Initiative: Past Present and Future (2000) and Expeditionary Air Operations in Africa: Challenges and Solutions (2001).
Contributor to 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out 8/23/06: Account of
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Pentagon employee and eyewitness to the events at the Pentagon on 9/11. "I believe the Commission failed to deeply examine the topic at hand, failed to apply scientific rigor to its assessment of events leading up to and including 9/11, failed to produce a believable and unbiased summary of what happened, failed to fully examine why it happened, and even failed to include a set of unanswered questions for future research. ...
It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics. The collapses of the World Trade Center buildings clearly violate the laws of probability and physics. ...
There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked [Pentagon] lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact. Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld], who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a "missile". ...
Patriots Question 9/11 - Responsible Criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report