Adrienne Kinne is a former Army sergeant who worked in military intelligence for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004. Trained in Arabic, she worked in the Army translating intercepted communications. She told me in an interview this week that she saw a target list that included the Palestine Hotel. She knew that it housed journalists, since she had intercepted calls from the Palestine Hotel between journalists there and their families and friends back home (illegally and unconstitutionally, she thought).
Said Kinne: “[W]e were listening to journalists who were staying in the Palestine Hotel. And I remember that, specifically because during the buildup to ‘shock and awe’ … we were given a list of potential targets in
She said the officer in charge was Warrant Officer John Berry.
Kinne’s account directly contradicts the official line of the
If Powell was telling the truth, then why was the hotel included on the list of targets that Kinne says she read in a secure e-mail? Or was he just parsing words by saying it wasn’t a target during the “aerial campaign”? Kinne also revealed that the military was spying on nongovernmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross, listening in on these groups—also illegal—and justifying the pretense on the grounds that they might by chance report on a cache of weapons of mass destruction, or their satellite phone might get stolen by terrorists. She also received and translated a fax from the Iraqi National Congress, the CIA-funded group of Iraqi exiles who were funneling false information about WMDs to the
Kinne has shown great courage and taken great risks to bring these revelations to light, to blow the whistle. She follows in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Ellsberg has called on government workers to blow the whistle:
“It’s a great, great risk to have the amount of secrecy we do have right now that enabled the president to lie us into this war and is heading us toward a war that will be even more disastrous in Iran. And this is the time for unauthorized disclosures, which are the only kind that are going to tell us the truth about what’s happening, and they should be done, in my opinion, on a scale that will indeed risk or even ensure that the person doing it will be identified.”
The brother of José Couso, Javier, has tirelessly pursued justice for his brother, traveling globally to make the story known and pushing the case in the Spanish courts. Kinne’s revelations created a stir in
The Bush White House, we now know, used retired generals with ties to the Pentagon and to military contractors to deceive the
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in
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