This speech was given at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s June 2008 conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia.
Karen Kwiatkowski retired from the USAF in 2003 as a Lieutenant Colonel. She currently teaches college courses in American Government, and is currently employed as a high school biology and Earth Science teacher in western Virginia.
She has an MA in Government from Harvard University, MS in Science Management from the University of Alaska, and has completed both Air Command and Staff College and the Naval War College seminar programs. She earned her Ph.D. in World Politics from Catholic University of America in 2005, with a dissertation on Overt/Covert War in Angola: A Case Study of the Implementation of the Reagan Doctrine, and has authored two books on African security issues, African Crisis Response Initiative: Past Present and Future (US Army Peacekeeping Institute, 2000) and Expeditionary Air Operations in Africa: Challenges and Solutions (Air University Press, 2001). Her final assignment was as a political-military affairs officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Under Secretary for Policy, in the Sub-Saharan Africa and Near East South Asia (NESA) Policy directorates, and left the military to publicly speak out against government excess and fraud in national security politics. She has been a regular contributor to LewRockwell.com since 2003, and has written for The American Conservative, Salon.com, Antiwar.com., and others.