"My recent account of the career of Dr. Lani Kass was based on what has appeared about her in the public record and media, including her own comments regarding national defense and security policy. To recapitulate, Kass was born, raised, and educated in Israel. She has a PhD in Russian studies and is fluent in Russian and Hebrew in addition to English. Kass reportedly reached the rank of major in the Israeli air force before moving to the United States and working her way up through the US defense establishment. She is currently the most senior civilian adviser to Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz and is believed to have access to most American defense secrets. Kass is best known to the public for her role in promoting Air Force cyberwarfare, but she also appears to have been a major player in counter-terrorism policy and in war preparations directed against Iran even though she has no actual substantive background in those areas. She believes that the US is engaged in a long war against Islamo-radicalism and that "winning" against Iran is necessary but the American people must be willing to pay the price to succeed."
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In this piece Giraldi raises the question of how this person could have been given a clearance for access to US defense secrets. Normally, the security clearance adjudicators, a humorless lot, would turn thumbs down on someone like her, not because she is an immigrant, but because she is, at the very least, a former foreign intelligence officer. I know of no other case like this. The only way she could have been cleared is that some as yet undisclosed person or persons with a great deal of power in DoD simply over-ruled the adjudicators. This must have happened repeatedly as her level of access to secrets has steadily risen.
Ironically, the situation would be quite different if she were here on assignment as an Israeli intelligence officer at the embassy or some such thing. In that case she would have some access granted by the US but it would be carefully limited. pl
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/04/21/israel-first-more-on-dr-lani-kass/
