03/31/15 – Karen Kwiatkowski – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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Writer for LewRockwell.com, although I guess it's been a while since I've seen a new article bar.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Karen?
Hey, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
Yeah, I haven't been writing that much.
I did have one out a few weeks ago.
Oh, okay, good.
Yeah.
I miss your writing.
You're such a great writer.
Well, thanks.
I don't know.
But I do need to have more discipline and produce more.
All right.
So let's talk about some history here.
It's right around the 12th anniversary of the start of Iraq War II or III, depending on whether you count Clinton's blockade or not.
And you had a front row seat to this whole thing.
So introduce yourself to the people, please.
Name, rank, serial number, and all that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I'm Karen Katowski.
I'm a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.
In 2001 and 2002, I was working at the Office of Secretary of Defense.
And in 2002, I was working in the Near East South Asia Policy Directorate of the Office of Secretary of Defense.
And this is where the Office of Special Plans sprouted out from.
It was a sister office to where I worked.
And we had actually shared office space with these folks.
And in the summer of 2002, and of course, this started before then.
But in the summer of 2002, we got to see the people who were involved in really the propaganda production, which was aimed not just at the American people, which it clearly was.
And it was used by the administration, by Bush, by Cheney, by Powell, by all these folks.
But it was also aimed at the Pentagon itself.
It was aimed at focusing this misinformation, really, that didn't have a solid, firm basis in intelligence, but this misinformation to push out the war on the Pentagon as well.
So, you know, very conflictual type of situation.
Many of my friends and co-workers that wore the uniform and also some of the civilians in the intelligence community that I worked with, all very disheartened and dismayed by what they saw.
And there was nothing that could be done because if you, well, there's always something that can be done.
But what was done was when people like myself and others in that office protested or called the, you know, waved the BS flag kind of thing, pretty much were told to sit down and shut up and get out.
And most of my buddies curtailed their assignments if they disagreed with what was going on.
They just found a new assignment, called their assignments officer and got out of there.
And of course, I retired about a year later when I hit my 20.
So you know, what could really be done?
I did write anonymously for the late David Hackworth, Colonel Hackworth's site.
He published anonymously my observations from inside the Pentagon during the time that I was still active duty.
And why did I have to publish anonymously?
Well, if I had said what I was saying and identified who I was and where I worked, I would probably be in prison right now, even though nothing I said was classified.
It was really just my opinion of what I was observing around me.
And what I was observing around me, of course, was the development of a propaganda campaign to promote this unnecessary and inappropriate invasion of Iraq, using reasons which did not exist.
And of course, the funny thing, it's not really funny, the sad thing, four or five years after that, by the mid 2000s, by 2004, 2005, even as early as 2003, the American people were able then to really see that these were lies.
And even some parts of mainstream media were identifying the propaganda as false political lies based on getting support for this invasion.
But that was too late.
We were already, you know, that didn't stop anything from happening.
In fact, if it did anything, I think it led to even more cover-ups.
I mean, you know, we saw when 2006 or 7, when the video of what went on in Iraq shooting the civilians was released by, oh, who's the guy who's in prison, had a sex change operation, our whistleblower dude.
Yeah.
Manning.
Manning.
Yeah.
Private Manning.
He, you know, he saw what we were doing.
First off, we're in a war that we lied to get into.
And if you know anything about history, which you do, Scott, and I've learned since my time in the Pentagon, I've learned more about our real history.
If you study the history of these wars, of the U.S. government's intention and actions in war, you know, it's almost always based on conscious, calculated, propagandistic lies.
I didn't know that in 2002, in 2001.
I didn't suspect that my government was like that at that point in time, but I found out different.
And historically, it actually isn't anything new.
The players change.
You know, the neoconservatives have had a handle on this for, you know, since the late 80s.
I mean, really since the Cold War theoretically ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These guys have been, you know, hankering for war.
Of course, none of them fight, none of their kids wear a uniform.
But they love war.
They love war from the window seat.
And this is who's doing it now.
Historically, it has been other politically influential groups, but right now, at that time, it was the neocons.
But what I was saying about Manning is we're in a war that's illegal, unconstitutional, based on lies, and we're doing evil, bad things.
He had evidence of that, felt bad about it, and shared it with the world.
And it was way, way after the fact.
It was not classified.
That video, most of the stuff that he released was time-sensitive stuff, which the time had long passed.
So while it was classified, it didn't meet any criteria of classification other than to save political face.
And of course, they, you know, hung him out to dry, for sure, and very upset.
So the cover-ups continued.
It wasn't like we stopped anything.
In fact, it fostered even more cover-ups, which hopefully is what we see whistleblowers And certainly later, with the guy in Russia now, the NSA whistleblower, Snowden, I mean, the things Snowden has indicated, has revealed to us about how our government operates against the actual American people.
Maybe these wars, while they haven't been stopped by whistleblowers and people like me who have, you know, spoken out against them and kind of, you know, called the motivation into, you know, into question.
But maybe, nobody, no less people were killed, okay?
No less money was spent.
No less economies were destroyed in the Middle East, okay?
Nothing like that changed.
But maybe people knowing that these wars were done under false pretenses and done for evil reasons, really.
I mean, evil political reasons, nothing else.
Maybe that's incited more whistleblowing.
I don't know.
I can only hope, because I can tell you, I never felt, I always believed I should have done more sooner than what I was even able to do.
And I was able to do, yeah, really, and even bigger whistleblowers feel the same way.
They feel like, well, you know, we whistleblew, but what really changed?
Not much.
And it's very frustrating.
Well, you know, I mean, the thing is, you've got to parse this a little bit there, Karen.
I mean, it's, you can't really measure with the counterfactual whether you changed the course of history or not.
I wouldn't really be surprised if you had in some important ways, but you've certainly changed the hearts and minds of some individuals and spared them the grief of having to be bad on these things and rooting for these things.
Now that they know better, they're released of that burden of cheering for this militarism and imperialism and mass murder.
So that's true.
And that ain't nothing.
No.
And that's a lot.
And that's actually what I think your show does.
Antiwar.com does.
The Rockwell does.
I mean, there's a lot of places out there that provide an ability for people to really get the facts and to really understand the nature of the state and how it, how that nature is integrated with war.
And the war doesn't have to be anything, you know, there doesn't have to be any threats or any defensive concern.
It just has, war is part of the state.
It's the health of the state.
And it's when you, you know, it's one thing just to hear that quote, you know, war is the health of the state.
And you go, okay, some old guy said that.
But then to really see how that operates, how that comes into play really every day, every decade.
All right.
Now hold it right there.
Hold it right there, Karen.
We got to take this break.
Breaking news.
News.antiwar.com.
Officials.
Iran framework deal reached.
Yeah.
We'll be right back with the great Karen Katowski.
In Rumsfeld's shop, conscientious objector and open door policy at the American conservative magazine and the new Pentagon papers at salon.com.
Right back after this.
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All right.
They did it.
Announcements coming out tonight.
Check out news.antiwar.com.
They wrote Jason Ditz.
Officials.
Iran framework deal reached.
They're going to make an announcement later tonight.
Well, that's about 10 million pounds lifted from my shoulders.
That's fine.
That just feels good.
And cool.
I always get to remember that this happened right in the middle of my conversation with my good friend, Karen Katowski, Pentagon whistleblower, author of the new Pentagon Papers at salon.com, which I reread this morning.
And please go and read The Lie Factory is all about her.
That's Bob Dreyfuss and Jason Vest at Mother Jones.
And then the very important, all important three part series at the American Conservative Magazine in Rumsfeld's shop, Conscientious Objector and Open Door Policy.
If you'd like, you could give us a brief comment on the Iran thing or we could get back to talking about the office of special plans and all of that.
No, I think the Iran thing is going to be great news.
I haven't followed it that closely.
The fact that I'll tell you what I take my cues from since I've been not watching a lot of news and staying up with things.
When you when you see the kind of reactionary side of government, which of politics, which is both Republicans and Democrats being very upset about something, then, you know, it's probably good.
Right.
And, you know, it's it's anything that that can save lives is, you know, a good thing.
And this seems like it would it would help.
But of course, they may not need to worry about peace in Iran because we got Yemen all blowing up.
So, right.
You know, there'll be plenty to bomb.
Don't worry, guys.
Lots of people are going to the market continues, you know, eat lots of more stuff.
And so the war, the war continues.
You know, that business is not really diminishing.
But it's it's nice to hear we won't be going into Iran because seriously, from a military perspective, and I don't know if this has ever changed and I don't think it ever has.
But for 30 or 40 years, I mean, really, since the time we put, you know, we overturned, you know, remember the CIA plot with, you know, to get rid of Mosaddegh, the elected guy.
I mean, since 53, we have been the military, I say we, I'm not in the military anymore.
The military Pentagon has looked at what you would do to could you invade Iran.
And, you know, Iran is blessed kind of like the like the United States is blessed with a geography that is really difficult.
It's like you do not want to go there in any type of any traditional type of warfare.
You don't want to do it.
And also, and this is, you know, since Carter promised will always defend the oil passing through the, you know, the Strait of Hormuz and whatnot.
This no matter what you do, even if Iran had no weapons whatsoever, of course, they have very few, and they certainly don't have any nuclear weapons.
But they don't even have a really formidable military air force or anything like that.
You know, they really just don't.
But if they were messed with, if they were attacked, if they were, if they felt severely threatened, the damage they could do to global oil supplies, and not just in the short term, but for an extended period of time, is really unacceptable.
So all these people that, you know, say, oh, we shouldn't deal with Iran.
Well, you know, God's blessed Iran politics, history, something's blessed him with a geography that really is an asset to that country.
And, you know, you can't not, you can't be underestimated how valuable that is.
And so, you know, of course, we should deal with them and not try to destroy them.
The damage Iran could do to Western interests in terms of oil is horrendous.
That's, you know, and so, you know, it just makes sense that we would deal with them.
And the fact that so many idiot brains in this country can't understand that this I don't know.
I don't know what to say.
All right.
Well, tell me this.
Who's Bill Lutie?
Bill Lutie?
Well, he was he was our boss in the Near East South Asia directorate and under in policy in the policy directorate of OSD.
And he was a was a neocon for sure, in terms of his perspectives.
He was placed as the head of that office when by Cheney, Vice President Cheney, who in whose staff he worked, he was in Cheney's staff even during the election before Cheney was vice president.
But during that election time frame, Cheney put together a staff of people and Lutie and I don't know how he knows Cheney, but but Lutie, who came from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, that's probably how he got hooked up.
They've produced a number of neoconservative advocates from that school of security studies up there.
So Cheney had been there.
I mean, I mean, Lutie had been there.
He ended up on Cheney's staff.
And then pretty much from day one, early on, as soon as the new president, as soon as Bush 43 was sworn in, Lutie is assigned over into to run this Near East South Asia shop.
And he pretty much took his orders from Cheney, not from not necessarily from Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, although Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney all were of the same mind.
OK, there's no doubt about that.
They were of the same mind.
And again, this was before 9-11.
I mean, these guys weren't in response to 9-11.
This wasn't like, oh, things changed all of a sudden after 9-11.
Now we have these new enemies.
We have to do these new things.
No, this is part of a long process of shifting policy and creating war.
I think certainly to create war was part of what what the agenda was about.
And I mentioned, I think in one of those articles, maybe the Salon article, maybe the American Conservative, I'm not sure.
But I ran into a guy, this was after, let's see, when was this?
Well, the decision to do war, I guess it was between, it was in the spring of 2003, before the invasion, but after the Powell thing to the UN, which was so infamous, you know, when he testified to all these things that, of course, weren't true.
And supposedly he knew some of them weren't true.
I don't know.
But, you know, if I had four stars on my shoulder and I had that position like that, if I knew something wasn't true, I don't think I'd testify to it.
You know, the man had power.
He could make a choice, but he didn't in any case.
Sometime after that testimony, which really put the nail in the coffin that we were going to go invade Iraq for sure, for sure.
I ran into a guy, Navy guy, Navy captain, who I had worked with before, but I hadn't seen him.
He had transferred out of our office into some other office, and I hadn't seen him for a long time.
He'd gone back to the Navy staff from OSD.
And I ran into him and said, what have you been working on?
And he goes, well, you know, we've been working on the logistics for this war.
And I said, what do you mean this war?
The war, we're just now going to do the war.
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
He goes, I've been working on this stuff for, you know, nine or 10 months.
We've been, I've been working 14 hour days trying to get the logistics ready for this invasion.
So he started, when I saw him backing it up, he started before, he started in the spring of 2002, which was before the formation of OSP, which was before the propaganda campaign at home.
So bottom line, you know, Rumsfeld, just as was noted after 9-11, when he infamously said, you know, we got to blame this on Iraq, Saddam Hussein, scoop up everything.
This is what has to happen.
You know, they knew what they were going to do, and they knew what they were going to do because they were organized even before Bush was elected.
You know, the Project for a New American Century, all this kind of ideology of taking down independent, popular, strong nations in the Middle East, you know, paving a way for eternal war.
I mean, the war on terrorism, what is that?
But an eternal war, you can't, you know, that's just the, I mean, they've changed so many things and the thing was, it didn't just start in 2001.
It started in the late 90s and might have started, I mean, Wolfowitz has been key on this.
It started with B-team stuff in the 80s.
So, you know, it's just really awful to look back and realize how this country got played and is continuing to be played by, you know, by the neoconservatives and their ideology of war.
Well, you know, Karen, I reread your salon piece this morning, and you kind of make a big deal in here.
It's the new Pentagon Papers again, and you kind of make a big deal about how a lot of the career professionals in, you know, within your eyesight there, inside the Pentagon, they were all pushed out of their positions and replaced with guys straight from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, American Enterprise Institute.
They just brought in all of these guys.
The political appointees.
That's right.
The political appointees.
And you can create those C-class positions or whatever pretty, pretty easily, at least you could then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And lower levels than the kind of people who would ever be political appointees, right?
The guys who are actually doing the grunt work, even they came from JINSA.
That's right.
That's right.
And if any military folks came in, they were closely vetted and they were the kind of people, unfortunately, like we see with General Petraeus.
They were the kind of people that get promoted, OK, because they do exactly what they're told and they don't think.
And again, you know, I did pretty good up to a point.
But really, if you question authority, especially on these political issues, which are, this is the test of trust.
This is the circle of trust kind of thing, you know, the neoconservative circle.
If you weren't inside of that circle of trust, you were gone.
And they had a whole bunch of the sources.
You mentioned these organizations, but the sources were there for people who truly, honestly, I can't say honestly, but they did believe their own propaganda.
Right.
Let me ask you this.
This is a very interesting point.
You mentioned this guy.
I forget his name now.
Bill Bruner was Ahmed Chalabi's handler.
But I wonder who was handling who, because there's another very important article at Salon.com called How Chalabi Conned the Neocons about how he was working for Iran all along and how these neocons are a bunch of freaking idiots.
They believe that the new Shiite controlled Iraq was going to be best allies with Israel and build the oil and water pipeline to Haifa and all this crap.
Were they really that stupid, Abram Shulsky and Richard Perle?
Absolutely, because they are pure.
They're the stereotypical pure academic.
I'm not saying they were teaching classes, but they totally had no ground knowledge.
And of course, it is well known that our human intelligence back in that time and certainly today as well, is really bad in that area.
It's just bad.
We don't know.
Even the best informed people in our intelligence community don't know very much.
So the standard of knowledge is already low.
The smartest, wisest, most clued in folks in the Pentagon don't know much.
Number one.
Number two, these guys, these particular guys, the ones you mentioned there, Ludi and other folks who had been in academia, formerly military, some of them, in Ludi's case, he was a Navy captain at one time.
Richard Perle and a lot of these basically lifetime people that work in think tanks and really only talk to people that talk to them.
Well, it's just like, you know, in cops, you know, with your confidential informants and whatnot, you know, it's quid pro quo.
They don't talk to you unless there's something in it for them.
And that's probably most likely the Chalabi story.
And I mean, I remember reading that back in the day when Solon published that.
But certainly these people who talk to the neocons didn't just, you know, they were not objective to begin with.
And why would they talk to these idiots, except they had something that these guys wanted, that Chalabi wanted.
I mean, power, access, ability to influence decisions.
So a whole bunch of people were played.
But the question is, I think if you step back, who gets played and who doesn't get played?
The well-informed people who are not arrogant, okay, who really kind of recognize the honest situation that they're in.
People who are, you know, follow the law, for example, you know, these are the people don't get played.
You know, my daughter, I'll tell you, my daughter is a security guard, prison guard, correction officer right now.
Okay.
How do correction officers get sucked into situations that get them fired?
You know, too much close contact, doing favors for inmates, et cetera.
Well, how do they get sucked into that?
They don't follow the rules, okay?
So if you do nothing more, you can be really stupid.
Many people are stupid.
Neoconservatives have no handle on being stupid.
They are stupid in many cases.
But a lot of people are stupid.
But what keeps you out of trouble?
Very often, following the rules keeps you out of trouble.
The neocons had nothing but contempt for the rules, contempt for the Constitution, contempt for the rules of intelligence in the Pentagon, contempt for CIA and their process, contempt for tradition, contempt for the civilian backbone of the military, as they say.
You know, certainly the folks that had been there year in and year out, they had nothing but contempt for them.
These are the people that were moved out and replaced with, you know, psychophantic neoconservative leaning political appointees.
So that's how they do it.
Could it have been prevented?
Sure.
Sure.
We have rules in place.
You got to follow them.
They didn't follow them.
They didn't have to follow them.
They didn't want to follow them.
They didn't need to.
I'm sorry, Karen.
We got to stop.
We're already over time.
I've kept you into the top of the hour break here.
And I got to get Todd Pierce on the line to talk about how these neocons have the exact same ideology as the German fascists of the pre-World War II era.
Oh, fantastic.
I'm glad.
I'll be listening.
Well, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Great to talk to you again.
Sure enough.
Anytime.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Karen Katowski.
Find her great article at Salon.com, The New Pentagon Papers.
It's a real eye opener.
And also the three-part series at the American Conservative Magazine in Rumsfeld's shop, Conscientious Objector and Open Door Policy.
And she's got a gigantic, great archive over at LewRockwell.com as well.
We'll be right back after this.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
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