All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I figured since it's the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, now would be a good time, especially when they're playing out the exact same, you know, Waco style script about Qaddafi that they did about Saddam Hussein.
He's, he's crazy like crash.
He's crazy.
He's bad to his own people and he's got illegal weapons.
And so, uh, we can't deal with them.
We got to invade them with the army Delta force, uh, same story, different war, uh, whether Waco, Iraq, or Libya.
And, uh, but anyway, uh, since it's the Iraq war invasion, I thought we could go back to a little bit of, you know, how they basically lied us into that war, propagandized us into that war.
Um, and, uh, talk with Karen Katowski who had a front row seat from her position and air force Lieutenant Colonel working inside the Pentagon.
Uh, she wrote back then anonymously for David Hackworth site soldiers for the truth, and she has a humongous archive, which I believe includes the reprints of all those, uh, Hackworth site articles now at lourockwell.com.
And I also want to recommend to you a few great articles.
There's a three part series in the American conservative magazine that she along with another one in, uh, salon.com called the new Pentagon papers.
There's a great piece by Robert Dreyfus and Jason Vest called the lie factory.
And, um, there's also a great one in the LA weekly called soldier for the truth, all about Karen Katowski.
There's quite a few other articles about her and her first person account from inside the Pentagon.
The very best interview that anyone has ever done or will ever do of Karen Katowski about what she saw there was Brian lamb on C-SPAN Q and a.
And so if you just hit C-SPAN Q and a, and figured out how to spell Katowski and Googled that, uh, you could certainly read that transcript or watch that interview and it'll blow your mind, but that all being said, welcome back to the show.
Karen, how are you?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for that great introduction.
Well, you've got a comment.
So, uh, let me ask you this.
When you were working at the Pentagon, did you ever hear that America was going to have a war with Iraq before September 11th, like say after Bush took office, but before the nine 11 attack, was it already being talked about at the Pentagon to your ears?
I, in my years, no, but I was working in the North Africa shop at that time.
And, um, so, you know, I didn't, we weren't focused on the middle East or anything in the fall.
After nine 11, um, you know, we hearing more about Iraq.
And then in the spring, when I moved into the near East South Asia office, that's when I found out that the whole war plan had already been developed.
And this is the spring of 2002 and you don't get them up to the Pentagon on the second review, unless you've put the, you know, put the order out to go ahead and start fleshing out this plan.
And of course the Pentagon says, well, we have plans for thousands of things.
And I'm sure anyone who's listened to the news will, you know, the Pentagon says, yeah, we have plans for invading all kinds of countries.
That's true.
But the order to update and expand and make it a practical, realistic, um, workable plan, uh, that, that order apparently had happened in sometime in the fall of 2001, by the time in the spring, uh, early May of 2002, when I got to near East South Asia policy office there at OSD, Office of Secretary of Defense at that time, it was on its second review.
Okay.
This is a, this is what you would consider to be a pretty tight and mature plan to invade Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein.
And at that time in the spring of 2002, most people, you know, the average people reading newspapers, watching TV, weren't hearing about Iraq.
The propaganda war had to come after they already made their mind up.
So it's pretty, I thought in my experience, it was the first time I'd ever imagined this thing.
But as I looked at history and became aware of our own history in this country, we've done this before.
Okay.
We've, we've, we've planned a war, got ready to do it, and then sold it basically after the fact.
Uh, we've done that before in our history and we definitely did it in 2002, 2003 for the Iraq thing.
Of course, I think historians, uh, will, will say this one blew up in our face because we were made to be liars relatively quickly after that invasion.
Right.
Now your boss, Bill Lutie, uh, you yourself did not work for Douglas Fyfe and, and Abram Shulsky in the office of special plans, but your boss, Bill Lutie did, right?
Yeah.
Bill Lutie did.
And Bill Lutie's boss was Doug Fyfe.
Uh, so, so then Abram Shulsky worked for Lutie then?
Yes, he did.
Yeah.
And he had, uh, well, he worked for Lutie on paper.
Uh, in actual fact, he was directly reporting to Doug Fyfe and he was the, the office of special plans.
Now that office was formed in, um, the summer of, uh, 2002 when late summer was set, it had its own spaces, but it was formed in the summer of 2002.
And it was initially, uh, told to us as the expanded Iraq desk, but they put the Iran desk up there as well.
So expanded Iraq, Iran desk, because, you know, a lot of folks, if you think back to those many years ago, um, Iran was the target probably still is.
Uh, and so the idea was, you know, we'll go into Iraq and, uh, we're already in Afghanistan, you know, pincher movement.
We, we've got, we can, we can change it.
You know, we can regime change Iran as well.
So, um, they're thinking that way.
They being the neocons because the neocons are obsessed with the Middle East and these, these strange, uh, ideas of, uh, regime, you know, democracy imposed from above and regime change will solve all your problems and, uh, tearing up the Middle East, weakening the States around Israel.
I mean, this is the obsession of the neocons and this is what they were doing.
Well, now Colin Powell, certainly just covering his rear end or trying to, uh, said that Douglas Fyfe, what he did was, uh, he referred to the office of special plans as the Gestapo office of Fyfe's Gestapo office.
And he told Bob Woodward that they basically created a parallel government to the U S government to get us into that war.
Would you agree with that?
I think, I think that's a fair assessment because these guys were putting out basic classified information, uh, just like they're accusing Brad Manning of doing, but they put out classified information directly into the media, directly to Judy Miller, directly into the editors of these, you know, the post and the New York times, uh, friendly newspapers.
Also the, the various websites that support the neocons.
These guys are spouting off information.
That's not true that they got directly from OSP and OSP put it out there because it supported the storyline.
It would build fear.
It would build distrust.
It would help make the president look like he was really, you know, knew what he was saying.
And they did this consciously.
They did it like, you know, directly with the end goal in mind.
And that end goal of course, was to get the invasion.
Um, the office of special plans disbanded within months after the invasion in March of 2003, they disbanded their whole purpose was to sell the war.
And mostly along a weapons of mass destruction lines, right?
You know, I mean, yeah, well, I mean, they had this other thing called the, the, uh, counter-terrorism policy evaluation group that was just two or three of these guys, and that was all focused on supposed ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, right?
Right.
And they had their own guys.
One guy that worked with me was tasked.
He was an Egyptian.
Uh, I mentioned him in the various articles that you mentioned in the American conservative, but this, uh, he was a Navy Lieutenant, a medical intel officer, medical intel.
Um, but he spoke a red Arabic.
I think he spoke Arabic too.
He was happy with the Egyptian American officer and, uh, he, uh, was tasked to go through, uh, the open media that they could find, um, kind of what some of the, uh, think tanks, the, the pro-Israel think tanks do.
Uh, I think the memory does this as well.
Looks at the public media, what people are saying and writing in the Middle East.
And he would go through that with the, uh, the idea of gleaning points that they could later use to say, Oh, Saddam said this, Saddam is doing that.
And of course, this is not intelligence.
I mean, it's not, it's just information that fits your storyline.
I mean, it's like, it's almost like dealing with, uh, you know, a teenager who's trying to lie their way out of something.
I mean, this is, you know, you take whatever you can get and you just weave a tail and that's what they were doing, um, consciously doing it to sell the war.
Because of course the plan had already been made to do it.
You know, the war plan was ready to go.
There was no, uh, uh, I don't think there was anything that was going to stop it.
George Bush, of course, wanted it.
The president is, is, uh, you know, the president at the time was part and parcel to this, but the actual mechanics of, of creating and selling the war and pushing out information to kind of get people to be basically fearful because we were not well-informed, none of the information that, that OSP pushed out to the New York times or to any of their, uh, various people, none of the stuff in the speeches that, uh, Condoleezza Rice made about, you know, bombs going off at St.
Louis and things like that from Saddam is saying, you know, none of this was a fact-based, we were not well-informed, but we were certainly stoked for fear.
I mean, this is what they were trying to do.
You told me one time, I forget.
Uh, and you've written about this as well.
I think, uh, was it a Shulsky or Lutie who talked about how they were working directly with Scooter Libby and the vice president's office?
They were, yeah, they talked about it and it was evident in a number of different ways that both Lutie who, uh, who was actually appointed into his job from the vice president's staff.
Lutie was, um, when, when, when, when Bush got elected, Bush and Cheney got elected or whatever, when it was finally decided, remember that?
Whatever you call it.
Yeah.
And well, even during that time when it hadn't been decided, Cheney had his staff and Lutie was on that staff from day one, he had worked with him before.
And, um, so Lutie was, was ensconced with the vice, the VP's office.
And when they finally got everything straightened out and they were, and they were in place, they were putting in their appointees, Lutie goes over into near East South Asia, uh, directorate is the under, uh, well, as the assistant deputy or deputy assistant secretary for near East South Asia, this puts him over a North Africa, Middle East, the whole area that we're talking about here.
So he was, he was Cheney's guy, um, in staff meetings, this guy, Scooter Libby was Libby was mentioned a number of times.
And initially when I first heard his name, didn't know who he was.
Cause you know, we knew who the generals were.
We knew who the people in the Pentagon were and that who we would be working with if we went out of the, you know, Pentagon to provide formal documentation to it, we would go up the chain and over, not, not directly, but they were faxing stuff back and forth to Scooter Libby, who had turned out to be, of course, chief of staff of Cheney's office.
And one of the key neocons and, you know, one of the key figures in this whole sales job that they did, this propaganda job that was conducted.
And of course, you know, yeah, he's the one that went to CIA headquarters 14 times saying, give me some dirt on Iraq.
That's right.
And see, we, we in the Pentagon, you know, we're dealing with our own problems, the DIA guys being told to shut up and say what we want to hear.
But we're not thinking CIA is the problem.
We didn't realize, you know, this network of neocons that really had hijacked our foreign policy for sure.
We didn't think we, you know, we didn't see that part that we read about later.
Oh, Cheney and his staff are bugging the CIA analysts.
You know, they're terrorizing them.
Well, of course you had John Bolton and David Wumser over at the state department too.
We did.
We knew a little bit about them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was a great article in Salon called the state department's extreme makeover about how, wow, I've never seen so many old CFR types lose their job and get fired and demoted.
And the state department turned upside down is what's been going on here over the past couple of months.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, um, it's, you know, they, they, they basically, and if you think about the neocons and the Wolfowitz's and all these guys, Richard Perl, these folks that were key, uh, to, uh, to having this country go to war and occupy the nation, which we are still occupying.
I mean, we're still there.
We're still killing Iraqis, you know?
I mean, this hasn't stopped, but the way they worked this, they did it in a smart way.
Uh, they understood how government worked.
They, uh, understood that, um, when you tell somebody something, they don't really want to hear.
They might pick up the phone and call somebody else that they trust in another agency.
They had people in every agency.
Right.
This, this is like, it's, it's really, it's really slick how this whole thing worked.
And of course, uh, to me, the, the bigger, uh, you know, lesson learned is that why is our government so big that we can get these political appointed people?
I mean, why, why, where are these people coming from?
Why don't they get a real job?
Yeah.
No neocon has ever even been elected anything.
If you call that a real job.
And they couldn't, they couldn't.
And Newt Gingrich is getting ready to find this out because he can't get elected.
Um, and he's one of the guys that's part of this problem and was very much of, you know, uh, loved war and, you know, uh, war, war for Israel, war for whatever purpose he loves it.
And, uh, he can't get elected.
He's not popular.
You know, I mean, the neocons cannot get elected.
And I guess that's one thing you could say.
It's a positive for democracy.
I mean, the, the people may be cheap, but they're not incredibly, totally always stupid.
You know, they actually can recognize people that are kind of scum to begin with.
And unfortunately the neocons, uh, you know, they don't go that route.
If they went that route, we wouldn't have a problem with them.
But what they do is they, they pose themselves as experts.
They have a network.
Who do you recommend?
I recommend my friend, you know, and it just so happens that, uh, you know, any network could do this, but the neocons have done it to us in, uh, in the past 20 years, actually longer because a lot of these guys are recycled from, uh, when they were in the Reagan administration.
So, um, you know, it's a shame and all these people who love Reagan, you know, they should look closely.
And, and I actually respect Reagan a little bit because he pushed away from these folks in the second term and they were very angry with him.
And I thought that was great.
But, um, you know, these guys have been in government for a long time.
They know the game.
They know how, how we react to things.
Uh, I, I'd like to think maybe the American people are a little smarter because we've been lied to so many times and we've seen how it comes out, you know, but then again, look how quickly they were able to go into Libya.
Well, and look at Max boot and Paul Wolfowitz leading the charge at the wall street journal editorial page.
You know, on TV, they're like, well, Eric Edelman's an expert.
We'll bring him on to tell us what to do.
Oh my God.
Yep.
I don't know.
I don't know if, if the media is just incompetent or if the media is actually colluding with neocons because war is the fun thing to report, but the bottom line is it kills people.
It destroys property.
It destroys wealth.
Well, you can always charge more for dish soap ads, you know, when there's a war on.
That's right.
That's right.
It's just a terrible thing.
And, and really, I think what the Libya thing, I didn't really write about this today in what I wrote, but it seems like what's happened in Libya, at least as far as the, the UN and, and you know, our actions in bombing and, and, and bombing from afar, you know, the safe war that we like to do that apparently is sanitary and never kills anybody.
I don't know where to get this idea, but you know, we still have a huge problem.
Where was the debate on, should we invade or should we bomb?
Well, the debate was, the debate was there for three weeks in a row.
It was, why hasn't he invaded yet?
And then, okay, okay.
We're trying to hurry.
We're trying to hurry.
And then they finally gave in to the dissent, which was you're taking too long.
Yeah.
And then, and then the two sides are, he took too long and the other side says, no, he didn't.
And by the way, you know, the Iraq war resulted in the death of about a million people, 5 million refugees, a horrific police state with secret torture prisons that the Red Cross is not allowed to as people still don't have electricity or water or any old thing, you know, they, if you remember back to the propaganda in 02 about how great this was all going to be and how necessary it all was, it's really just amazing to compare and contrast that to the reality of that war.
That's right.
And also it's, it's not even a safe country for us to even occupy because of the radiation in the soil and other places where we bombed the living hell out of these places with depleted uranium shells.
You know, that stuff is there.
You can't get rid of it.
You have to take all the dirt away.
They have, there's no way to do that.
They can't, like you said, they don't have water and electricity and plumbing.
So, um, it's, it's, uh, just an outrageous criminal act, even to this day, it was a crime to go to war, uh, against our, our domestic laws, which I'm talking about the constitution.
You know, there was no declaration of war.
There was lying.
I mean, impeachable offenses done by, uh, you know, guys like Lutie Chaney, any of these guys should have been, you know, taken removed from their offices for what, for the crimes they did.
And then the crimes have just multiplied.
Now you have, you know, the folks in Iraq, what's left of them struggling, struggling to live.
And it's no wonder they probably wish for the days when Saddam Hussein was there, where they had schools and education and they had a relatively clean environment.
It didn't have contamination.
Yeah.
Well, you know what I wonder?
Uh, I wonder, uh, you know, Gareth Porter and others have reported that, well, and I think it was pretty obvious, right?
I think you even said they always did want Iran to be part of this, but why didn't they push for Iran first instead of Iraq?
Why was Iraq the target?
Was it just a Halliburton thing or what?
Because it seemed like if you wanted to make a plausible case for expanding the terror war to one of Israel's enemies, you say, well, look, Iran backs Hamas and Hezbollah, right?
That's your, their terrorist's case right there.
They could have gotten away with attacking Iran instead of Iraq.
Was it because Iraq was doable and Iran wasn't?
Or what do you think?
Yeah.
Well, first off, the Israelis certainly wanted Iran.
That's what I was trying to get to.
We only pick on the very weak.
Okay.
You know, we don't go after anybody that can fight back first off.
And that's, that's a major thing.
I think somebody should, should explain to Petraeus or ask him and have him explain why we only pick on fourth rate military powers.
Um, but we do.
So Iraq fit the bill that way.
Had no military, had no Navy, had no air force.
We've been bombing them for what?
10, 11 years in the no fly zone.
He had nothing.
So he was seen as an easy target.
Same with Afghanistan.
They didn't have any particular, you know, that thing went over, you know, in a couple of weeks or whatever.
It was nothing.
So, um, and the idea is these wars will be popular.
They'll keep America safe.
Cause America hates Islamic terrorism and we've, we've pegged it this way.
So, uh, and then, then the idea is we can harass and do Iran, uh, over time.
Like perhaps, you know, uh, maybe we can weaken them in some way over time, but there, there's no way they could take on Iran, our military.
Well, first, you know, we can't take on Afghanistan with our military.
We got lots of boots on the ground, some of the best soldiers we have, and they're making zero progress.
Okay.
So, um, this idea that Iran is doable, Iran is not doable in, in any military strategic sense, it's not, it's not going to happen.
Um, so, uh, you know, I think they would have had a tough time explaining that they would have had a tough time doing it because, you know, these guys want, it's all about the show.
It's all about mission accomplished banners, you know, Hey, look how good we're doing.
Look at all the schools we painted, you know, look at all the women we liberated.
Like that's a big joke, but you know, that's what they're, you know, it has to be able to be sold.
You couldn't have done that with Iran.
Iran would have done that to us and they would have had the stories of victory that they would have told to their people, you know, do they have the troops to say, put, I don't know, 30 or 50,000 soldiers in Libya or no way.
Tell me no way.
Yeah.
I don't know where we would get those troops from.
All right.
Well, that's what I want to hear.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're all out of time, Karen.
We got to move on, but I really appreciate everything that you've written all this time and all your appearances on the show.
I really appreciate what you're doing, Scott.
Great, great way to get the word out and make people think about things.
Thanks very much.
All right, everybody.
That's Karen Katowski and you can find her archive at Lou Rockwell dot com.
Her piece there today is thoughts on the insanity and just Google her name and especially the Q&A with Brian Lamb.
That's some excellent stuff there.
And yeah, we'll be back after this.
