Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest today is Karen Katowski.
She's a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force and blew the whistle on the questioners at the debate last night for lying us into war from the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003.
She's got an archive at lootrockwell.com.
Her current website is karenk4congress.com.
Welcome back, Karen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Good to be here.
I'm very happy to have you here.
By the way, let me mention to the audience real quick that you wrote a three-part series for the American Conservative Magazine back in the day telling your whistle-blowing story beginning with In Rumsfeld's Shop and then there was the new Pentagon Papers for salon.com and Soldier for the Truth, a great interview with you in the LA Weekly.
And then, of course, all your archives from David Hackworth's site, Soldiers for the Truth, that were published under a pen name while you were still at the Pentagon are there included now in your archives at lootrockwell.com.
And the best interview of you that was ever done by anyone wasn't me.
It was Brian Lamb at C-SPAN.
And if they were to just Google Karen Katowski, spelled like kwee-at-kow-ski, and Q&A or Brian Lamb C-SPAN Q&A, that would be the single best interview.
And then, of course, there's that great article all about you that Dreyfus and Vest wrote for Mother Jones called The Lie Factory and on and on like that.
Google Karen Katowski if you want to know how the neocons lied us into war.
She's the one that told that story.
But I wanted to ask you about your run for Congress.
How's it going?
You making headway?
And good old what's-his-name that you're running against?
How's he doing?
Well, I guess he's doing fine, but we're doing better.
That's great to hear.
Yeah, I feel like we are.
You know, we're running a primary challenge, Republican primary.
He's a ten-term Republican incumbent, one of the guys that came in in 1994 time frame and swore to due term limits, of course, which 75% of those guys who swore to due term limits, of course, never did.
And he has gotten he never was all that conservative.
He was kind of a middle-of-the-road conservative.
But over time, and certainly we all know this in this whole country, I mean, the Congress as a whole has spent and spent and borrowed and borrowed and spent and spent and, you know, continued to vote for debt ceiling increases and continued to, you know, spend more money and see the growth of the welfare state, the growth of the warfare state.
So he's a part of that, and we're sick of it.
And so, you know, that's kind of our campaign in a nutshell.
And we're getting lots and lots of support.
We're getting support from conservatives, from constitutionalists, from libertarians, from independents, and from the anti-war side of the House who believes and understands, you know, that the warfare state is part and parcel to what's wrong with this country.
And I have to tell you, I did not watch the debates last night.
And I read about them this morning.
And I didn't even realize that Wolfowitz was one of the questioners in this other thing.
I mean, this is just insane that they would even, that those individuals so responsible for some really stupid decisions this country has taken would even be getting air time.
And there you have it.
Wolfowitz on TV last night.
Amazing.
I know.
I saw David Addington ask a question, and I thought, this guy's not in hiding or what?
I know.
I mean, they're not scared.
You know, the rest of us are too afraid to even get on an airplane in case somebody's going to grope us, you know.
And we're, like, looking, we're watching our backs and trying to make sure our Facebook isn't being spied upon by the CIA, you know.
And here are these guys who marched us to war based on lies, lies that they admitted but felt that they were noble.
And you've talked about this on your show before, these noble lies.
This concept of, well, if it's the right thing to do, we should be able to lie you into it.
You people don't know any better.
Totally unconstitutional.
And yet, and yet they're not frightened.
They're on, you know, they're on television.
And this may be the key to your future success in politics is you just have to be completely and utterly shameless.
Yeah.
You think you could do that?
I don't know.
I really don't think so.
I'll tell you what I am going to be in the way, and partly what's driving this campaign, and I'm sure driving the campaigns of lots and lots of people who are challenging some of these incumbents across the whole country.
But, you know, it's a sense of rage, a sense of anger, a sense of utter frustration to the point of we have to do something.
These folks in Congress are just, frankly, incompetent.
They are incompetent to be paid.
They should be paid anything.
In fact, one of the side issues that I'll be proposing when I get up there is not a 10% cut on congressional salary and elimination of the PERC, but more like a 50% cut, period.
And then tie it to performance.
Well, you know what?
I think last night's debate really proved, Karen, how incompetent they are, as you say, in the argument between Dr. Paul and Mitt Romney about Mitt Romney saying, oh, Barack Obama wants to cut a trillion dollars from the military.
And Ron Paul corrects him, no, they're just talking about cuts in the already set rate of increase.
It's not a real cut at all.
And I'm pretty sure that Romney wasn't being dishonest there.
He really just doesn't understand.
Yeah, they don't.
It's really kind of these guys, like Romney and Kaine, who's not really a political guy, but he's a rich guy who wants to be president.
Who's another one?
That's right, Perry.
Well, Perry's not known to be super smart anyway.
But these folks, these front runners, these side runners, these sideshow presidential candidates, we look at them and we go, wow, they want to be president.
Do they have presidential qualities?
Do they look good?
What's their hair look like?
In fact, they are actually far less informed than your listeners and far less informed than a lot of people who study history.
But they're not very wise about government.
I imagine that Romney did not believe what Ron Paul told him.
Tell Ron Paul to stay in that, because that's what Romney would do.
Romney would just say something.
But in fact, Ron Paul is absolutely correct.
There is no risk of any cuts in real spending, only out-year forecasts.
We're going to spend this much, so we're going to spend less, so that means we saved X.
That's the way they do business.
And even these guys who want to be president don't get it.
They really don't get it.
And they're not competent if they don't get it, because I get it and you get it and your listeners get it.
So if those guys don't get it, they're not competent to be president.
So they don't deserve any votes from any person.
And if you want to vote for Obama, then that's a whole other story of incompetence.
But the Republican field, except for Ron Paul, is not competent.
I kind of want to move to the Shenandoah Valley so that I can vote for you, because I can imagine you taking Ron Paul's place as the real libertarian in the House of Representatives and term limits or not, spending a lot of time giving a lot of great speeches and leading these people by a real great example, Karen.
I appreciate you saying that.
I think I told you that seven years ago or something I want you to remember.
You probably did.
And I mean, I'm not a fan of politics, and this is not something I really wanted to do.
Basically, there was a guy that hounded me for a couple years to run for something, and he kind of talked me into it at a weak moment.
And then once, of course, I said yes, and then I had said yes, and so then I was committed and I said, well, I have to do this.
There's a risk you might win, as Carol Paul likes to say.
That's right.
But I think there's going to be not as many as we need to have.
But I'm counting on myself up there.
But I think there's going to be others up there who will kind of stand up for what's right.
I think there will be a few more that kind of talk the talk.
Ron Paul, since he's not going to be there in the House anymore after this term, there's a huge gap that must be filled.
And I think there are a few folks, hopefully some of the younger ones, some of the newer ones, and maybe some of the older ones, who will step up to this.
Now, that's what we need to have happen.
We need people up there, and not so much to promote legislation, but to educate the rest of Congress into what they can and can't do.
You know, there's that carpe diem, you know, seize the day.
Congress needs to wake up to the power that they do have in the Constitution.
And that power can heal this country.
That power can restore the republic.
You know, they don't have to approve the spending budget.
They can override presidential vetoes if that's what it takes to stop the growth of government.
They can end the DHS.
You know, a lot of people are, you know, let's get rid of the TSA.
Well, of course we should get rid of the TSA, the most hated agency in the history of this country.
This is like Arstotzka.
You know, we hate them, and we want to get TSA, get rid of the TSA.
People cheer, Republicans and Democrats alike.
But we need to get rid of the whole of the Department of Homeland Security.
We have a Department of Homeland Security.
It's called the Defense Department.
It has a constitutional role, you know.
So, anyway, lots of stuff needs to be talked about.
We need to get these guys encouraged so they can do it.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, that's the thing, too, is you'd be a great influence on the rest of them who are leaning your way but could use some cover from someone who really knows her stuff, you.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Karen Katowski on Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Karen Katowski.
KarenK4Congress.com is her website.
And now, Karen, what number district is it that you're running for there in Virginia?
Sixth.
Virginia's sixth district.
This is upper Shenandoah Valley.
It runs from Front Royal down to Roanoke right along the 81 corridor.
A real pretty part of the state, a pretty part of the country.
Lots of conservatives.
It's a conservative district, which is actually good for me because, you know, they're dissatisfied with what they see is, you know, big spending, Republican and name-only behavior out of our representatives.
And it's not just the sixth district guy.
We have a number of, here in Virginia, we have a number of representatives who are kind of liberal Republicans in the sense of fiscal responsibility.
You know, they kind of, and, you know, you've got to think about Virginia, too.
We are a state, I think, we're in the top ten of recipients of the military industrial complex spending.
You know, when the federal government steals money out of your pocket and makes weapons with it, well, they send a lot of that money from, you know, other states into Virginia.
So there is a big sense of insecurity here in Virginia that, oh, we have to have military spending because it means a job.
And this is a hard thing to re-educate people on.
But here in sixth district, we don't have any military bases in the sixth district.
We don't have a huge number of defense-type contracts.
What we do is agriculture here.
And, of course, there's a huge sense that subsidies are wrong.
We don't like the ethanol subsidy.
We don't like other agricultural subsidies.
So my people, I should say my people, my neighbors, you know, and the members of the district, they pretty much are in line with the kinds of things that I thought, that I grew up thinking were conservative.
Well, how are they taking to your foreign policy positions?
Are you able to lead them?
Are they ready to be led toward neutrality and peace in 2011 yet, Karen?
I think so.
I think so.
But I will say, and you know about this as well and all over the whole country, there is a concerted effort out of D.C., out of Washington, D.C., out of organizations that guys like Paul Wolfowitz is a member of, American Enterprise Institute and others, pushing this idea of this threat that we face from foreign enemies.
And, you know, oh, that we must be fearful and we must be afraid and we must spend lots and lots of money, trillions and trillions of dollars.
But what people here, I'll tell you what the people here know.
First off, we serve in the military here in Shando Valley more than I think other people do.
We have a lot of, everybody has a relative, a cousin, a son, a niece, a nephew, in the military or has been in the military.
And these guys have had, these guys and gals have had tours in Afghanistan, several.
Tours in Iraq, several.
They've come back.
Some are discharged.
Some are reservists back doing home duty.
And so their family says, hey, you're a hero.
You fought against the enemy and you kept America safe.
And then their son and their daughter and their husband, their wife, their cousin, their nephew explains to them what they really did.
And they explain to them that, you know what, our commanders didn't even know why we were in Iraq.
Our commanders didn't have a clear sense of what we were doing in Afghanistan.
Okay?
Or Uganda.
Well, you know, this is something I've really noticed in the coverage of the debate last night is they say, well, you know, Ron Paul, you've got ten minutes to talk.
He was very clear and principled and whatever, and they thought, you know, in the general TV pundit sense, he did good, you know, sort of thing for who he is from the point of view of the news anchors.
But they would say, and this is, I think, in the CNN analysis of the winners and losers of the debate, is that, but what he said might appeal to Democrats and to moderates and undecideds more than the Republican base that he's taking such a very different position from.
And I was thinking, of course, it never occurred to these people, the CNN writers or the TV pundits, it seemed to me that, as we can see in Ron Paul's growing poll numbers, the thing that he has going for him the best is that he refuses to back down on these things, and he is winning people over.
He is changing people's minds.
There are people who have thought this whole time that, hey, if everybody I know is in on the consensus that these wars are great and are necessary to protect us from the terrorists and whatever, then, you know, there's a lot of people who believe that up until they heard Ron Paul explain otherwise once, and they went, oh, geez, that makes a lot more sense to me, and they're coming his way.
In the same sense, I hate to make the comparison to John Kerry, but I thought in 2004 that if Kerry had just come out and said, no, this is wrong, they told us lies to get us into this war, they've handed the south of the country over to Iran, they let Osama bin Laden escape, etc., etc., and really had hammered the Bush foreign policy, even though his wasn't different, he could have won.
But instead he refused to take on the myth of Bush's aggression keeping us all safe from the bad guys.
That's right, because the money that helps get people elected, whether they be Republican or Democrat, the big money is sourced out of people whose interest is fighting these wars and going over there and occupying countries and messing with them and nation-building and all these kinds of things, tons and tons of dollars out of people's taxes, out of borrowed money, out of your children's and your grandchildren's livelihood, kids that aren't even born yet are going to pay for these wars.
And so that money, but right now that money gets used, it gets recycled, it gets laundered by the military-industrial complex.
It's not buying defense.
It's not buying intelligence, as we well know.
I mean, we could have had the same intelligence for a quarter of the amount we spent when it comes to accurate information.
But my thing is here, we have a lot of people in the 6th District, rightly so, and I am one of them, who thinks the Constitution is a really good idea, right?
I mean, you know, they believe in the Constitution.
Well, if you believe in the Constitution, you can have wars.
Nothing wrong with wars.
They just have to be constitutionally declared.
And we haven't had one of those in a really long time, and certainly the things we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan...
Although that can be problematic, too, because a lot of times the Congress is worse than Bush or Obama on any of these issues, you know?
Well, that's true, but I'll tell you, if the...
A war declared by the House and the Senate could be just as immoral and aggressive.
Oh, no, could be, absolutely.
No, I'm not saying they're right.
I'm saying let's go through the constitutional process, and in that process, I think you would find that the truth would have come out far earlier when it came to what we were doing in Iraq, and it would have clearly put some parameters on what we might have been doing in Afghanistan.
Because, you know, we went to Afghanistan to knock down the Taliban, I guess, because they were harboring one of the guys who fought up 9-11, right?
So, they were knocked down, and we put Karzai in December 2001.
But we're still in the Afghanistan Nation Building.
Well, that wasn't part of the discussion.
So, you know, I think the Constitution, while it wouldn't prevent immoral and wrong wars, it would have included a discussion, a public discussion, such that Americans would have been educated, and they wouldn't have to hear it for the first time from Ron Paul.
Right.
Because they would have...
You know what, I mean, just looking back at the fall of 2002, I think that's right.
Joe Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he held the people-in-agreement-only hearings for a day or two, and that was it.
And yet, if they were really debating a declaration of war, they would have had to let others testify.
That's exactly right.
That's the process.
The Founders understood that, you know, maybe it's not so fast to talk about things, but you know what, it's better for the Republic if we don't let a small group of people who want war...
I mean, and they knew, the Founders knew this.
They worked, they lived, you know, they watched Europe.
They studied European history.
They understood how wars get started.
A couple of guys want something, go to the king, get a war.
Well, it's the same thing here in this country, unfortunately.
And so they wrote a constitution to say, well, we must make sure that a group of people, many, many people, I don't remember how big the Congress was initially, it wasn't that big, but it was a lot more people than one or two, that those people will talk about it, those people accountable to the ones who will die in these wars, the ones that will fund these wars, you know, that those people...
So, you know, when you talk about the Constitution, you really can address concerns about our foreign policy because, you know, it's a federal role.
The foreign policy is something that has to be done, needs to be done right, and the Constitution lays out some steps to do it right, and yet we don't follow that Constitution.
So, you know, I can appeal, and many people who love the Constitution understand this and they respond well to it.
I'll tell you, I got a question, I was at a Tea Party meeting the other day, and I got a question from the audience after the presentation, and actually, you know, what I presented there was Ron Paul's Restore the Republic plan.
I went through it, I said, you know what, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here.
Ron Paul's got a great plan to bring back fiscal sanity.
Here, let's talk it through, because that's what I'm going to be pushing for, and it absolutely is.
I love his Restore the Republic plan.
It's just great, and I know you've talked about it, and people are aware of it.
But in any case, afterwards, I had a question about Aid to Israel, and I mentioned it, I thought Rick Perry got it right when he talked about a zero-based foreign aid budget, you know, looking at everything from ground zero, not what we've done historically, but what makes sense.
And I said, when you give aid to a country, you weaken that country.
Just like when you give, you've got some kids, and if one kid, every time he gets in trouble, you bail him out.
Every time they make a mistake, you cover up the mistake, you solve the problem for them.
Does that make the kid stronger or weaker?
Well, we know, right?
This is a problem.
We know this is what parents do.
We love our kids, right?
But sometimes the way we handle them, sometimes our generosity is not actually the best thing for them.
And I said, in terms of Israel, I said, first off, and I pointed out that people understood some things about Israel, but one thing they didn't know.
I said, one thing they do know is Israel has a really strong military and a relatively good economy, although it's a socialist system over there.
They have a relatively good economy compared to their neighbors.
They certainly have a higher per capita income, and they have a great military.
We know this, right?
I mean, there's no argument.
Israel's military, their air force, their navy, their intel, it's all good, right?
They do a good job.
It's admirable in the sense of a small country's military.
So we know that.
But I said one thing that many of you here don't know is that we don't have a mutual defense treaty with Israel.
We don't.
Because we don't want them to participate in our wars in the Middle East, because it just undermines our entire mission.
Well, that could be true, but actually we have asked them repeatedly and worked through the State Department repeatedly to try to get some definition, some legal treaty of mutual defense.
And the main people that don't want that is the Israeli government.
And I told the people here that I was talking to, and I hope to educate people, that's correct.
They don't want to have their hands tied by us.
They don't want to be sucked into our wars, because we're very unreliable.
We do wars all the time.
We don't have clear parameters and objectives.
They are looking out for their sovereignty.
Their sovereignty means they don't want to be tied into mutual defense treaties, even with us.
And we assume that we are their friends, and they view us as friends.
But I give them credit for that.
And I said that's an example that we should take to heart in the way that we ourselves operate in the United States.
And this is that whole thing Washington warned about.
Be careful about entangling alliances.
Well, Israel actually follows that rule for themselves.
Right.
But we don't.
Those isolationists.
Yeah, yeah.
And here's the thing too, Karen.
Last night in the debate this came up where Ron Paul was saying we ought to give them their independence and let them decide these things for themselves.
But I think his point was developed better.
And he did make mention that we tell them when they can't negotiate peace as well as when they can't bomb Iran or something like that.
And this is a point that he developed further in an interview with Israel Anderson at RonPaulFlicks.com.
He talked about how, look, if we weren't involved in every step of their foreign policy over there in Israel, I think they would probably have more friendly relations with their neighbors.
There probably wouldn't be all this talk of war.
We kind of distort their amount of power that they have.
It's right.
They would be, as a truly sovereign nation, Israel would be trading with other sovereign nations.
And instead you've got America on both sides, not the people of America, but you've got Washington, D.C., pulling the strings on both sides, telling other countries that are our allies, we tell the Europeans you can't trade with Iran, you must put an economic embargo on Iran like we're doing.
And we tell Israel we can't negotiate here, you can't trade there.
Right.
I mean, Olmert was trying to go and have a, I don't know about a peace treaty, but he was trying to negotiate with Assad in 2008 or 2007, and George Bush wouldn't let him do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And if we put ourselves in their shoes, we would say back off.
We'd say to Washington, D.C., back off.
And that's really the message I think that more and more Washington is going to be hearing from other countries and from the American people.
All right.
Well, we're already over time.
I thank you very much for your time, Karen, and best of luck to you there.
Well, thanks a lot.
I always love talking to you.
Everybody, that's Karen Katowski, heroic Air Force whistleblower.
Let's Google her up.
Spell it like Kwiatkowski.
Her website is KarenKforCongress.com.
She's running for Congress in the, I think, northern Shenandoah Valley.
