I'm here at the Restoring the Republic Conference 2008, Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties, hosted by the Future Freedom Foundation.
And I'm joined in person with the American hero, Pentagon whistleblower, Karen Katowski.
So good to talk to you on a radio show, live in person here.
Karen, how are you?
I'm fine, thank you so much.
It's great talking to you in person, too.
I have to say, your speech this morning was just incredible.
You're the best writer on LRC.
Don't tell Anthony I said that.
I love the way you write.
I love all the little jokes and the stuff.
It's just great.
Thanks.
Well, I guess I want to ask you about some of the Pentagon whistleblower stuff, maybe toward the end.
But basically, your speech had this overarching theme.
And it's time for us to just be beyond completely fed up.
And you invoked that spirit of mutiny that Alex Coburn talked about in his speech yesterday.
Tell us about that, what you think about where we are in this country, what we need to do to head it the right way.
The topic that I had was about opportunities that we have to restore the republic, to reclaim a republic as the empire collapses.
And we know it's collapsing, and so that's pretty standard.
And I think a lot of the speeches that have been given, all this whole conference, about how the empire is collapsing.
But what do we do?
And it's hard to think about these abstract things.
And so I was tasked to come up with real things.
So I wanted to look at, well, what can we do?
Well, what we can do, it's not we, it's what I can do.
It's what each individual can do.
And there's actually, and this is why people feel weak and we feel scared and we feel alarmed, because we feel powerless.
But really, we're never powerless.
We make choices, you know, a million choices a day.
We, information is unlimited to us.
This is one of the beautiful things about where we, you know, living today rather than living 2,000 years ago or 1,000 years ago.
You know, we have access to all kinds of ideas, all kinds of people.
You know, this is the first time we have sat together.
But it is not the first time that we have had these types of conversations.
And we know lots of people who we rarely actually see in person, but we have access to those ideas.
So there's lots of things we can do.
And so in this speech I just, which, by the way, I'm pretty sure will be on Lou Rockwell later this week with links to some of the quotes because a lot of people like the Patrick Henry quotes and these other things.
But what we can do is we can prepare ourselves to live free.
We can modify and adapt our personal economy and our viewpoint, our thinking about economy, because I think capitalism is sometimes left out, free market.
And we assume, oh, a free market will naturally emerge, a free market, just like the black market exists.
You know, we don't really see it and talk about it, but we know it's there.
And we think, well, it will just naturally expand and take over in the absence of a large state.
The state shrinks and naturally all the good things will grow up.
And that's not necessarily true.
So we have to take some time to nurture our thinking about the free market, but prepare ourselves mentally and preparing our kind of courage to live free, to remember that it is not just freedom to act, but freedom to trade, freedom to produce, freedom to benefit from that production, freedom to choose what I want to produce.
It's all that.
And then it's this attitude thing, which is the fun part, is the attitude.
I liked Augustine's noble insolence.
And then, of course, Alex Coburn had already said earlier, he said, the spirit of mutiny.
We need to have the spirit of mutiny.
We need to reward it, cultivate it, live it, be it, you know.
So I love that stuff.
Right.
It almost sounds like a Condoleezza Rice, out of every crisis comes opportunity sort of thing.
It's just that rather than enlarging the state when everything comes crashing down, you want to offer an alternative, a libertarian alternative, that actually all the statisms will cause our problem.
Let's get back to some basic principles here.
Right.
Basic principles have to drive it.
But I think, too, we have to be afraid.
I mean, not afraid.
We need to be aware that just because we love freedom and we may love the free market and we understand these things, does not mean that it's automatically going to emerge as the dominant mindset in a collapsing empire, in what we have now.
And it is collapsing.
And then you can have the argument, will it take a long time?
Will it be a little whimper?
Or will it be rapid?
And I'm leaning towards just, you know, taking a bet here.
I mean, that it's going to be more rapid than we expect.
And are we going to be ready?
Are we the freedom vanguard, all the people here who understand libertarianism, who understand some of these things and put value on it?
We are the vanguard.
Are even we going to be ready?
Because you can be sure a lot of people are not going to be ready.
And so there's a sense that what I tried to, I hope, what I want to think about is let's get ready for the future because it's happening.
It's right around the corner.
And that means we have to practice.
We need to be knowledgeable.
We can't get that knowledge in public schooling, and we're not going to get it in most colleges.
I'm sorry.
You have to educate yourself.
So there's that.
Luckily, it's easy.
Go to antiwar.com every day.
Go to TheFutureOfFreedom.com.
Go to Lou Rockwell.
If you just spend a half hour a day skimming articles, reading deeply a few, becoming aware, understanding the principles behind some of this stuff, that's an education, better than a college education.
But we have to do that, and we have to do that with the idea not just that it's entertaining to us.
You know, oh, that's good.
I enjoy reading antiwar.com.
I absolutely do.
I could spend many hours doing that, and I would do it for fun.
But we also need to think about the purpose behind it.
How do we prepare ourselves for citizens in this future republic or republics or confederation or whatever it is?
Because if we don't prepare ourselves to live that way, we could end up living in something that's very worse than an expanding empire, a contracted empire that's putting all of its resources, you know, on us, against us.
Another New Deal, another world war.
Yeah.
And, I mean, like I've asked a few people here at the conference, because they're all over the country, and I've been reading a little bit on antiwar.com just news articles about some of the things that FEMA is doing, some of the things that Homeland Security guys are doing.
Certainly we know the Military Commissions Act and some of the ways that the military, that we think of as a foreign thing, is going to be able to operate here at home against us, enforcing laws and helping with humanitarian disasters, all these things, helping.
I use that word loosely.
You know, we've got this.
The possibility exists that as Americans become so fed up with overseas wars, which they are.
I don't care what political party, the whole country is against these overseas wars.
As we insist that the next president pull back, that doesn't necessarily mean the military is going to get smaller.
That doesn't mean the state is going to shrink accordingly.
That doesn't mean the budget is going to go from $550 billion a year operating funds down suddenly to $250 billion.
It should go down a lot worse.
It won't, though.
We know the nature of the Leviathan is to expand and grow.
So if all that money and energy and employment and corporate benefits, this whole entity, the military industrial complex, if it all comes home from those 70 countries that we're in and all the various interventions, which Americans want this to happen, and they may well get this sooner than we think, it would be wonderful.
But if it comes home and does not be liberated from itself, it doesn't go back out into communities to do productive, peaceful, wonderful, purposeful things, then that force of the state potentially can be used against us.
And so we really need to be prepared for battle.
I don't know if it's a physical battle.
Maybe in some cases.
But mental battle, moral battle.
We have to be prepared for that.
So that's kind of what I was thinking of with all this.
Well, the consequences of the warfare state coming home and then, well, what do we do with it?
There's Karen, pointed at her.
This is already this way, right?
Almost all of our cops just got out of the Army.
And that's one of the reasons the cops are killing all these people.
Because soldiers said, I saw a movement and I shot them, and that's what I've been doing for three years, and that's what I'm doing now.
And so they shoot them.
They see a movement, they shoot them.
They see a cell phone in somebody's hand, somebody gave the story.
Old lady has a cell phone.
Well, she dead now.
Looked like a gun to me.
And all his buddies back him up.
Right.
So, yeah.
You mentioned secession, too, in the speech.
And just now you talked about the possibility of confederacy and some of these other things maybe going back to the Articles of Confederation or maybe even more extreme than that.
I was actually a couple of minutes late.
When I walked into the speech, you were talking about the secession movements in Hawaii and the Lakota Nation.
Yeah, sure.
And you think those are harbingers of, of course, there's the Free Vermont Movement as well, right?
That's right.
That's right.
The Lakota Sioux thing happened, I think, in December.
They formally broke with the United States.
And, you know, the United States, they can't break with us.
You know, we own them.
Well, in fact, we don't own them.
And in paper, they repudiated the treaties.
Of course, the government, our government, hasn't honored any of those treaties for years and years, and that's a fact.
And so based on this, we've had it.
And we think we can do better than what – and if you think about Indian reservations, which I've driven through, I've never lived on one, but I've driven through them, and I certainly read about the reputation.
This is the very worst of statism, the very worst of destruction of a people, of individuality, of market, everything, except, well, there's a minor revenge.
Of course, that's the revenge of the Indian casinos.
This is wonderful.
But, you know, they've realized that salvation is not in a grand state, and it's not in trusting a grand state.
And so they said, look, Cota Nation is independent.
They're going to issue passports if you want to join them.
And they said, not only that, we have open immigration policy.
Come on in.
All we ask is that you don't have dual loyalty.
You don't carry two passports.
If you want to be part of us, we will issue you a passport.
You have to repudiate your American one.
And, you know, that's serious.
Well, it's less serious than it used to be, because being an American these days is, what does it mean?
I mean, it doesn't mean what we read in books that it means.
It means something much uglier than that.
So, anyway, I use that as an example.
And then, of course, the Hawaiians, there's apparently a number of movements, different ones, probably competing ones, which are saying we don't like being a state anymore.
And Hawaii is a huge recipient of federal funds, there's no doubt about it.
And yet they're seeing that that's not the salvation.
So I think they're another good example.
And, of course, you've got a couple of states, the Vermont guys politically, and cheese-wise and yogurt-wise and the other things that they do in Vermont, they don't need the federal government to make their name.
Vermont has a brand.
And this is good.
It doesn't need the federal government to tax the hell out of that brand.
We really don't.
And, you know, if it was just Vermont that seceded, they could still have free trade with all their neighboring states and everything else.
It wouldn't require a breakdown in the division of labor or anything.
No, not at all.
We could all just be the USA only without a central government.
You know, this I didn't talk about, and I'm not an expert on, but the state of New York in a mad grab for money, because obviously there's never enough money in New York's government to spend and to dole out to their favorites.
These guys have said that if you're a New Yorker and you buy something on the Internet, you're, by God, going to pay that New York income tax.
And if you don't, we're going to get it from whoever it was that sent you the goods and we got all these lawsuits planned and we're going to intimidate the hell out of the rest.
Well, they're getting sued, of course, by Amazon and a few others.
But what better?
I mean, can you imagine if New York was an independent?
They'll separate them.
Let them behave.
They want to be like a little nation.
Be a little nation.
And they would be far more accountable to New Yorkers than they are now.
So rather than letting them succeed, we kick them out.
Kick their butts out.
Kick their butts out.
Because, you know, what they want is, and this is something I talked about last year a little bit, they want the benefits of being a state with free commerce with all, but they want to tax that commerce when it's to their benefit.
Well, you know, people don't like that, this country.
We'd like free trade.
Free trade is attractive.
And these folks, the Vermont people, the Lakota Sioux, the groups in Hawaii, and the folks that are very angry at the state of New York for this unnecessary and unlawful attempt to gouge them, basically, on Internet trade, they're not libertarians.
I mean, there's some libertarians in Vermont, and I'm sure Lakota Sioux has some libertarians, but this is not a libertarian thing.
This is average common people who say, I'm sick of this state.
It is not worth the cost.
It's not worth the price.
Not ideological people, just regular people making economic decisions in their own lives.
That's right.
That's right.
What's good for me?
What's good for me being part of a republic that has 330 million people who have – and I was talking to somebody the other day.
Jim Webb is our state of Virginia senator, and he won, and I voted for him, first Democrat I've ever voted for, and I'm happy with him.
But you know what?
There's like 12, 13 million people in Virginia.
We've got two senators.
Well, I have one 13 millionth of a relationship with Jim Webb.
And, frankly, I'm sorry to say this.
I don't know who the other guy is.
Is it Warner still?
I don't know who it is.
I have no relationship with him.
So there's even less than one 13 millionth.
And that's almost lottery odds.
That's not democracy.
That's not a republic.
A republic is about the public and about an accountable government.
In the case of Jim Webb, you basically got lucky that he's got a little bit of reason when it comes to foreign policy going on there, but it wasn't up to you to pick him, really, was it?
Not at all.
In fact, yeah, nothing like that.
And, you know, it's actually unfair, and this is typical of all government, that Jim Webb and I have communicated before.
So probably if I did, as a constituent, ask him for something, I would probably get better treatment than the average Virginian because he would know my name.
He'd say, oh, I remember her, yeah.
Well, this is the nature of all government, so let's keep it small.
Because if it's going to be about who knows who and who gets favors, let's keep that group small so that all of us in my community can get favors, at least kind of equal.
You did this whole great thing in your speech about turning government into a little puppy dog.
Tell me this now, the puppy dog metaphor.
I love this.
Well, first off, this is speaking back to that noble insolence and the whole spirit of mutiny and whatnot.
And, really, I was trying to build up this idea that we, well, Ayn Randian idea, the individual as the one to be worshipped, the atlas that holds it up, not the government.
The government should be very lowly.
It should be worshipping at our feet.
Well, like V.
What did V say?
People should be.
Oh.
The government.
The people should not fear their government.
The government should fear the people.
Absolutely.
That's what I'm talking about.
I should use the V quote because that's perfect.
But little puppies, you know, it's like the Leviathan.
It grows and grows, and it's very dangerous and deadly.
But, I mean, think about a Rottweiler, a big, large, male Rottweiler.
Well, even if he's a sweet dog, which most Rottweilers are, if you are walking down a dark alley and you see a big Rottweiler adult, you're going to be scared of him.
But, you know, if you saw a baby Rottweiler, you would just like want to squeeze him and just give him little, you know, just cute as a button, and all puppies are like that, no matter how ugly and mean they get to be later, and how aggressive and how deadly and dangerous these creatures would be.
And I just wanted to, but, and so I likened the way government should be.
It's like a little puppy, and they're always submissive.
If you go to the pound and see puppies, or you go visit somebody who's had a litter of puppies, you know, the little puppies are rolling around, and they're just licking, and they're so friendly and submissive, and they're scared of you.
You've got all the power, and that's the way we should be with our government.
Our government should be scared of us, and we should have all the power.
And, you know, we might choose to feed government every once in a while.
You know, maybe like one of the guys was saying, the old way the taxes, income taxes were done, in March 15th, people would write a check to the government.
That's how I buy my dog food.
I would say, yeah, it's time to buy some dog food.
I'd like a few government services.
Now, as an anarchist, it doesn't need anything.
That guy, and maybe, you know what?
Maybe that guy doesn't have to pay.
Maybe some people who need government services should pay.
But limited, and I choose what it is.
But it's not like that now.
I mean, you know, the government demands.
Now we're the guy in the galley, and they're the Rottweiler, for sure.
That's right, and we're getting shaken down every day, every day.
And we have to have, I think the first thing that has to change is our thinking about it.
We need to recognize that being shaken down by your government's wrong.
Okay, we already got a little thing.
We kind of know that being held incommunicado and tortured for six years or whatever, we kind of know that's wrong.
We kind of picked up on that.
It took us a while.
It took us a while to get that.
But most Americans realize that's wrong.
Well, there's a lot of things that are wrong, and the first step is, I think, realizing it and having contempt, a healthy contempt for government, which is libertarians have this, but all these other people who are acting against this overreaching state, they're all getting the same thing, and they're not libertarians.
They are not libertarians.
This is not, I really think it's much more broad than the libertarian philosophy.
You know, I've noticed it's really hard for a lot of people to even hear the word empire in conjunction, in a description of America.
It's a good thing.
People know that America's not supposed to be an empire.
Don't you call America an empire, you jerk.
But until they can accept that fact, they're not going to be able to undo it.
I'm glad it hurts their feelings, but we've got to find a way to get it through their head that no, really, that story is our story, the republic that became an empire and committed suicide.
Well, I remember even in high school, and that was a long time ago, there would be talk of comparing America in the 20th century as Rome, because we had our 200th anniversary, and I remember when we celebrated our 200th anniversary.
And this talk continued.
It wasn't just that anniversary year, this idea, a comparison of the world's greatest society, at least in, you know, let's leave out all the countries that don't count in South America, Central America, and, you know, Asia and all that.
But the one we're familiar with is Rome, the Roman initially republic held up as a standard, and then later the empire.
Well, this comparison was made frequently, and many people who aren't even political will know about this comparison of America's history and model of government and the republicanism that we used to have with Rome's history.
And you know what?
Guess where Rome ended up, and many people were worried about it even 30, 40 years ago.
I'm sure neoconservatives even worry about this at some point, you know, make this comparison.
Well, it's the commies that call us imperialists, so who's listening to them?
We're not imperialists at all.
We're only trying to protect the world from the communists.
Of course, that's what they call it.
That's right.
And yet now here we are.
The Cold War has been over quite a while, Karen.
That's right.
Well, and we couldn't use that word imperial really until recently because it echoed the bad things the communists were saying, and of course they couldn't be right.
And weirdly enough, on that one issue, they were kind of right.
But we're thinking now in terms of empire, and I think not that it's a good thing, but all of our forces everywhere, we're becoming aware of it more and more.
We're thinking about this.
And certainly as we go broke and we spend all this money on mercenary forces and, well, Halliburton and all these just whole, you know, the money that's spent in prosecuting stupid wars everywhere for no good reason, but blowing up stuff so you can spend money to your contractors to rebuild it so it can get blown up again so you can rebuild it.
I mean, this is just a stupid self-licking ice cream cone is what they call it in the Pentagon.
Yeah.
Not usually about ourselves so much, but that's what it is.
Yeah, War, Inc.
So we're aware now, and we have some words we're allowed to use because we couldn't use imperialism during the Cold War because that would mean you're a communist because you're using a word a communist uses.
But it applies.
And, you know, there's that other book, and I know you know which one it is.
You may have even talked to the author.
He was a banker, and he went around the world, and he wrote a book.
Oh, I can't remember.
I wish I could remember it.
Well, he didn't go.
He went to South America, and he did the U.S. government's business, and then finally wrote a tell-all book.
Oh, Economic Hitman.
Economic Hitman, yes.
And read that or interview.
Oh, you've got to read it.
It's sitting on my pile.
Perkins.
Perkins is the guy's name.
I forget his first name.
Economic Hitman.
He's working for our banks.
He's working for companies that are dealing with IMF loans and World Bank guarantees and whole things, and we, of course, run those kind of things out of Washington the way we want them in the Washington consensus.
We tell Latin American countries and all other countries, this is how you should organize.
Well, of course, if the communists were around, they would say, well, this is how your imperialism works, and they would be absolutely right.
Well, Tom, not Tom, Perkins, I can't remember his first name, and his book Economic Hitman, this was on the bestseller list.
New York Times, people were reading it, all kinds of people, not ideological people.
Everybody says, what's the story?
Well, what we're explaining is how the empire works, so we are allowed to talk about empire, and many people beyond ideological people understand what it means, and that's good because we're calling it what it is, and now we can say, well, what happens to empires when they go broke, when they overreach, when they do things that are not responsive to the public that they were supposed to be the republic of?
Ultimately, the Ewoks bring them down.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I think the only thing is it's coming down.
Empire is collapsing, and the question is can we prevent a really serious fascist phase before we get back to a republic or multiple republics or independent states or whatever it is it's going to take the form of, and I don't think we know.
Yeah, it does seem like the state is, they're ready for the former there.
It's going to be up to us.
This is what I don't understand, and I'm not well informed on, but, you know, you keep hearing about these FEMA camps and checking out these old abandoned military bases here on the states so we can see if we can hold people there, and they're doing all these big mass roundups with these poor guys trying to make a living in these packing plants.
You know, some of them are illegal, some of them are not illegal, but they're rounding up all these people.
They're holding them.
I mean, what they did in the FDLS folks, these are not workers.
In fact, the big crime of the folks yearning for Zion was they were yearning for too many welfare checks, and we were sending them out that way, and I don't think that's right.
I don't care how they live.
I don't want to pay for it, and we were paying.
We were subsidizing.
All these people say, Oh, they're awful.
They're immoral.
They made breaks for the Air Force.
Yeah, yeah.
We gave them military contracts, and all the women that weren't legally married but had children are what we call, what is it called?
We call them mothers with dependent children, and there's programs for them, and they're getting that money.
We're paying for it.
We're subsidizing that lifestyle.
That angers me.
Nobody's able to.
Apparently, you know, their focus is, Oh, somebody got married when they were 16.
So instead of just cutting off the funding, they send in the SWAT team.
Right, but you know what?
What a nice practice that was.
They sent in the military, and it was militarized.
It was a militarized takedown of women and children.
Yeah, and you know what?
We didn't outcry that.
We said, Oh, well, they have polygamy.
They're not good.
Let's point a sniper gun at them.
Let's scare the living hell out of these poor children.
Let's separate them from their families and put them in who knows what kind of temporary quarters.
You know what, too?
All the Waco references and the buildup to that, they didn't serve to make people say, Whoa, this is going to be another Waco Everybody stay back at your headquarters and leave these people alone.
Send a couple of cops out to knock on the door politely.
We don't want another Waco here.
Instead, it was like, Oh, good.
This is an opportunity.
Maybe we can have another one of these.
Let's have all the armored personnel carriers and everything else.
They probably said, This is how we do Waco right.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But you know, it's also interesting, too, that both of these targets were in Texas, the source of our other great contribution, George Bush.
Of course, Texans don't claim him, but whatever.
He's from Connecticut.
I know he's from Connecticut.
Okay.
But, you know, out in the country, you know, lots of expansive land where you're not in the middle of a city doing it, and both religious organizations that are not favored by the mainstream, which is, That's fine.
I'll favor either one of them.
I didn't know much about what they believed, but I know I wasn't a part of that, and I probably wouldn't be a part of that ever.
I don't agree.
But you know what?
That's contrary to our very most basic principles.
Of course.
America was founded by religious gooks with guns.
Come on.
That's what we're all about here.
That's right.
And to protect the right of other people to be religious gooks with guns.
Oh, and you know what?
I don't even think they had guns.
They were just religious gooks.
See, I'm stuck in all the spin from TV that tried to make them dangerous to others on the outside, which they were, just like they would have had us believe that the Branch Davidians were going to march on Waco and Koresh was going to install himself the emperor of Waco or something.
Yeah, and, you know, that's, again, it's the kind of thing I was trying to talk about in the speech, and everybody else is doing the same thing, too.
I mean, we've got to get rid of this unsubstantiated sense of fear.
The government pushes fear.
It lives on fear.
That's how it gets us to do it at once.
You know, you better pay your taxes or the IRS is going to destroy your life.
Well, okay, yes, it is true that the IRS can destroy your life, but if we all didn't pay our taxes, you know, it's like a lottery, you know.
Actually, most of us would be just fine.
We'd be a lot better off.
But I'm not advocating that type of mass mutiny at this point.
I think we can wait a few more months for that.
But, you know, this idea that we've got to take down Koresh because he's going to take over, what was the town, Waco?
Yeah, he's going to be the king of Waco.
We can't have that.
Well, why not?
Give him Waco, for God's sake.
I don't know anything in Waco.
Let him have him.
That's what Bill Hicks said.
He was like, the guy's real name is Vernon.
Let him be Jesus for a couple of weeks.
What's his deal yet?
That's right.
And, you know, the Wacoans, I have a great deal of confidence, can handle themselves in the face of a Jesus David Koresh takeover.
I'm not worried about them.
The people of that town weren't scared of the Branch Davidians at all.
The ATF, they called the operation Showtime for a reason.
Oh, wow.
All right, let's not get too far into Waco.
We're almost out of time here because the next speech is coming up and we've got to all run downstairs.
But I have to get you on the record about what happened at the Pentagon again.
Okay.
No interview of you that I could ever do would ever compare to the Q&A with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN.
Anyone who hasn't read Karen's interview on C-SPAN Q&A with Brian Lamb, you're cheating yourself.
Go read it right now, hit pause, and then come back later and listen to the rest of this thing.
But we've got to bring it up.
Scott McClellan is in the news and he's not told us anything new.
No, not true.
And yet it's reopened.
That's what I think Frank Rich in the New York Times talked about.
Listen, there's a reason why everybody's jumping on this.
It's because this is a crime that's still unprosecuted and people want justice for it.
And that's why even mealy-mouthed little statements like we're getting out of Scott McClellan have such a shockwave effect.
And I think, honestly, Karen, there's probably among the super majority of Americans who oppose this war now many of them don't know that you came out in 2004.
Three.
Oh, in three.
Oh, it wasn't three.
Right after I left the Pentagon, as soon as I was out.
And said, hey, listen, I was there, I saw these guys, they didn't just lie you into war, they were trying to lie me into war.
Tell us what happened there.
Yeah, well, I worked up in OSD in May of 2002.
I was moved into the Middle East Policy Directorate to write staff papers and all kinds of stuff, just worker piece stuff, low level.
Lieutenant Colonel is low level where I was.
I was, like, at the bottom.
And during that summer a bunch of folks are coming in from outside, all civilians, political appointees, which are not hired on merit but hired because they know somebody.
So we've got these ideologues, and they were ideologues, and I spoke to many of them, and they were ideologues.
They were not military experts.
They were not strategic people.
They were not history people.
They knew nothing about the Middle East.
They didn't speak Arabic, but they were ideologues.
And it turned out later I found out.
I didn't even know what a neoconservative was.
I didn't know what they stood for.
But you could call them imperialists, and certainly they believe in the use of American militarism to pursue aims, and their particular aims had to do with the Middle East.
These guys come in.
A couple months later they're formed into an office called the Office of Special Plans.
Of course, we know them because we'd shared space with them for a while.
Now they're a sister organization to us.
And our first meeting that said, hey, we got these guys out of there.
They're not hot bucking your desks anymore, and that's great.
They're going to move upstairs into their own space.
They're your sister organization, and here's how it works.
When you need to write a paper, you will no longer go to the intelligence resources.
You will make a phone call to the Office of Special Plans desk officer, and you will tell him when your material is due, and a few days later they will send you a set of talking points.
You will use those talking points in their entirety.
You will not delete.
You will not replace.
You will not modify.
You will use the entire list in your document on the three topics of Saddam Hussein and Iraq, WMD, and terrorism.
These three things.
Now, if I'm writing a paper that's not on those things but takes place in the Middle East, I have to address those three things.
So every document that me and all the other guys and gals doing this work of producing papers on various policy issues would have not really an addendum, an integrated part of their paper.
Of course, electronically you could say it's an addendum.
We would copy and paste exactly this information.
Well, looking at these talking points and having looked at the intelligence, of course, I knew they were leaving things out.
It was cherry-picked.
It was modified.
It was written very, I say, persuasively to a certain end.
It was propaganda, and this was clear.
And the other thing that really, two things caused the problem.
One is these talking points are marked secret.
Everything is supposed to be secret on this and these things that we were using, and then I heard the exact same talking points in Cheney and Bush speeches in September and October 2002.
I'm saying, wait a minute.
You know, it is true that presidents, when they mouth off about something that was secret, have instantly declassified it.
That is true.
Reagan did this.
He was notorious for doing this, and we know this.
But then they were still classified.
Even though the president is telling the American people secret things, we still have to treat it like it's classified.
So it's not classified, and it wasn't true either, so I don't even know what that means.
But that was that.
Also, over time, if we had a paper due one week and then two weeks later another paper, we could not use the same set of talking points we had two weeks earlier.
Had to go through the same process again because they were modifying them.
And as they modified them, I got to see what they added and what they deleted because they were in charge of the propaganda points, and they were modifying them and making them different and better and whatnot.
Again, they is the Office of Special Plans up there.
Office of Special Plans, sure, Abe Sholsky, who's still in the Pentagon, still working in policy and been working on Iran issues for some years now.
The OSP itself, of course, disbanded after the invasion, shortly after the invasion.
It's called the Iranian Directorate now.
Yeah, Iranian Directorate now because that's the next big thing.
So the talking points, though, they evolved.
Evolved over time.
From week to week there.
From week to week, and what they evolved in response to was never in what I saw and what I could glean, never from new intelligence.
In fact, some of the intelligence that was in there was 10, 12 years old, and it was already been proven to be false, yet they were still using it.
That's one of the problems.
It was never due to new intelligence, but it was due to the exposure of things Bush and Cheney had said publicly, quoting these talking points that turned out not to be true.
And, of course, the most significant one that sticks in my mind is the we had a talking point.
OSP would provide us a talking point.
We used it from early September until late November, early December, and then suddenly it disappeared, and it disappeared.
It was the talking point about Saddam Hussein's intelligence people had met with Mohammed Adda in Prague.
This is a big 9-11 in Iraq connection, which it never existed.
This was a factoid that had been reported and substantiated to be untrue by the FBI and the CIA in conjunction two years before this, at least, or a year and a half before this.
They knew that this was not true.
We had it in our OSP-produced talking points because it's very nice.
It fits with the argument.
It's nice propaganda.
If it was true, it would be great.
It would justify the war, wouldn't it?
Well, it did.
Until the New York Times, doing a rare bit of actual work during this time frame, published some statements by the FBI and CIA that said this didn't happen.
We got a report.
We checked it out.
We proved it.
We knew Mohammed Adda wasn't even on the same continent when this happened.
So this is not true.
Only after the New York Times, so then you've got to wonder the role of media in this country.
Is it actually creating our intelligence?
Because that was the new intelligence input that caused OSP to eliminate that statement, and then after that the statement disappeared.
Sure.
Airbrushed out, just like the old Soviets would do when something was no longer.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I remember actually being surprised in 2003 and I think even 2004 to hear Cheney, at least in I guess the anniversary of September 11, 2003, two years later, and he was still using the Mohammed Atta in Prague Line.
And I remember saying, well, wait a minute.
Doesn't he know that we all know now that that's not true anymore?
Sure, sure.
And you have to ask yourself why Cheney and Bush and other administration people, and of course certainly the think tanks that supported American Enterprise Institute totally prostituted themselves in aims of this war, New York Times and Post.
Many of these people had inklings that what they were doing was not consistent with reality and with the truth, and they continued to do it.
And you've got to ask yourself, why would Cheney, even a year and a half later, bring up things that the whole country, if they had not been asleep, and many of them were not asleep and knew this to be false, why would he keep saying this?
Because if nothing else, we can fire that guy for incompetence.
You know, if I give you a briefing and I say this is the truth and this is the false thing, 2 plus 2 equals 4, not 5, and you keep filling in on your test, 2 plus 2 equals 5, you're failing.
I'm failing your butt.
I'm kicking you out of class.
I mean, this is, it just makes no sense.
Now, obviously, they abide by a different culture.
You know, if you keep repeating it long enough, they'll believe anything.
So is that it?
Does Cheney have huge contempt for it?
Well, I think we know he does.
I wonder if he even knew that it had been debunked.
Oh, sure.
Absolutely.
Did Scooter Libby tell him it wasn't true?
Look, why is he making all those, no, probably not.
Well, they probably discussed it.
They said, you know, it's not really true, but people will believe it and it sounds good.
You know, so let's use it.
You know, very much a practical liar.
You know, it's a useful lie, let's tell it.
But, you know, you know he knew that it was false.
That's why he had to go to CIA so many times.
Because there's a lot of stuff that the CIA was telling him.
He said, well, I don't like this.
I don't like this.
I don't like this.
Give me something I like.
14 trips he and Libby took.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is the thing, too.
If it had been anybody but Cheney, you could say, well, maybe he's just a little dumb or he's dense or he's a bald-faced fascist liar and he's doing this on purpose.
But, you know, Cheney didn't behave this way when he was the Secretary of Defense.
We know this.
And he's in the best quote on the dangers of doing what we already did and have been doing for six years and will continue doing for a long time, unfortunately, I think.
Cheney advised against this for all of the right reasons, you know, when he was in, you know, when he was in Secretary of Defense.
Do you have a speculation as to what changed?
They say people that even know him well don't know, and I don't know him at all.
So I think, I don't know.
I don't know.
He, I really don't know, and I ought to give it some thought to see if I can come up with some sort of theory.
But.
Halliburton basis.
Well, you know, when he hired, you know, the thing about Halliburton is also a tragedy, too, because before they hired Cheney as their CEO, he got him right out, you know, fresh from the Pentagon, all the contacts, all the congressional things.
It's a big smart move on Halliburton in the short run.
But what Cheney ended up doing to Halliburton was shifting its customer base from about 30 percent government, 25 to 30 percent government, to like 75, 80 percent government dependency.
So now he turned Halliburton into a big government welfare queen, which Halliburton is, and there's a lot of other companies, Blackwater.
I mean, if they want to move on for FEMA and Homeland Security and the Defense Department, what's Blackwater doing?
They wouldn't make much money.
Who needs a private army to go, you know, intimidate people and kill them?
Not many people have that market.
So if you get yourself in a position where you're a lackey to the empire and your whole stock price is based on political stuff, that could have changed him, and he was responsible regardless.
He had never been vice president.
He should be credited in Halliburton's history with taking him down.
Your philosophy that I could make a lot of money on sounds really good right now, this whole neoconservative thing.
That's right.
I want to know more about exporting democracy.
Well, hey, well, think about it this way.
Let's say Cheney's not the devil, okay?
Just suspend that, you know, and let's think.
He's a human.
He's a human being.
For the sake of argument.
Sure.
And he's like George Bush because George Bush was freaked out about his legacy, right?
He's got to have a legacy.
He's got to have a legacy.
That would be a good one.
Okay, well, Cheney probably got criticized for some of the stuff he did with Halliburton in shifting them to a, I just wasted a white collar, welfare queen company.
That's what it is.
Sure.
And they were highly respected.
They had contracts around the world to do all kinds of high-tech stuff and construction.
And, you know, they had a multiple, a diversified customer base.
But now they don't have a diversified customer base.
They do work for governments and primarily our government.
And they're funded by the taxpayers as long as he stays blind and keeps coughing up the money.
Well, maybe he knew this.
Maybe they talked to him and they said, hey, we're kind of worried in the long term, you know, because it's like the peace dividend might break out.
It hadn't done it yet, but maybe it will.
And maybe, you know, the old folks at Halliburton maybe said, you know, we took great pride in what we used to do.
Now we're just a bunch of prostitutes for some government and let's go occupy countries.
Maybe there were complaints there.
Maybe they said, you know what, we don't think this is right.
Maybe Halliburton, in their staff meetings, in their CEO boardrooms, pushed back against Cheney.
And maybe Cheney's just trying to say, hey, look, I'll make you a lot of money.
See, here's how it works.
I'm vice president.
You remember how he got to be vice president.
He picked himself.
He picked himself.
And so maybe this is part of not so much to enrich himself, because I'm not sure how rich you've got to be.
He's got millions of dollars.
And all the power in the world.
Right.
I'm not sure if it's really he wants a few more millions, although maybe he does.
But it could be his own legacy as a CEO, his own doubts about – because he had – Cheney was right years ago.
Well, he made terrible mistakes, too, didn't he?
He arranged the merger with a company that had just lost its massive – I think so.
So maybe this whole government disaster, empire fall, collapse of the empire and everything is really just about Cheney salvaging his reputation as a CEO.
And if you look at Cheney's own personal life – I mean, professional life, not his personal life.
If you look at his professional life, he's got no experience being a CEO.
I bet there's guys, Halliburton stockholders said, who the hell is Cheney?
And get him – he has no qualification.
You're going to run his company.
He's going to run his company into the ground.
And then he almost did.
So now he's VP.
He's trying to salvage his Halliburton CEO legacy.
And you know what?
Who do you love more, the company you're with or some stupid government where the dumb idiot people vote for you?
Come on.
I'm going to have my heart in something I build myself.
This is the beauty of free market capitalism.
Right.
They chose him.
He didn't choose himself for Halliburton.
They chose him.
He owes them a little something.
That's right.
He may have – well, that would be the nicest explanation of how Cheney has destroyed the universe that I can think of.
His unenlightened self-interest.
That's all.
Yeah, unenlightened self-interest.
And he's concerned about – And certainly he couldn't be because he cares about Israel.
Well, you know, and the thing is – Somebody told me actually that Cheney was a holy roller, that he kind of – I bet they put that out as propaganda.
He keeps it kind of under wraps, but that actually he's one of these – Cheney's the kind of guy, if he was a holy roller, he wouldn't keep it under wraps.
I don't think.
I don't think he's got a religious bone in his body.
And if he does, he's going to go to hell for it because he's certainly not behaving in any type of consistency with any type of religion, at least as far as the number of mass murders that have been committed on his watch.
But, yeah, it's hard to say about him, but it would be really awful if Cheney cared more about his Halliburton legacy than he cared about his legacy as vice president over eight years to what he's done to this country's economy and the whole bit and the war and the murders and the deaths and the – The people of Iraq, yeah.
People.
We hardly ever mention them, and it's terrible.
All right, well, we're over time here.
I could sit here and talk to you for another hour, Karen.
I've got a million questions here on my page I didn't even get to, but we have another speech we have to go catch.
So I just would like to end with mentioning a career officer does eye-opening stint inside the Pentagon, and I want to mention the new Pentagon Papers for Salon.com.
The first one out was Knight Ritter, right?
Yeah, Knight Ritter published a little short op-ed, and then American Conservative still has them.
I remember the day that came out.
Oh, oh, look at this.
Yeah.
And then the new Pentagon Papers for Salon.
Yeah.
There's the three-article series in the American Conservative beginning with In Rumsfeld's Shop.
Yeah, and I actually think if you go to Lou Rockwell in the archives, you can link to all those things.
And plus so much other good – And plus your archives.
Well, in my archives, yeah.
At lourockwell.com.
And plus so much other good stuff, good ideas.
People just need to get themselves oriented.
Read antiwar.com.
Read Lou Rockwell.
Pay attention to some of these ideas because, you know, there will be a time when we're going to be clinging to ideas, and that's going to carry us through into the next best thing, the next good thing.
Thank you so much for your time, Karen.
Well, thank you.
