03/15/13 – Karen Kwiatkowski – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and next up is Karen Katowski, heroic Pentagon whistleblower, former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, and Ryder4LouRockwell.com.
Check out her incredible archive there.
She ran for Congress in Virginia and didn't quite pull it off, but maybe someday.
Anyway, welcome back, Karen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
It's good to be with you again.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And so it's right around the 10th anniversary of being lied into war with Iraq.
And it occurred to me that there are a lot of people listening now who were just kids then, or at least they were living a whole different lifetime then.
Maybe they weren't paying any attention at all.
Maybe they only found libertarianism because of the Ron Paul campaign or something like that.
And now they're paying a little bit of attention.
And I thought, man, I really ought to get Karen Katowski on the show to tell her first-person account of seeing those who lied us into war with Iraq do so.
And maybe she could tell us why they did it, too.
So I guess, first of all, can you start off with explaining...
Oh, you know what?
And let me say real quick here, too, before I turn the mic over to you, Karen, is I want to recommend people...
This will be an MP3 format for most of the people who end up hearing it later anyway.
So they'll be able to rewind if they need to.
The C-SPAN Q&A, Agents of Influence by Bob Dreyfuss at The Nation, The Lie Factory by Dreyfuss and Vest at Mother Jones, The Spies Who Push for War by Julian Borger, Soldier for the Truth at LA Weekly, The New Pentagon Papers at Salon.com, and the three-part series at The American Conservative beginning with In Rumsfeld's Shop.
These are all, as far as I can remember off the top of my head anyway, the most important articles written by you and or about you in your time at the Pentagon during this 2002-2003 era.
I think it's so important for people to understand, especially, you know, revisionist history-inclined types.
So with that, please tell me, what were you doing at the Pentagon in 2002, Karen?
Well, I was working for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Near East, South Asia.
So that's the Middle East Office of Plans, basically, at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
There were two people under Secretary Rumsfeld at the time.
And, you know, I had come from there.
I had transferred within OSD from the Sub-Saharan Africa area.
And there was really no interest, no activity going on.
You know, it's very slow.
And you've got to realize, you know, at the Pentagon, they push a lot of papers.
And that's what we did.
You know, we pushed papers.
We wrote policy papers.
We looked at the intelligence and came up with recommendations.
And we formulated those and raised them up the chain.
Now, and, you know, most of that, most of what you did on a day-to-day basis didn't really impact very much.
And, you know, we're pushing papers.
We're bureaucrats.
So when I worked the Sub-Saharan Africa stuff, which was 2000 until 2002 for the OSD, not a lot of activity is going on.
We rarely got feedback on anything we sent up there.
But they came around to all the folks that were working military political affairs type stuff.
And they were looking for warm bodies to man the Near East South Asia Division.
And they wanted volunteers.
And no one volunteered.
So then they came around a second time and they took people that were being volunteered.
And I was one of the ones who was volunteered to go over there.
And so I, you know, obviously, I was volunteered.
When you're in uniform, you know what it means.
So you go.
And I went over there.
And, oh, my goodness, what a hotbed of plans and policy activity the Near East South Asia Division was, filled with political appointees, running around with their hair on fire, lots and lots of activity, daily interaction with Mr. Feist, who was the undersecretary for policy, near daily interaction with Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy secretary of defense, and with Don Rumsfeld.
It was very, very important, whatever they were doing in Near East South Asia.
And so, you know, well, this could be fun, right?
I mean, at least we're doing something.
At least we're getting the attention.
We have, you know, lots of real work, quote, unquote, real work to do.
Now, pardon me, just one second.
What month are we talking about here?
This was May of 2002.
May of 2002.
And so I was transferred over from one part of OSD to another, to the Near East South Asia in May of 2002.
And the first thing that I kind of found out was, well, there were several things I found out that first week.
One of which was that the war plan for the invasion of Iraq.
Now, this is the actual tactical plan, not the strategic plan on the shelf, which says, hey, in theory, if we go into, you know, Guyana or someplace, you know, here's our plan.
We'll dust it off.
No, this is the actual tactical invasion plan to go into Iraq.
This is the spring of 2002.
That particular plan, an active, prosecutable, executable plan, was on its second review with Mr. Rumsfeld.
And this was May of 2002.
Now, most of the people that, you know, you mentioned people that were young at the time or weren't paying attention.
We didn't start really hearing about Iraq and an invasion of Iraq until the summer of 2002.
And yet, the tactical plan ready to do it had already been through its second and was on its third revision with the Pentagon, between Central Command and the Pentagon.
And that's how they would put that.
That would have been a Central Command executable plan.
So, anyway, the point of that being that a lot had gone on and many, a great many decisions to do what we ended up doing had already been made long before this had been justified to the American people.
So that's the context in which I joined.
Over the summer, the propaganda campaign, over the summer of 2002, the propaganda campaign in the media began to be played out.
And much of what I saw there was alarming because we would see it at work classified secret and compartmented.
But the next day or that week, we would see it on the front page of the Washington Post or the New York Times.
The same exact stuff.
So certain things were being leaked.
Now, you know, you'd think, hey, that's really wrong, right?
I mean, we don't want leaks, right?
I mean, look at Bradley Manning.
He leaked something.
He's been in jail for like three years, tortured a whole bit, right?
We don't like leaks, right, except we only like leaks that we like when the executives are leaking it to the media, which indeed is pretty much what was happening.
And these executives that I was working for, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Doug Fife, these folks and many of their advisors were part of this whole neoconservative takeover, which seemed to me a takeover.
It was certainly a domination of neoconservative policy in the Pentagon at that time.
And when I say neoconservatives, I don't know if people certainly, you know, have we heard that.
It sounds like it means new conservative.
But, of course, it doesn't.
Neoconservatives are kind of a philosophy, has its roots in international communism under Trotsky.
I mean, this is kind of an international, global type perspective.
They find homes in both Democrat and Republican parties.
They're very pro change in the world, you know, foreign policy that's active, that is at the point of a spear.
They like that.
And they're also very, very comfortable, even though many are in the Republican Party and at the time were.
This was a Republican administration.
But these neoconservatives, their political view is very comfortable with the welfare state, a domestic socialism of the type that we have been living under for, you know, 10, 20, 30 years.
They like that.
So what I'm trying to say is these are not Ron Paul Republicans.
OK, they're there.
They worked for Bush, but they wanted war.
They had planned a war executed, put together the executable plan all under cover of darkness.
No public policy, no discussion.
The American people were totally unaware that this was happening.
Then they launched a propaganda campaign, which entailed the leaking of classified information by top level people.
And I have to tell you, Scott, you know this.
You're a low level person.
You get in trouble.
You can get in trouble.
Top level people, whether it's bankers or political appointees, if they do the wrong thing, they're rarely held to account.
And this is indeed they weren't held to account.
In fact, the leaking of classified directly from some of the senior appointees in the Pentagon over to media, selected media outlets.
This was in support of the Bush agenda at that time, which was to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.
Now, we can talk about why that might have been an important thing that they wanted to do, why they cared about it so much.
But the bottom line is this war, and I haven't got to the lying part, this war did not follow any type of constitutional process at all.
In fact, also in addition in the summer to the leaking of classified information that was true, there was also the insertion into the media of information that was not true.
In fact, this is what really got me a little bit in that summer.
Information that we knew to be unconfirmed and in some cases confirmed to be false in the intelligence was being leaked to the media, sent to the media as if it was true, as if it was confirmed, as if it was real knowledge, when in fact it was known not to be real knowledge.
And things like the Yellow Cake story, which we heard about later, and again, if it's new to you, later after the invasion happened, a great number of articles were written and people came out and talked about, oh, well, by the way, this didn't happen and this wasn't true.
But in the summer of 2002, there was very little in the way of a public challenge to a lot of this false information.
So they had developed in the summer also a special office, an office of special plans, which was dedicated to kind of promulgating the storyline.
And again, none of this has to do with defense.
Just as we know today that Iraq, and I would say Afghanistan as well, have nothing to do with making America safer.
It had everything to do with employing people, pursuing an international agenda of some sort.
You know, there's a number of, you know, securing, putting Iraq's oil back on the dollar as opposed to the euro, where he had changed it.
I mean, there's all kinds of things it had to do with, but the real fundamental reasons for this were never really explained to the American people, and lies were put forth.
Saddam was developing nuclear weapons.
Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, the joke was, yeah, we know because we have the receipts.
You know, we kind of forgot the fact that we worked with Saddam for years and years.
He was our guy in Iraq for many years.
You know, none of that needed to be mentioned to the American people.
It's just, he's a bad guy.
He's doing evil things.
He's going to drop, he's going to put WMD and chemical warfare over St. Louis, you know, and we're going to wake up to a mushroom cloud, I think is what Condoleezza Rice said.
If we don't take out Saddam Hussein, all of this information, all this propaganda that was put out by the people I worked for, by my organization, okay, which, of course, that's pretty shocking.
And that kind of broke my heart in many ways.
All of this information was aimed at drumming up support for the war.
And I would say probably 65% of it was bald-faced fabrication and lies.
So, you know, you have this.
In the fall, of course, the drumbeats for war continued to go and go and go.
And certain, and this is just of some interest, there weren't, many people knew what was going on.
Some generals, like General Vinnie, Anthony Vinnie, who is since retired.
Stood up and said, hey, you know, we need to slow down, we need to actually look at this information.
I suspect much of it, he was a former commander of CENTCOM, and he said, you know, I suspect much of this is not true, it does not jive with what I personally know and was exposed to.
Respected Marine General, so what did they do?
Well, they let him go.
So if you criticized it in the system, you were let go.
Anyway, so the fall happened, and then in the spring, now we have the anniversary, we invade Iraq on false pretense, based on lies.
The, certain folks around the world, certain media domestically, certain independent media, Knight Ritter News Service was one that actually questioned this before the war started.
International media had done some of this after we invaded.
Then you began to see more criticism, more people coming out of the closet, so to speak, and talking about this.
And I guess technically I was one of those people, although I did write, I did write anonymous, kind of revealing, I thought, a little bit expose, kind of dark humor about what was going on prior to the invasion.
But I had to do that anonymously.
Had I not, I would have faced the same retribution that Vinny and everybody else who questioned the status quo there.
Anyway, I don't know if that tells you everything, but that's kind of how I remember it.
Yeah, well, lots of very important stuff here.
First of all, let's get back to what you say about the neocons there for a minute.
Nowadays, for sure, people just use that term to mean somebody I don't like, or something like that.
Yeah, and they forget that neoconservatism has been around for a long, long time.
Emerged significantly at the beginning of the Cold War, end of the 40s, early 50s.
They were, in fact, Paul Wolfowitz called himself a Scoop Jackson, who was a Democratic senator, well-known neoconservative kind of thinker.
Paul Wolfowitz, who was a Republican, called himself a Scoop Jackson Republican.
Who's the other guy, Prince of Darkness guy?
Richard Perle.
Richard Perle called himself a Scoop Jackson Democrat.
So, this idea, this philosophy that was really nourished under the Cold War.
Because, you know, that was an anti-communist, you know, a good fight, everybody could get behind it.
And it led to, of course, the great build-up of a standing military in this country, a great, huge growth, and establishment of our national security infrastructure, military industrial complex kind of thing.
You know, this is all nourished by the Cold War, and fed by the Cold War.
These neoconservatives, their philosophy made it all okay to do all the things we were doing during the Cold War.
And what we were doing during the Cold War, and this again is ancient history to a lot of people, right?
Cold War, what's that?
Well, you know, that was 50 or 60 years of us fighting in guerrilla-type activities, helping freedom movements, if we identified them as freedom movements, constantly talking about the values of democracy, and how America could be a great example of that.
Pushing that ideology across the world as a way of combating what the Soviets were doing on the other side of the spectrum.
Meanwhile, lots and lots of money is being made.
I mean, this is an incredible growth of an industry which is totally dependent on government.
So, what we get is a philosophy that kind of ties Congress with the industrial complex, the producers, and the military.
These thinkers, it's kind of like a rationalization of what we were doing.
And neoconservatism fits very well with that rationalization, that philosophy that says what we are doing is good.
When we help freedom fighters, and when we say we're promoting democracy, you know, remember when we were helping the Contras back in the 80s under Reagan, and a bunch of guys, including Paul Wolf Whitman, they were working to help the Contras.
Even though Congress had said, no, the Contras were fighting communists in Nicaragua.
So, here's this anti-communist group, and the Congress had said, look, it's not to our benefit to keep helping these guys.
We can't really interfere.
We're not having the proper impact, so we're not going to do that anymore.
And yet, members of Reagan's staff, this is where Ollie North is famous for this, continued to help them to continue to raise money through CIA trades and arms sales to Iran.
I mean, all kinds of things that the Congress didn't know anything about and wouldn't have approved.
They did that to aid the freedom fighters in Nicaragua, and they justified it.
They felt good about it, and Ollie North, in his marine uniform, very famously, stood up and said, basically, I did the right thing, and I'd do it again, and that's neoconservatism.
They believe that they can fix the world, and that the United States is supposed to do that.
And they also are very hubristic.
They believe they actually can do what they say they can do, and they want to do that, and this is their life, and their philosophy kind of supports all that.
So, it's very much an overseas engagement, kill them if you can't convert them, kind of philosophy.
Okay?
It is a global philosophy.
It's very different than what the Constitution would put forth.
It's very different than what the founders had.
It's very different than what the turn-of-the-century Republican Party had, which was very non-interventionist.
It's very the opposite of that.
On the domestic side, neoconservatism is very dangerous because it also rationalizes our domestic social welfare state.
And when Republicans rationalize the domestic social welfare state, they do what our Republican Congress and House of Representatives have been doing.
They spend money, they can't cut any programs, they continue to borrow, and they promise everybody everything, and they're very comfortable with it, and yet they have the audacity to call themselves Republican.
Well, of course, it has nothing to do with helping the poor.
It's just about creating more dependence on the central state, which the conservatives put as their highest goal.
The thing is, 47%, the way I read it, is 47% that live at the pleasure of the government and love the government and help hold their hand out, and the government puts stolen goods in their hands in order to gain votes.
That's the 47%, and Republicans do that as much, or if not more, than the Democrats do.
And this is what is so infuriating about this, because you think, oh, the Democrats are helping the poor people, and then the poor people vote Democratic.
That's kind of nutty, okay?
Because poor people pay a lot of taxes.
It's the Republicans helping out the rich industrialists, you know, as part of this national socialism that we've evolved into.
And Republicans do this at the same time they claim they like small government.
Well, neoconservatives never said they liked small government, and that's the difference.
And so they are an enabling philosophy that has permeated during the Cold War, both parties.
And specifically, it has permeated the modern Republican Party, and I think it's why they're not winning elections.
But now, hold on one second now, because I think you're doing a great job of explaining the philosophy of the neoconservatives and their neoconservatism.
Except, don't leave out, really, the network of the actual people, the biographical neocons.
Because to me, Sean Hannity and John Bolton, they're not neoconservatives.
They're just right-wing nationalists who believe and go along with what the neoconservatives also believe, right?
But the neocons are actually the people doing Thanksgiving over at the Podhoretz place.
That's right.
In fact, that's the interesting thing, although Lennon would not find it surprising at all, and neither would Margaret Mead, whose famous quote says, you know, never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world, right?
The neoconservative philosophy that I'm talking about is, if you track it back to not just its Trotskyism source, you know, not just back to there, but track it back to the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, you find a small academic family of thinkers and writers, and I wouldn't go so far as to call them philosophers, but these policy-type people who have influence over policy, a very small number of people, and they are inbred, very highly inbred, married to each other, they have the son-in-law and the nephew and all that, a very small group of folks.
And one of the things that unites them, and this is where people who criticize the neoconservatives get in trouble, one of the things that unites the neoconservatives, at least the core producers of that philosophy, the core rationalizers of what it is they want, is a very much pro-Israel position, a very blind pro-Israel position.
And one of the things I found out, which of course certainly surprised me as a military member, when I was in the Pentagon 2002-2003 watching this happen, one of the things I didn't understand, and you asked about this, why Iraq, and why do we have to do it now, and what's the point of it, and seriously, there was no real mission, anybody with a 5th grade education could have told you what would have happened when you went in there and got rid of Saddam Hussein in this country.
You know, it would break, it would fracture, it would become weakened, it would be a hotbed for terrorism.
I mean, anybody could have told you that, and so you wonder why smart people wouldn't have known that.
But there was a document written by a number of these same people who were in the Pentagon by name, Richard Perle, Doug Fife, a number of other folks, who wrote a piece.
They're Americans.
Most of them were Jewish, not all.
But they were Americans who contracted or voluntarily submitted this piece of policy guidance to Israel's government.
And it was called, oh gosh, I can't think of the name of it now.
Clean Break.
You know what I'm talking about, the plan that was the...
Yeah, the Clean Break.
David Wormser was the principal author.
The Clean Break, yes.
David Wormser and his wife were part of that as well.
And this group of interested, pro-Israel, neoconservative Americans put together a plan for Israel's future, not just survival, but for Israel's expansion.
And that plan was called a Clean Break.
You know, if you Google a Clean Break, you can still find it on the internet.
It's about, you know, ten pages long.
And it goes through the geographic and political barriers in the Middle East to Israel's expansion.
Now, I'm all for Israel, you know, but I happen to be an American.
And I care about our country just a little bit more.
You know, our country is bound by a constitution.
I embrace that.
I'm a citizen, yada yada.
Israel, not so much, right?
That's not my country.
Their constitution is very different than ours.
Their government is very different.
Their socialism is a different flavor than our socialism.
So, Israel's not my country.
And it's nice that these guys put together this plan for the Israeli government.
They did this a few years before the invasion of Iraq, a few years before the Bush administration came to power, and appointed all of these individuals as actual decision makers in the Pentagon, in the State Department, and in the National Security Council.
So, we have these people who have this idea that there are barriers to Israel's growth, expansion, and prosperity.
One of those barriers is Saddam Hussein, who is unifying Arabs against Israel.
Therefore, he must go.
His country must be fractured.
And influence must be gained by Israeli forces in what's left of Iraq.
Now, there were actually seven countries mentioned.
Syria was one of those.
Oh, I'm sorry, what's happening in Syria?
Oh, it's still part of the same agenda.
It's kind of a progressive thing.
But in 2002, Israel was on the docket.
Israel needed to go to make way for this basically geographically, politically, and economically expanded Israel.
Now, everybody who's a nationalist for their country, maybe they want their country to grow and to be prosperous, that's fine.
But when these people who wrote that particular plan, then were appointed by the Bush administration directly into positions of decision making power, and then this country, with its massive capability to fight wars, whether they're successful or not remains to be seen, but we have a massive, undeniable capability to fight wars, to blow up things, to cause major destruction.
Here's these people who had this idea, and lo and behold, this whole country followed that plan.
Now, if anybody wants to read some history, I wouldn't call this revisionist history.
Go back and read the Clean Break Plan.
Go back and look at what we did in Iraq and what we're doing in some of the neighboring countries.
Sudan was on the list.
Egypt.
Syria.
Iraq.
In fact, I think before the war, Chris Matthews challenged Richard Perle, or maybe it was even Tim Russert on the Sunday Morning Show, said, can you assure us that what you're pushing now doesn't have anything to do with this Clean Break thing from 1996?
So, yeah, you're right.
It's not revisionist history.
It's real time from then.
And by the way, pardon me, Karen, real quick, I just wanted to clarify.
You said Israel was on the docket to make way for Israel.
You meant Iraq.
I meant Iraq.
I didn't mean to misspeak there.
Sure, I just wanted to clarify.
Yes, Iraq was one of the big, in fact, one of the ones that needed to go first.
And of course, some people could look back at the first Persian Gulf War.
Of course, this is way before a lot of people's time, back in 1991.
And look at some of our foreign policy behavior in advance of that.
And look at some of the economic things that were going on at the time.
The Iraq-Iran War had just ended.
Saddam Hussein had a lot of debt.
There were some interesting things that went on.
I know April, what's her name, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad at the time, took a lot of heat for her behavior, which seemed to encourage Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, whereupon this united war machine, led by George Herbert Walker Bush, launched in there and smacked Saddam.
And it's hard to say if that wasn't also driven by some of the same things.
Because really, it's sad to say, but that oil that Saddam was producing, it was mostly being sold to, first off, it was being constrained by embargoes and economic limits that had been put on him.
But most of it was going to Europe, and it wasn't a huge amount.
His oil filter and disarray.
It's not like, oh, we have to have oil, it's the Carter Doctrine, we've got to protect our oil.
It's not really about that.
Oil is a part of it.
The petrodollar is even a bigger part of it, facing the dollar.
But it's hard.
This obsession with Iraq has gone on for a long time, and it has always been hand-in-hand with the neoconservative thinking on that part of the world, which is overwhelmingly biased towards not just Israel as a country, but the Likud side of Israel's government, which is, of course, in control now and was in control then.
So this is something that, and none of this is revisionist, this is all, just check it out, this is all, you know, it's all there.
Okay, now, and let me ask you, Karen, real quick here about, you know, specifically on that issue.
There are two articles which I mentioned at the top of the show.
One of them is The Spies Who Pushed for War by Julian Borger in The Guardian, and then Agents of Influence by Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation.
And both of those indicate that there is a separate Office of Special Plans, perhaps the original Office of Special Plans was created inside the Prime Minister's office, inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel.
Apparently, maybe this is oversimplifying, I'd ask you to clarify as best you know, first-hand and second-hand about this part of the story, but that he had a problem with Mossad the same way that Bush had a problem with the CIA, and that was that they'd lie some, but not enough, and they needed more and better lies to get the Americans into this war.
And so they produced intelligence, quote-unquote, intelligence in English in order to funnel through what was later called the stovepipe, straight through the neocons in your proximity there at the Pentagon and into the Vice President's office.
Yes, that's right.
In fact, we, our boss, our immediate boss in Near East South Asia, appeared to work as much for Dick Cheney as he did for Doug Fyfe.
Dick Cheney being over, you know, obviously the Vice President and the National Security, Scooter Libby, head of the, I forget his name, I think he was Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff.
They had almost their own intelligence operation over there, and we sent tons of stuff over there, almost directly, and certainly much of it raw, if it fit the bill.
We had guys in our office, you know, with their sole job was to look for bits of stuff in the public media that could be reported as confirmation of unconfirmed intelligence, you know, which is not the process that you would necessarily use.
So, yeah, they were definitely ginning up and working to produce a storyline.
I didn't personally see any, I was not at the level to really know about any corresponding Office of Special Plans or group like that in Netanyahu's government.
I didn't see that.
But certainly the road to war was one where we held Israel's hand and they held our hands.
When I say Israel, I don't mean Israel, because most Israelis oppose this.
I'm talking about the inner workings of the Likud government and that kind of thing.
So we're in lockstep with them, and that's not how America's foreign policy should be made, and that's not how we should go to war.
It is a tail wagging the dog.
It shouldn't happen.
And yet, I saw it happen.
Hey, let me ask you this, Karen.
Let me ask you this.
Neoconservative loyalty to Israel aside for the moment, for Bush and Dick Cheney to, well, never mind, we won't fight about who won Florida or whatever, but just assuming that they took power legitimacy.
For them to take power and to install what you could call, I think Dreyfus called it the Vice Squad.
Dick Cheney, his separate cabal in the Vice President's office on the National Security Council over there at the Near East South Asia desk and the expanded Iraq desk and the policy shop at the Pentagon and also over at the State Department where Wunzer and Bolton were originally sent at the State Department.
Powell called this, well, at least he referred to the one at the Pentagon as Fife's Gestapo office, but basically he was referring to, and that's to Bob Woodward, assuming that that's a correct quotation there.
Yeah, you never know when you're getting with Bob, yeah.
Yeah, but anyway, the story being that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, these two hardcore right-wing nationalists with this predetermined agenda to do this war for various reasons, obviously including the Israeli obsession with whatever Ariel Sharon wants kind of thing.
But the idea that they could come to power and put their men in charge in these specific departments and get this agenda done, isn't that kind of legit?
I mean, is it really fair to say that only the professional unelected bureaucrats at the Department of State and the department over there at the Pentagon should be able to decide what's right and wrong rather than the democratically elected people?
Aren't you, in a sense, on their behalf just kind of resentful that the elected politicians actually were, I mean, with Cheney's iron will, they were strong enough to make the bureaucracy do what the hell they wanted, whereas the bureaucracy likes to do whatever the hell they want and be a million little dictators instead of one.
Yeah, what bothered me, though, about it was not any idea, you know, we're pretty lazy up there in the Pentagon.
Most of these government bureaucrats, I hate to say, and I don't mean to insult anybody, but for the most part it's a lazy career.
You're busy all the time and you're doing things you think are important, but we take the path of least resistance.
That is true, I'll grant you that.
But what bothered me is kind of what, a few years later, bothered Walter Jones, Congressman Walter Jones, is the lying to Congress.
You know, we have a system that says we have to declare war if we're going to go to war.
Now, we don't abide by that system, but kind of the idea is Congress will be aware of the President's use of military forces.
You know, if he's going to invade a country, if he's going to bomb a capital, the Congress needs to know.
And, in fact, even the intelligence subcommittees were presented with false information by the administration.
So it's kind of, not so much that, hey, you know, us lazy bureaucrats wanted to do it our way, you know, and we didn't really want to be bossed around by these neoconservative appointees, because we hate all the appointees, seriously, it doesn't matter if they're neoconservative or not.
You know, that's a good point.
But this information that they were putting out on the public was not true.
It was also not true, the information they were giving in classified briefings to the Senate and House, and the committees there that are concerned with the use of military force.
They were being told falsehoods.
And they were also being, if they questioned anything, just like people in the media who questioned anything, and just like whistleblowers who questioned anything, if they questioned some of this stuff, immediately it was, well, if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
If you're not with this game plan, then you must be one of, you know, you must be working for Bin Laden kind of thing.
There was this immediate demonization of anyone who asked a question.
And a lot of congressmen, Walter Jones is notable among these, and of course Ron Paul knew what was happening and wrote, again, not revisionist history, read what Ron Paul was writing in 2002 and 2003.
Ron Paul understood what was happening.
He knew.
And he wasn't sitting on these select intelligence committees and getting those briefings from the Pentagon.
He was still correcting what was happening.
And those guys sitting in those committees getting the briefings were being lied to.
And I think also for people who are thinking that, well, you know, the bureaucrats didn't want to be busted and they just resent this.
Why don't you ask Colin Powell, who said publicly, I don't mean you, Scott, but anybody who has this question, check out what Colin Powell said in February leading up to the war at the U.N., and then check out what he and his aide Wilkerson had to say after that when he totally realized that he had not only been lied to, he had been pressured to publicly lie, to be a liar for the administration, that he served as Secretary of State.
And he didn't like it, and he resented it, and he knew where it came from.
And that's the squad he's talking about, Cheney's henchmen.
And, of course, abnormalities of the process, you know, Cheney's infamous multiple personal visits down into the CIA analysis rooms to talk to actual low-level guys.
Hey, I'm the vice president.
Are you sure that you don't have something to tell me that I want to hear?
And after you get asked that five times by a guy like Dick Cheney, you think maybe somebody doesn't pop up and say, well, sir, I have something you want to hear.
Why don't we say this?
And that's not how the process works.
That's an abuse of power.
That's precisely why these guys sought the offices under the Bush administration that they sought, the neoconservatives.
They had an agenda.
They wanted to pursue it.
They needed power.
The power came through those positions, and they utilized that power.
In a truly Machiavellian world, they didn't do anything wrong.
Okay?
But we don't live in a Machiavellian world.
We don't have a constitution.
We have a constitution that is supposed to protect us from that type of power-seeking.
And you know this.
I'm getting a little hot and bothered here, but this is really upsetting, 10 years later, to think how this happened.
And, of course, part of it is American people aren't interested.
Congress is very frightened of the loss of certain interest groups that support them.
And the mainstream media is government media.
Okay?
The Washington Post and the New York Times, for the most part, are spokes organs for the federal government and for the administration.
I don't care whether it's Bush or Obama.
And quite frankly, I don't see much difference between those two.
Right.
Now, one quick note about Paul.
I remember Bill Moyers asked him, right after he voted no on the authorization in, what, October 2002, Moyers asked him, do you receive the classified briefings?
And Paul said, no, I don't want to be confused by their propaganda.
Because he knew good and well, you know, what had been going on.
I don't know if he was reading Knight Ridder.
He was certainly reading Antiwar.com at the time.
You know, it's funny.
I always wonder how these things happen.
And one of the things that I've noticed in the years intervening, since I've been out of the military and just doing different things, trying to think about this stuff, is we have, as Americans, and maybe it's just a human thing, you know, we watch reality TV.
We watch, like, Survivor, right, on TV.
If you have TV and you watch that stupid Survivor series, right, what are those people doing to each other as they try to survive?
You know, they're lying, they're backstabbing, they're forming alliances and breaking up, whatever.
And we find that entertaining.
And we say, boy, those people on Survivor, you know, boy, they're sure, they sure are flying back, whatever.
And then when we look at our politicians and the political appointees and the machinations in the Pentagon or the machinations in Washington, D.C., very often we say, it's really nice to have public service like that, isn't it?
You know, we put our faith in them.
And they're, you know, they're just people after power.
There's people trying to win, trying to get their way.
And the neocon way, of course, the neocon agenda was these wars that we are, in theory, ending in Iraq and trying to end in Afghanistan.
But these had nothing to do with defense.
They had to do with a particular agenda and a particular sector's perspective on what America's interests are, which certainly would not be shared by an informed Congress by any means.
And you can just look at the $3 trillion or more that we've spent.
You can look at the 70, 80, 90, 100,000 injured vets that we have.
You can look at the quarter of a million vets with PTSD that we have as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan.
You can look at the 1,000,000 that we have as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan.
You can look at our military personnel system, which has been damaged by all this.
You can look at the cost and livelihood.
You can look at, I don't know, what is it, 5 million displaced Iraqis, 2 million dead Iraqis, a country that has been permeated in many of its cities with the depleted uranium dust that they'll never get rid of.
They'll be having kids and so there's a cost to people getting their way.
The neocons did not bear that cost.
They don't acknowledge that cost, but that cost is there.
If anything, we've created the potential with both Afghanistan and Iraq and other things we do around the world.
We've created a hotbed for new enemies to our country and new challenges for our security.
And I don't think the neocons even care about that because it's an opportunity.
Every crisis is an opportunity.
That's the motto of the weekly standard, never look back, not one day.
You can't.
Let me ask you about this too.
I don't know if this is really true, but there was journalism anyway that said that the CIA and the DIA went back and looked and they decided that Chalabi was sent by the Ayatollah to trick the Americans into getting rid of Saddam for him.
But really, it was the Ayatollah Khamenei that they were working for.
And Chalabi was telling them this nonsense like, oh yeah, you know, the new democratic Shiite Iraq is going to be best friends with Israel and we'll build an oil and water pipeline to Haifa.
In fact, they started it, but they had to stop it because it was getting ready to start another civil war in the country had they done that.
I'm sorry, I didn't really identify Chalabi, but he was the ringleader of the supplies that they needed when they went shopping for their bill of goods.
Absolutely.
And if you look back at a lot of the activities that we've done militarily to kind of take over countries or put in our friendly puppets, there's always a Chalabi.
In fact, we could talk right now about another guy who's a successful version of Chalabi and that would be Hamid Karzai who is our man in Kabul.
He's got all the junk he can shoot.
That's good.
That's right.
He's our guy.
His ties to this country, he was in this country, of course an exiled guy.
We propped it up and put him in there.
In fact, Saddam Hussein ran Iraq for many years because of CIA help in his career when he was in his 30s and 40s.
So he was identified as a guy we could quote unquote work with and so we supported his rise in the Ba'ath Party which is really national communism, national socialism.
It's a pretty hardcore philosophy, very much antithetical to what we say we are in this country and yet he was our guy.
If you look at the ugly games that are played, it'd all be fine if it was just on a chess board or in somebody's basement but it's not.
These games kill people.
They destroy lives.
They destroy economies.
They destroy currencies.
They create monsters.
Look at the loss of freedom in our country that we've had since 9-11.
The ratcheting of domestic security controls has never stopped.
So quite frankly, it's not a pretty picture and this is what really bothers me.
I told a group of college kids the other day on Monday, most of them were not really familiar with a lot of these stories.
It's before their time.
They were like 9 years old when these things happened.
They weren't paying attention but they'd all flown on airplanes and none of them ever knew a world prior to the TSA patting them down and groping them and scaring them.
Yeah, they have no idea.
Normalcy to them is when you fly, you take off your shoes, you're in uniform, in a government uniform who's ordering you around and if you look at him cross-eyed or make a mistake or blurt out something that you think is a joke and he takes it the wrong way or pass gas, you will go and get abused all without due process.
Now, they think that's normal and we know that's not normal, it's not constitutional and yet that's what they've done without thinking about it, goes to war based on lies and criticizes anybody who challenges those lies and that's what we have been in this country for probably 20 years.
We can go back to 91 and make it 30 years and this is what we do because we went to war in the Persian Gulf based on lies then as well and you and I know what those stories are.
This is ancient history and I have a friend who was in Iraq at the time and who personally testified to me that he saw the real American government top secret satellite pictures and all they showed was empty desert.
We're referring to the bogus Saudi invasion force that was prepared to move at any minute.
Sure, but what did the newspapers have in it?
They had pictures of Assad and he, isn't he our puppet?
Isn't the house of Assad also part of our process?
Well, he's arming the al-Qaeda guys in Syria for us right now, Karen, so I'd have to say yes.
Very loyal subject of the Empire, and with that we've got to go, we're all out of time.
Thank you so much for your time, Karen.
Great talking to you.
You're doing a great job and we'll talk to you soon.
Thanks very much, appreciate it.
That's the link on the left side of the page there, and you can find her full archive there.
She witnessed the neocon's liaison to war ten years ago.
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