For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome Karen Kotowski back to the show.
It's been a little while.
She is a regular writer for rockwell.com and she hosts a radio show, but also she famously resigned from the Pentagon, her job in the Air Force, where she was a lieutenant colonel back in 2003 and immediately became a whistleblower.
Her first article was called Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Inside Pentagon that ran in Knight Ritter newspapers and then that was followed up by In Rumsfeld's Shop for the American Conservative Magazine, which was part one of a three-part series there, The New Pentagon Papers for Salon.com, Soldier for the Truth for LA Weekly, and my very favorite, and it's going to far outshine this interview no matter how hard I try, is the Q&A with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN.
You just figure out how to spell Karen Kotowski and put it in there with Brian Lamb in your search engine.
That is journalism right there.
Really, really, really great stuff.
Welcome back to the show, Karen, how are you?
Thanks for that good introduction.
I think you covered all the key sources of at least what I had to share back in those days.
Well, I was trying to rack my brain.
That was what I could come up with off the top of my head.
Yeah, that's good.
It's a good set of stuff because American Conservative or Salon or C-SPAN, it covers the whole spectrum of anybody's political interest and it's the same story on all three.
Well, and I'll tell you what too, I wrote an article one time called Secrecy and the Warfare State, and it has a paragraph there about you, and it says, to learn more, click here, here, here, here, here, and here, and there's about 16 links to all the best sources about Karen Kotowski.
I'm sure there's a Wikipedia and everything else, and of course, also your article archives at lourockwell.com.
Okay, so now tell me about your radio show.
It runs on American Freedom Radio.
It's AF Free Radio.
I don't have it in front of me, but on Eastern Standard Time, it runs 6 to 8 p.m.
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but I haven't created a huge amount of new content, but it's an interview-type show, one-hour interviews with different people, and the archives are all there at American Freedom Radio.
You can find it.
I'm not usually active, but I try to do a couple new interviews every week.
Right on, and it is always great stuff, very interesting stuff.
Well, the people I like to talk to, less so international security, although if I find somebody, I like to talk to them, but I'm interested nowadays in talking with people about secession and thinking about it and talking to people about getting out of the public schools.
I've had a number of guests like that, and I think on Monday, I've got another guy coming up who is a critique of American public schools, so I'm kind of, I guess, looking at what can we change, and I guess maybe in some ways it harkens back to my assessment of 2003, 2002, what I saw and what I did and how little, in my own opinion, how little impact it really had.
Now, I know people say, oh, well, you know, it was really good that you said those things.
Sure, but so many people were saying those same things, and what was the impact?
Well, the impact was we went into Iraq illegally.
The American people were lied to such that at some point in time, I think 80 or 90% of the people believed the bald-faced lies that were not true, which today, of course, we know are not true, but even saying them in 2003, it didn't get through.
In fact, there are some folks, they've done kind of surveys, and they've showed people that here's President Bush taking back his statements that he made about why we went into Iraq.
He said, hey, you know what, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11 and actually didn't have any weapons of mass destruction.
They've got video and audio of President Bush, and those people hear that and they go, oh, that's not true, that's not true, because I heard him say it the first time, and I believe that, so it's frustrating.
It's frustrating to me to see that, and again, are we still in Iraq?
Yeah, and how many troops do we have there?
I haven't checked recently.
More than 100,000.
It's over, yeah, right around 100,000, a little bit more.
Any chance of those folks coming home?
No, because if we get them out of Iraq, we're sending them to some other battlefield in the Middle East, whether it's Afghanistan, you know, Pakistan, certainly we're messing with Pakistan, illegally, undeclared war there, and then you've got the Yemenis, well, not the guy, not the little dictator that we like so much, but you know, whatever battles he's doing, and then the Somalians are coming up again.
In fact, I saw, I think it was maybe on anti-war, I'm pretty sure you had it, the UN has suspended food shipments because of the dangers to their logistics operations, and doesn't that sound like 1990?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's exactly the same damn thing.
Yeah, well, as long as you brought up Somalia, I'd like to mention that there's, I think, a really good article in the Jerusalem Post, where they ask the question, is a Taliban-style government taking over Somalia?
And they answer, no, don't be silly.
And so, you know, wow, actual journalism instead of just an agenda by some military somewhere, thank God.
Well, I'll tell you one thing, too, that I've observed and noticed, and it's part of it's because of my own experience, and just that I've tried to pay attention a little bit, but you absolutely, and anti-war people know this, but you cannot believe a word that comes out of the American media.
I mean, they just don't, it's all state, all the time, all war, all the time.
You know, the big debate now, and you might have saw this on what came out today, an article by Dave Lindorf, but he was just echoing some other articles that have been written, and he's pointing out that, you know, we're all worried about the seven CIA agents, not what they were doing in Afghanistan, but that they were blown up, you know, nobody likes to have lost a life, but a couple weeks or so, maybe a month or so before that, there's a huge crisis where guys, we don't know if they're military, CIA, black, you know, we don't know what they are, but Americans go in and kill a bunch of kids.
And it's reported one way in the American media, and the whole rest of the world is asking the hard question, and the American media passes over it.
Yeah.
We're more concerned with adults and mothers that happen to be CIA agents, and what are they doing?
Well, and on that story, on that story, from what I can tell on it, and this is not, you know, complete research or anything, but I don't buy it.
I mean, what I saw was Karzai said so, and some local chief said so, and somebody else said yeah, but you know, the local chief's son was one of the ones killed, and so obviously he's mad and wants to portray it how he wants, but TPM cafe or whatever over there, Talking Points memo, they had in the comment section, somebody put a link to a picture that supposedly was a picture of the dead in that attack, and all of them had beards.
None of them were sixth and seventh graders, so I mean, I'm suspicious of just, doesn't report that.
Yeah, I mean, we all know that our military will blast an entire village off the face of the earth, but put a sixth grader on his knees in handcuffs and shoot him in the back of the head.
I don't believe in that.
I don't think that's true.
Good.
Well, I hope it's not true.
But your point is still completely valid, which is that CNN didn't want to know whether it was true or not.
They just didn't even bring it up at all.
No, they don't.
They don't ask those questions because it's not, it's not savory.
Although one good thing they're doing, they are, the mainstream media does seem to be reporting many of the flaws in our homeland security department, the bureaucracy and the intel bureaucracy in light of these, you know, the Christmas thing and the shutdown at Newark, and then there was a, I guess, honey, a jar of honey that shut down somebody.
They don't, they did, they thought they tested it and it showed up, it showed positive for TNT or DD, there's something, something, some chemical, and it was honey.
So we're kind of getting some news on that, but I think most of that's aimed at growing the state, not limiting it.
So it's just a shame.
I just, I've, you know, I wasn't a friend of the mainstream media back in 2002 and 2003.
And I, nowadays, I certainly, I just don't believe a word they say.
Well, you know, Jeff Riggenbach has a theory that being a libertarian is determined by genetics, which is really unfortunate since the whole theory centers around free will and all that.
But I wonder if maybe what it is, is some of us have a genetic predisposition where we're unable to be desensitized, right?
Where like, we're never surprised anymore, but we're still shocked, or other people get over the shock.
And it's those of us who, who can't get desensitized that become libertarians, because we just get so fed up and where everybody else just lets it roll off their back or something, you know?
Well, it could be, and I haven't read his stuff.
I have to look into that, but, you know, there, there are personality types and there are those that are very friendly and comfortable with a lot of authority figures, you know, following type, you know, just going along with it.
And then there are those who are less likely to do that.
Well, why can't we get the former to just follow us then?
Well, I think it's happening, actually.
I think Ron Paul has actually, you know, and he may not see it in his lifetime, but he is usually, you know, and then look, the whole Republican Party is in many ways, not the whole Republican Party, certainly not the, the Washington and the city type, what I call the city type Republicans, but, you know, the socialist Republicans, but a good many of people who consider themselves to be members of the GOP or sympathetic to it, what they actually thought they liked about the GOP was what Ron Paul says, and they are following Ron Paul and there's huge pressures, you know, there's, I mean, look at all the libertarians and Ron Paul type Republicans that are running in all these races.
This is, this is huge.
So yeah, the followers can, can follow those, at least I think that option of truth-based, you know, politics and also small government.
I mean, who's going to pay for the government anyway?
These states like California going bankrupt, they do surveys, who wants to bail out California?
Well, nobody's raising their hand.
Yeah.
You know, we're not, I sure don't want to.
No.
And I don't see why anyone would want to.
All right.
Now let me, let me stop us here because I think you and I both probably have opinions about 10 million different things that we could talk about, but, but there's a specialized field of knowledge that you have, access, memories of things that you saw with your own eyeballs that none of the rest of us have that are very unique to your experience that I want these people to have a chance to hear, because after all, here we are in 2010, we're post Ron Paul revolution.
There are a lot of newbies who haven't heard me interview you before, I think, probably listening to the show right now.
And you got one hell of a story, Karen, why don't you start off with, you know, just explaining, I think I said before you were a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force, right?
And you worked where in the Pentagon and you saw what, when that was so important.
Yeah.
Well, I, I started working in the Pentagon in 1998.
And initially I worked for the air staff.
And in 1998, of course, Bill Clinton was our president at the time.
And of course we made, we in the military were most military tends to be particularly the officer corps tends to be on the conservative side, whether they're Democrat or Republican party affiliation or libertarian, they're all kind of conservative.
And, you know, 98, 99 timeframe, this is during the impeachment hearings for Clinton.
And so there's a lot of Clinton jokes going around.
Okay.
And in 1998, other than enforcing the no fly zone over Iraq, there's not a lot of active air force war.
There's some high altitude bombing going on still in Bosnia, but not, not a huge amount.
So we're not engaged in a war and you never want the military, you know, government bureaucracy, not have a mission, right?
Cause we like to do stuff because that's how we get more money.
And so there's frustration is what I'm saying in 1998, 1999, I'm at the, I'm working at the air staff on African Middle East issues.
And so I move over from that job into the office of secretary of defense.
So I'm moving up one bureaucratic level to the office of the secretary of defense.
And initially I'm working in the Sub-Saharan Africa shop until May of 2002.
And at that point, I'm about a year away from retirement at my 20 anyway.
So hadn't decided yet what to do, but that's where I'm at.
So May of 2002, I get moved over into the near East South Asia side of OSD policy.
And so our, our big boss is Doug Fife.
His name was in the news, certainly at the time he was the deputy secretary of defense for policy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's basically one of four under secretaries under Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
Now, Wolfowitz of course, very much an advocate for invading Iraq.
Rumsfeld certainly argued it very well.
I don't know if it was his ideas, but he supported it very well and, and made a lot of memorable statements that kind of were aimed at don't question us.
We know what we're doing.
We're going to go do this thing.
And, and of course the, the methodology of how they invaded Iraq, the idea that we would go in with a small number of troops in rel, you know, relative to what we might've done and, you know, topple the country and immediately, immediately turn it back wouldn't be, it was never a thought that it would be an occupation.
Never thought that we'd have troops there, at least certainly not breathed to the American public that we would have troops there.
But of course I'll, I'll get into why that, you know, I can't believe anything.
The neocons really didn't want to occupy the place, right?
They wanted to smash into a million pieces and go or turn it over to the Shiites who are going to be friendly to us.
Let me tell you, let me tell you what they, I think, well, certainly they didn't articulate that.
Certainly their idea was, and when you think about neoconservatism as a political, you know, philosophy first off, they're very biased towards our allies in the Middle East, specifically one ally that would be Israel.
They actually are not as pro-Saudi Arabia, which is our other big ally there.
They're certainly not pro-Egypt, another ally in the region.
They're pro-Israel.
Many of them have dual passports, at least in the Pentagon they did, and had strong, strong ties to Israeli, well thinkers, people, there was really government members.
Well, Doug Fyfe was a law partner in the firm of Fyfe and Zell that represents the Israeli military-industrial complex.
They represent settlers in the West Bank.
These are the Likud in America.
That's right.
They are, yeah, technically they are the closest thing we have to the Likud in America because that, you know, obviously not an American political party, but if there was one, Doug Fyfe would be a member of it, okay?
He'd probably be an active member.
Wolfowitz, very, you know, it's, their worldview is focused on the Middle East, not the rest of the world.
And, of course, we noticed this working in sub-Saharan Africa, that nobody really didn't care about, that this was not a priority of Doug Fyfe or Rumsfeld or any of those guys.
You know, we're just a backwater.
And even the European side felt as if they were a backwater.
I'll tell you this, of course, it's kind of mundane, but we had our boss of, when we worked for sub-Saharan Africa, our boss was out of the European side of the house.
Because remember, before we had AFRICOM, oh, that's another thing, don't want to change the subject, but, you know, we have an African command now that we didn't have before.
So the state in the military is growing and growing.
But in any case, Africa was run by the European side.
The policy department that did Europe was filled by a guy, a strong conservative who had worked for Reagan before.
His name is escaping me right now.
But in any case, he was very disappointed that he was assigned that one.
And he articulated this in some meeting somewhere.
And he was unhappy, really.
He felt that was kind of a slight, because European stuff was not what was happening.
That's not what Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Fyfe were interested in.
Just like they weren't interested in Africa, they weren't interested in Asia.
Well, now, let me ask you this, Karen.
They were South America.
They were interested in the Middle East.
So this is the priority.
And that's my first kind of orientation there is I go into that office.
I find out, yeah, this is where it's happening.
It's all Middle East all the time.
All right.
Now, I was wondering if you could address the difference between the neoconservatives as a faction, really, and the rest of the Pentagon, the rest of the empire.
I mean, America's been an empire for a long, long time now.
What is so significant about this crew of neoconservatives that you witnessed?
And then if you could, I know part of your answer is going to be, well, the way they lied us into war and how you saw that.
But we've been lied into war before.
That's true.
I think what struck me when I was working at OSD, the political appointees that were neoconservative and embraced neoconservative ideology, which means you need to transform the Middle East militarily, and you need to do it right now through hook or by crook, whatever, because lying doesn't matter if it's for this cause.
It's very much utilitarian, moral relativism that they approach this with.
They're very much thinking about the transformation through military force.
They're very much focused on that.
They understand the political system.
That's one difference that we don't give them credit for.
They understand the political system and the media system.
Most bureaucrats in the Pentagon were smarter than we were during Vietnam, maybe in previous times, but we're still not that savvy.
These guys totally used American media.
They totally used American political systems.
Certainly they had the support of lobbies like AIPAC to kind of push the agenda.
And the agenda is very much, as we mentioned before, shared in many ways by the Israeli Likud political party.
Not all of Israel, of course, but the right-wing party certainly embraces this same one.
And they put themselves and were placed in positions.
In fact, Dick Cheney personally appointed a number of the guys in there.
They knew how to use the system, and they almost had a sense that their time and opportunity was limited to do that.
Well, it really was kind of a smaller faction.
I remember, and this is after the fact, trying to acquit himself, of course, but there's some truth in this, where Colin Powell told Bob Woodward, Mr. Establishment Secretary of State, talking to Mr. Establishment journalists, you know, Doug Feith and them set up a separate government.
He called it Feith's Gestapo office over there at the Pentagon.
This is what Raimondo at antiwar.com calls the transmission belt of treason, where you have a few neocons in the Pentagon, a few in the vice president's office, a few over at the State Department, and they have their own little network.
That's right.
And they're the ones who lied us into war with Iraq.
Well, they did, and they created the lies that were used by others, in some cases, innocently, because there are people that didn't research it, and I don't actually hold Colin Powell into that category.
I think Colin Powell knew better and was not innocent of this, but, you know, there were some folks that figured, well, you get it from the Pentagon, must be true, not realizing that a good part of the decision-making apparatus had been hijacked, and people use this word hijacked, and it's fair, I think, to say.
Now, the lesson learned, of course, forgetting all the, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, our own dead and wounded, the cost of this war, the fact that we built these permanent bases, which was always part of the agenda, you know, these bases were asked for.
There's another whistleblower, Bonnetine Greenhouse, which you may or may not have talked to, and she lost her job.
No, I should have, though.
Yeah, she's great, and she's a real whistleblower, because I got out before they could do anything to me except prevent me from getting my medal, you know, I did not care about that.
I mean, she actually was punished, put in a room with no mission, she's a certified licensed contract officer for the DOD, worked in the, what is it, the Army Corps of Engineers, and she blew the whistle saying, you're not competing these base construction and facility repair contracts, but you're asking me to do it for five years, and she said, that's illegal in the contracting book.
See, if we don't compete, because it's an emergency, we have to, by law, recompete them in six months, because competition is something that's built into our federal acquisition regulation.
Well, she called them on this, and they took her out big time, and she was made to be a traitor, like most whistleblowers in this security arena are.
Yeah, but yeah, this was long-term, there was long-term planning, too, so many people say, oh, the neocons just wanted democracy in Iraq.
Well, not really, not really.
They wanted Lillipad, which, of course, Rumsfeld talked about repeatedly.
They wanted operational space in the Middle East, operational space that could get us out of Saudi Arabia, and that could be centrally located, both for manipulation of oil fields, I don't want to say providing security for them, because we don't do that very well, but also to be able to launch into the neighboring areas, to foment problems, and perhaps to shield Israel from having to do it.
And, of course, all this has been done.
So all the whistleblowers and all the people observing this and writing about it, you know, and to some extent speaking out about it, you know, it hasn't really changed.
We have this forward motion of our empire.
But, yeah, in this case, I think with the neocons, one thing people can go away with is policy apparatus can be hijacked.
It was hijacked with ideological people who did not worry about telling lies to the American people.
Well, I think that's the most important lesson that I learned, because I think my understanding of politics then, which, you know, I was younger, it's been a while, was much more uniform.
And I guess really what happens is when you build an empire this big, it gets so unwieldy.
There is no single establishment group that can really hold consensus for a permanent period of time, like I would have thought.
I mean, the neocons really were able to come in and seize the state.
George Bush, Sr.called them the crazies in the basement.
According to Ray McGovern and Scott Ritter, that's what he called them.
And he had explicit instructions to Brent Scowcroft to keep the crazies in the basement.
They are not to make policy.
Maybe they can go murder kids in South America, but they're certainly not to make Middle East policy.
That's for James Baker to decide.
And that entirely changed.
Yeah.
And these people, I mean, they knew.
They saw this and they constrained him.
Of course, Bush did not constrain them.
He was seduced by them.
He actually promoted them.
He actually facilitated their dream.
And I think most neocons that were involved in policy or cheerleading the policy from outside of government are extremely, extremely happy with what we have.
We are bogged down in Iraq.
We have permanent bases from which to launch military operations from in 360 degrees.
And we're expanding the war in other places, which increases the chaos, which in terms of some countries' interest, is an opportunity.
And certainly more chaos is more opportunity for more hijacking.
Well, you know, part of this, too, and I'm sorry because we really got to cut this short, but I want to give you a chance to comment on one more thing.
How ignorant were these guys?
Was it at least part of the hype, Karen, was that they really believed they were going to get a Hashemite king?
Chalabi was going to give them a Hashemite king like they have in Jordan.
They're going to build a pipeline of water and oil to Haifa and become best friends with Israel.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, do they really believe these things?
Smashing Iraq into a million pieces was sort of plan B.
These guys, most of the neocons that are identified with this policy direction in the time frame, these guys have had no operational experience, whether it's operational intelligence, operational military.
They never wore a uniform.
They never really understood in a really fundamental way what Patton always says about a plan.
You know, no plan survives contact with an enemy.
So they didn't understand that it really, you can't make the world just like you want and pull all the strings, really living in a fantasy world.
So were they ignorant?
Sure, they were ignorant.
But even if they read more books, they would still be ignorant.
These are not the kinds of people that you want playing war games with your sons and daughters, your wives and husbands, your nieces and nephews.
But yet they were.
So that's, to me, is a huge crime because none of them were elected.
They were playing gore games in clean rooms, you know, protected smoke filled rooms.
And people are dying and countries are destroyed.
Societies and civilizations are destroyed.
And of course, the risk of terrorism has exploded.
And they're all still blogging, at least, you know, they're still out there.
They still have their front groups and on it goes.
I'm sorry.
I got to cut this off.
Thanks so much for your time, Karen.
I hope we can do it again soon.
Sure enough.
OK, thank you.
And everybody, please go and read Career Officer Does Eye-Opening Stint Inside Pentagon in Rumsfeld.
Oh, that's for Knight Ritter in Rumsfeld Shop at the American Conservative Magazine.
The New Pentagon Papers at Salon.com.
Soldier for the Truth at LA Weekly.
Especially I should have said this first, because do this one first.
It's the Q&A with Brian Lamb.
Karen Katowski.
You can find her archives at LouRockwell.com.
Figure out how to spell it yourself.
And also, I want to mention there's a great article by Bob Dreyfuss called The Lie Factory about her case, as well as another great one by Dreyfuss called Agents of Influence about the ties between the neocons and Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party.
A great one called The Spies Who Push for War by Julian Borger in The Guardian.
Jim Loeb, number one neocon hunter on the face of the earth, has written, just put in Office of Special Plans and Jim Loeb like your earlobe, and you'll find a ton of great stuff out there.
There's some footnotes for you guys who are new to figuring out who the neoconservatives are and how it was that they're responsible for the catastrophe in Iraq that cost over a million lives there.
And now I'm late.
I gotta go.
