08/03/10 – Karen Kwiatkowski – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and I've got some footnotes for you, forgive me I'm going off the top of my head here because I didn't have time to do a bunch of Googling, but first of all, The Lie Factory by Bob Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, start there, also Pentagon Home Office to Neocon Network, or Pentagon Shop Home Office to Neocon Network by Jim Loeb, that's a great one, and then also there's a three part series in the American Conservative Magazine, that's at amconmag.com, the first one is called In Rumsfeld's Shop, there's the New Pentagon Papers for Salon.com, there's a great LA Weekly article called Soldier for the Truth, I think if you Google that and the term cherry picking you'll come up with that from the LA Weekly, and there's more.
Karen, help me out with some more footnotes here, but it's Karen Katowski, Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel.
And most of those articles are linked in my archives at Lew Rockwell, one way or the other.
Oh that's right.
A lot of the stuff in the Lew Rockwell archives has been, not all written by me, but it covers it, it'll give you the introduction you need, and certainly back in 2003, 2004, after I left the military, the stuff that I talked about then was roundly criticized by the neocons in the media, in mainstream papers and all that, but within about a year and a half, what I had been saying then became common knowledge, because it was all confirmed, and so many reporters at the time actually had some sense of it.
They were not fooled, they just took the easy way, and that was to take the storyline from neocons in government, this is under the Bush administration, where he populated a great many appointed positions with neocons, certainly in his Defense Department, and some parts of the State Department, the important parts.
These guys would call their reporter buddies and say, well here's what we know, here's what we have, here's what the intelligence tells us, and of course they weren't intelligence people, they were propaganda artists, and they made a bunch of stories up, and the reporters took it.
So anyway, we know what happened, we understand.
Well that's true, and you know what, I just thought of another great footnote.
First of all, that's kind of a clumsy introduction that I gave you there, it's Karen Katowski, she's a retired lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force, and she worked for Lutie, right?
Yeah, Bill Lutie.
Bill Lutie, right.
And now he was one of the neocons in the policy shop, now you didn't work in the Office of Special Plans, but you worked for a guy who was part of the Office of Special Plans.
And wait, wait, wait, hang on, hang on, because one more footnote, and this is actually the best footnote of all, and in fact this is the best interview, I think not just of Karen Katowski, but maybe just the best interview about the neoconservative movement inside the Bush administration that anybody could find ever, and that's Karen Katowski talking with Brian Lamb at C-SPAN, which I highly recommend, if you only go read one thing, go read the transcript of that, or watch the video, it's there at C-SPAN.org.
And now, so the point is that you had kind of a, not really front row, but maybe third row view of these, of the neoconservative plot to lie us into war with Iraq, inside the Pentagon.
Yeah, and I, like many people, like many Americans who found out about it after the fact, I couldn't believe that that's how they were using their positions.
I couldn't believe that, you know, I mean, you serve in the military, you believe in the Constitution and representative government, and you think, well, policy is made by policy makers, and it's implemented, policy makers who are responsive to the electorate, and it's implemented in accordance with that, but it's not, it's made by people who have a passion for, you know, basically riding the backs of the institutions and doing what they want.
They wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, and of course, this was no secret prior to 2003 in the invasion.
I mean, they've been working throughout the whole Clinton administration, and most of the short Bush administration up to that time to try to do regime change, and you know, you guys, of course, antiwar.com has published links to it, many of your writers have explained this to people, but it is a war crime, it is illegal to engage in a war for the purposes of regime change, and that is precisely what they were publicly, the neocons publicly advocated that for probably 20 years, 15 years at least.
Yeah.
So, while you were still there, you were actually writing articles for David Hackworth's site, Soldier for the Truth, and for some reason, he keeps coming up on the show recently, I guess because we keep talking about the officer corps waging war against the enlisted man, and so he keeps coming up, and you were really writing, hey, check out what's going on inside the Pentagon, guys, for his website, Soldiers for the Truth.
Yeah, I mean, I wrote, these articles that I wrote while I was still in uniform, I had published them anonymously, and because, you know, I was criticizing what I was seeing around me, so I was criticizing defense policy making and defense policy makers, I was making fun of them, and also observing what they were doing, commenting negatively or critically on what they were doing.
That's not allowed, of course, and so it had to be done anonymously, and I've said this before on your show and elsewhere, Hackworth did not know me, I never got a chance to meet him before he passed away, but he saw what I wrote, and immediately embraced it, and I never understood why, but I know why it was.
He had many other people that he did know personally, that he did trust, who were saying much the same thing, and I just happened to be another person in a position, and willing to write these articles and, you know, these observations, and he took them, but he took them because he knew from so many, and that's the thing about when we start to realize what happened in the invasion of Iraq and this, we look back and we go, oh yeah, we see what happened, but at the time, so many people were caught up in the emotional misdirection and the lies coming out of the administration, and most of those were being constructed, pushed, developed, you know, and fabricated, they were being done by a small group of folks who were not elected, the neoconservatives, and they're still around, in fact, if anybody is interested in them, and I'm sure they're interested in themselves, I don't know if we are, it's much easier to forget about them, they are around, for the most part, they're not involved in the Obama administration, except at the outside, it's this kind of pressure and pushing them into certain directions, certainly, you know, they're advocating strongly for attacks on Iran, but if you want to look at where these guys are, I'll tell you this, because I was looking, I was wondering where Doug Feist was, he was the policy, the undersecretary for policy, he's at the Hudson Institute, and you know, 15 years ago, the Hudson Institute was a really good conservative, anti-communist institute, and it had lots of wise people there.
If you go to the Hudson Institute's listing of their adjuncts and their fellows and whatnot, you'll find almost a complete cadre, I mean, convicted felon who worked for, the guy who worked for Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff, remind me again who this famous guy is.
Well, there's a few of them, Elliot Abrams?
No, no, he's not a convicted felon, I think he's there, too, but no, the guy who was...
You're talking about the guy from the Total Information Awareness, Poindexter, Admiral Poindexter?
No, not talking about him, there's another convicted felon.
Oh, Scooter Libby, the perjurer?
I'm talking about more recently, who got his tenants commuted when George Floyd left.
Oh, Scooter Libby, the guy who wrote the novel with the bear raping the little girl in it.
The novel with the bear, and isn't it funny how, yeah, oh yeah.
Yeah, that guy's a sicko, man, he was Cheney's Cheney, that's what they called him.
Yeah, well, he's there, Scooter Libby is there as some sort of fellow, and if you read it, it's funny to read the bio that the Hudson Institute, formally a really good... when it was out in Indianapolis, it was not a bad organization, but they've apparently moved to D.C., and they are just flooded.
Yeah, that'll do it.
Just flooded as a holding location for a whole bunch of neocons, so they are still active in policymaking, or trying to be.
They're waiting in the wings, and Obama obviously has not kept any of his promises.
He's basically a Bush number three, but he is unpopular, and he's setting the stage for a Republican to come back in, and the Republicans, where are they going to look for their people?
They're going to look at places like the Hudson Institute.
So, it's still a really... it's a shame.
Not a single one, other than Scooter for lying and obstructing an investigation, these guys that lied their way into war, that have created what we read about on a daily basis, about what's going on in Iraq particularly, the poor ideas and strategies in Afghanistan, you can put this on the neocons, and yet not a single one has truly paid any price at all.
Of course, none of their children serve, so you don't have this to worry about.
Except Ledeen.
Ledeen sent his son.
Well, I guess he wasn't one of the ones in government, but he was one of the leaders in the media.
Yeah, Ledeen certainly is an agitator.
He's a true believer.
He's a crazy man.
That guy actually believes all the crazy things he says.
Well, that's what Larissa Alexandrovna says.
She says she talked with him face to face, interviewed him, and she said, oh no, he's not a liar.
He's really crazy.
Alright, now, that might count for a lot of these guys, actually.
Hold it right there, everybody.
We'll be back in just a minute with Karen Katowski.
Go check out our archives at luerockwell.com.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Did I mention that you should go to c-span.org and look up Karen Katowski's interview with Brian Lamb there?
It's called the Q&A.
And if you can't figure out how to spell Katowski, well, that's fair.
But just Google it, and it'll correct your spelling.
It'll work out.
Also, Karen is featured in the movie Hijacking Catastrophe, which is wonderful, and is available to watch on Google Video.
What other documentary films are you featured in, Karen?
Oh my gosh.
Quite a few.
Give me a couple.
I can't remember any of the names of them.
Hijacking Catastrophe.
I should have warned you or something.
Yeah, sorry.
I'm sorry.
But, you know, they're out there, and there's actually so much good stuff out there.
In fact, yeah, just go to YouTube and just, well, have Google figure out how to spell her name, and then go and put that in the YouTube there, and you'll be able to find all kinds of things.
Yeah, lots of stuff out there.
Okay, so what was the Office of Special Plans, Karen?
Well, it was an office created and staffed by mostly politically appointed workers, and their job, Special Plans, well, their official name was Expanded Iraq Desk.
And this was back in the summer, late summer of 2002, and they were disbanded after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
About a month or so after that, they were disbanded because their job was done.
It was not to worry about what happened to Iraq.
It was to basically build the case in this small office operating very secretively.
Special Plans, you know, was even publicly, you know, you weren't supposed to know what went on in there.
And they were producing, they were going through the intelligence, existing raw material as well as processed intelligence, and they would cherry pick and pull out nuggets and take and mix both unprocessed factoids with some processed material and put together a storyline.
Of course, that storyline, we're quite aware of it, because if you want to know what was in that storyline, you can just watch Colin Powell's presentation to the UN several weeks before we invaded in early 2003.
All of those things that Colin Powell was talking about, I would say probably 80% of them were something that had been embellished and put together and promoted out of the Office of Special Plans.
Well, and you know what's interesting about that, too, is to hear Larry Wilkerson tell it.
Colin Powell, and he got Scooter Libby's version of the speech and said, Oh my God, this is so ridiculous.
You know, they're blaming Saddam Hussein for global warming and the anthrax attacks and everything in the whole wide world.
So they really pared it down.
They threw a lot of that stuff out.
Yes, they did.
And I'm glad you mentioned it, because OSP was staffed by people very tight with Scooter Libby and actually were providing direct channel stuff back and forth, both to Scooter Libby's office and the Vice President's suite and back from the Vice President's National Security Advisor set, which was Scooter Libby and his staff, into Office of Special Plans.
So there's a two-way street going there with direct communications.
And this stuff was not always, on an operational basis, was not running up the chain and down the chain.
It was going directly, because Bill Lutie came to the Pentagon from Cheney's staff.
When Cheney looked around for a Vice President candidate, couldn't find one, said, Well, maybe I could do it.
So he's the Vice President.
He came ready to go when the inauguration hit.
He had his staff picked out.
In fact, even before, in the interim period, he had his staff picked out as they were waiting to find out who was going to be the president, remember, back in that election.
So Cheney had a staff, and one of the guys on his staff was a guy he knew, Bill Lutie.
And Bill worked there for a while, and then Bill Lutie was placed over into the Near East South Asia shop of the Secretary of Defense's staff.
So he's the point man on the Middle East, and he comes from Dick Cheney's office.
He works for Dick Cheney.
Now, did he ever stop working for Dick Cheney?
Well, I have to say no, because the products, certainly the products that OSP was putting together, OSP directly under Lutie, Lutie created that office, put Abe Shulsky in charge of it.
This material that they were producing, it wasn't valid intelligence.
It wasn't anything that was vetted.
It was propaganda, but this stuff was going back and forth to Cheney's office.
And so you would see Cheney, and you would hear Cheney in his speeches, and, of course, some of the president's speechwriters as well, using this same descriptive type thing.
And, you know, when you hear things like mushroom clouds over St. Louis, you know, he's going to send a drone over here, you know, and he's got to be saying, I mean, come on, you know, the whole intelligence community is, like, laughing its head off, going, this is insane, except it's actually happening.
It's actually being sold to the Americans.
And, you know, Americans think if the president or some high-ranking, you know, person in Washington that works in the Pentagon particularly says it, well, it must be true.
Well, it's not true.
There's no guarantee that it's true.
You know, the system is not accountable.
Well, you know, I think the thing is, you know, the permanent state is dangerous enough, the one you were a part of for so long, no personal offense there.
But, you know, the empire is bad enough without having this kind of – I guess this is what they give Dick Cheney credit for.
This is what he's so good at, being the former chief of staff for Gerald Ford and whatever.
He knows Washington.
So what you do is you put all your guys as the deputy assistant secretary of whatever for killing people that nobody's ever heard of, and then you have this transmission belt, the stovepipe, Seymour Hersh called it in his article Selective Intelligence, where you have Wormser and Bolton over at the State Department, and Armitage for that matter.
Oh, Wormser's at the Hudson Institute too.
Dave Wormser's at the Hudson Institute.
I'm serious.
You have to look at that.
Yeah, the survivors.
That's where they are now.
But then you had Libby in the vice president's office, and then you had Doug Fyfe and Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and the crew over at the Pentagon, and along with Lutie and Shulsky and now Michael Rubin and all these people were there at the Office of Special Plans cooking this stuff up.
That's right.
And the transmission belt of treason, that's what Raimondo called it.
Oh, perfect.
Well, in fact, here's the thing too.
Bob Dreyfuss in his article Agents of Influence and Julian Borger in his article The Spies Who Push for War, they both talk about how Ariel Sharon was producing bogus intelligence in English and putting it through this channel in order to help Lyons in the war himself.
Sure.
And that's how they would do it too.
I mean, you can add like a kind of veneer of credibility.
You can say, oh, well, the Israelis gave us this, or we have two sources that tell us the same thing.
Well, oftentimes the two sources were actually the same source, one from one channel, one from another.
It's the same thing, not vetted.
And they played these kinds of games because they don't care about the truth.
They care about their agenda.
Their agenda was to destroy Iraq as a viable nation-state.
They have done that.
Their point was to put us permanently, to put us permanently in a military-type manner, permanently in the Middle East.
They've done that.
We're permanently in the Middle East.
In fact, I read on some headline just today Obama has decided to back away from his declaration of bringing us to Iraq.
Yeah, it was Gareth.
It was Gareth Porter.
We just talked to him.
There you go.
Well, and see, this is the thing too, is revisionist history is fun.
My point is here I've got a whole section full of articles of the Hudson Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, American Enterprise Institute, WINEP, Axis of Evil over here, pushing for war with Iran.
And what they're trying to do is they're going to build up for a year.
They're going to give the sanctions time to not work, and then this whole time they're going to basically just restart.
Here we are five years later, and they're just going to restart that same thing.
Everything wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq is Iran's fault, not ours.
And they're making nukes, and they're going to kill us all, and we have to attack them.
And it's the exact same people.
It's the people that you saw with your own eyes lying us into war with Iraq.
It's them and their allies in the media.
It's absolutely the same people, and you can track them.
What you have to hope is that we as Americans are not the same people that we were in 2002 and 2003.
If we can be a little bit smarter about, you know, not paying attention to what they're saying, not taking it to heart, not being scared by it, because if you notice, everything is about creating fear.
And, you know, you'd think that Americans might be more susceptible now.
The economy is bad.
We've got high unemployment.
A lot of people are worried about their future.
But, you know, we're not scared, and we shouldn't be, that Iran is going to do anything to it.
We're not scared of al-Qaeda.
The president said there's, like, what, five al-Qaeda guys left?
I mean, what's the number?
That's not scary.
So the facts are actually not scary when it comes to the Middle East.
Americans are tired of paying for empire.
We can't afford it.
You know, and not only can't we afford it, we're tired of giving foreign aid to countries like Israel and Pakistan, you know, both these nuclear countries that call themselves allies.
But, in fact, you know, we're manipulating them both, and we have this terrible thing.
Americans are not interested in that.
We're not interested in paying for it.
They want their unemployment benefits extended.
I mean, if you could give them a choice, you know, that's what they'd want.
They want the money here.
So I think the neocons are going to have a tougher time selling their fear agenda.
And, you know, but that doesn't mean they can't get us into a war.
Already there was some accident, some explosion on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz not long ago.
Right, yeah, a Japanese ship.
Yeah, and what was the first thing out of the war chorus's mouth?
Oh, I bet the Iranians did that.
We better be ready for the Iranians to start messing with us.
What are you messing with them?
The headlines this morning is there's a border skirmish going on on the Lebanese border.
So, you know, who knows?
These things can blow up at any time.
All right, well, thanks so much for your time today on the show, Karen.
It's great as always.
Good to talk to you again.
Keep up the good work.
All right, take care.
Everybody, that's Karen Katowski.
You can find millions of wonderful articles she's written at lewrockwell.com, L-E-W, rockwell.com.
And look her up on YouTube, too.
Great stuff.
And, again, C-SPAN, Brian Lamb interview.
Go look at that.