All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, starting the third hour here, and I'm happy to bring Karen Katowski back to the show.
Remember, somebody mentioned Eugene Jarecki's film, Why We Fight, on the show yesterday.
Karen is featured in that, and Hijacking Catastrophe.
Have y'all ever seen Hijacking Catastrophe?
That's what Michael Moore's giant Fahrenheit 9-11 should have been.
Here's who did this and why, for real.
Also, she wrote the new Pentagon Papers for Salon.com.
She wrote an excellent three-part series for the American Conservative magazine, beginning with In Rumsfeld's Shop.
She's the subject of The Lie Factory by Bob Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, and a source for many other great articles.
Pentagon Home Office to Neocon Network by Jim Loeb.
I think you can read about her in A Pretext for War by James Banford.
Let's see here, what am I missing?
She's the editor for The Truth in the LA Weekly.
She's got an archive as long as my arm at lewrockwell.com slash katowski slash katowski-ark.html, which we'll link to in the archive of the summary of this interview at antiwar.com slash radio.
And I really could go on and on and on like that to introduce Karen Katowski.
Welcome back to the show, Karen.
Well, it's good to be here.
Thanks for having me.
As I could have explained, you were a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and one degree of Kevin Bacon removed from the Office of Special Plans where the neoconservative transmission belt of treason lied us into war with Iraq.
Is that about right?
You got it.
All right, now your article today on lewrockwell.com, or pardon me, yesterday on lewrockwell.com is titled War is Murder.
So it wouldn't be fair if I didn't start off trying to be tough on you and say, well, what about your career in the U.S. Air Force?
Were you a murderer, Karen?
Well, I didn't think that I was, and certainly I kind of drove a desk and all that, and actually pushing papers on basically our military foreign policy, you would think that, well, that's pretty safe, not doing much, but it's a good question because American foreign policy is a militarized foreign policy, and it's a policy that is basically either security or economic embargoes, either pressuring people by threat of force or threat of starvation, or actually using that force.
Prior to working policy issues, I worked acquisition.
Well, what do you think we were buying?
I mean, yeah, the business is murder, and part of what that article is about is we should not, as Americans, be the least bit appalled when at the pointy end of the spear we have these low-life soldiers, which we've been recruiting.
We've dropped our standards so low because you can't get anybody in to do the kind of work that we ask them to do for the money we pay them, and the work we're doing is immoral work.
So you're going to find people in there who are immoral, okay?
So don't be surprised when they relieve their tensions in the way that these soldiers in Afghanistan had been doing.
You know, you could say they're accused or they're suspected, but the fact of the matter is they pretty as much as admitted to basically popping off civilians because it was fun and because they could and because they could get away with it.
Well, this is just what we do except we pretty it up.
Higher up you go the chain.
Our bureaucrats, our leaders, our mid-grade officers, our upper-grade officers, our general officers, our war planners in the Pentagon.
I've read this on antiwar.com, other articles.
The CIA in Washington, in Langley, is operating drones from halfway around the world to shoot up villages in Pakistan.
It's not even being done locally.
So, yes, it's a business of murder.
I'm glad you asked that question.
Yeah, and, you know, I don't want to be unfair to you because, after all, you've done your penance and you've done a great job in exposing the machinations of the war parties since you left and really before you left writing for David Hackworth's site, Soldiers for the Truth.
And, you know, I owe you a debt of gratitude personally for all I've learned from you.
Well, I think that I haven't, you know, no, I have not done my penance yet.
I will need to, you know, work on that for the remaining years and decades that I have left.
I'm not going to, you know, if you really think about what it is that our foreign policy does, that the United States foreign policy does, that Washington, D.C. does, you know, you just can't, it's something we need to stop.
And that would be the way to, you know, if some success could be seen in, you know, in changing our foreign policy, in bringing our troops home, in eliminating the network of military bases, in utterly destroying, if possible, the military-industrial complex in this country.
I mean, this is the only thing we export nowadays.
Yeah, so, no, it's a good question.
And no, I have not done my penance, okay, because we are a warring state.
Our economy, to the extent that it is working at all, is a militarized economy.
It's really bad.
I mean, I'm sorry.
It's bad, and everybody needs to see what you guys are doing.
That's great.
You're educating people.
People are starting to make the right choices, hopefully not sending their kids to the military, choosing perhaps not to work for the government, not to work for a government contractor, even though it pays more, even though there's job security.
If we continue to make these kinds of choices, we can take this country back.
But, you know, it's a, no, no penance.
I still owe much more.
Okay, well, you know, that's you.
That's up to you.
Well, so I do want to focus on what you say about it gets prettied up.
You have these war criminals you're referring to who are being prosecuted by the U.S. government for literally hunting Afghans for sport, throwing a grenade at an old man, shooting others, keeping their fingers as mementos.
And, you know, it's kind of surprising, actually, when you think back of it.
There's so much brutality in Iraq, but as far as I know, there was only the one case, not that I'm trying to minimize the one case because everybody's an individual after all, but there's the one case of the rape and the murder by Stephen Green and his buddies there where I guess I would assume that that kind of thing would go on much more often.
Well, I don't have evidence that it went on much more often, but the intent there was that Stephen Green and his cohorts in crime were to eliminate all witnesses.
They didn't succeed at that.
They got caught.
I don't doubt for a minute that, I mean, in all wars those types of atrocities happen, and certainly they would have happened in Iraq.
The guy in Afghanistan, one of them, I don't remember which one, if it was Gibbs or one of the other guys, but he actually had done this and gotten away with it in Iraq.
That was part of what he had told his friend.
His friend told his father.
His father tried to tell the Army, but the Army didn't listen, and then eventually it comes up.
But this guy practiced this stress killing, relief of stress killing or cold-blooded murder of civilians.
He learned it and practiced it and got away with it in Iraq.
That's just one case.
So, yeah, I would see this much more as an iceberg.
So here's my thing, though, is, Karen, if you'd been deployed to Afghanistan, in no circumstances in the whole world would you ever participate in such a thing, but sitting at your desk at the Pentagon you would direct those men into battle in a sense, right?
Well, that's what the leadership does.
That's the prettying up of it.
Your uniform is nice and pressed and blue and neat at the Pentagon, and you don't have to get all dirty with these most horrible sins.
That's exactly right.
And I don't know, you guys did a lot of reporting on the Rolling Stones interview with McChrystal.
Was it McChrystal, the guy?
Right, Michael Hastings' article, The Runaway General, that cost McChrystal his job.
And, you know, it actually, McChrystal lost his job, and he probably intended to lose his job because he was losing and didn't have the freedom to murder at will that he, you know, things weren't working out.
He needed to get out.
This was one mechanism, and I think that he wanted to leave.
But, you know, he came across in that article, especially if you are not a fan of the Obama administration, which right now many people are not, he came across pretty good in that article and pretty bloody and pretty bloodthirsty, and, oh, if I could only fight with both hands instead of one arm behind my back.
This is, we celebrate murder, okay?
And if you read the McChrystal article with that in mind, you know, you can see.
It comes from the very top.
Yeah.
In fact, Hastings even said on this show, it just, it stuck out to me, I think I might have missed it the first time or something, distracted, but I heard it on the replay that, you know, these guys, the soldiers, they're really frustrated that now they're having to be in fair fights with the Taliban.
It's not supposed to be a fair fight, you know?
A massacre is much more satisfying, I'm sure.
All right, hold it right there, Karen.
Everybody, it's the great Karen Katowski.
Spell it like Kwiatkowski with an I on the end instead of a Y.
Karen Kwiatkowski is how you Google it.
Karen Katowski, she's at luerockwell.com.
The article was called War is Murder.
This is Anti-War Radio, and we'll be right back.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Worden.
I'm talking with retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Karen Katowski.
She writes for luerockwell.com.
She watched Douglas Fyfe and Bill Ludy and Michael Rubin and Abram Shulsky and the Neocon Network lie you into war in Iraq from her perch at the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003.
And we're talking about war as murder, not different from murder, but the same frigging thing.
And somehow we have this false dichotomy.
I was complaining about this earlier in the show, Karen.
I learned this when I was a little kid, I don't know, six, seven years old maybe at the latest, that thou shalt not kill.
You never kill anybody.
It's never okay to kill anybody, except if you're wearing green and the government says it's okay and you're fighting for your country like in World War II, then you can kill whoever you want as long as you're following orders and fighting for your country, and that's different.
That man can overrule God on killing people as long as your country can overrule God.
Yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of people in this country who believe that country, God, government, at least as long as it's a Republican government or a God-fearing president, is the same thing.
They think it's the same thing.
So, and this is why, you know, certainly much of the Arab world and much of the Muslim world sees the way we're behaving and where we're operating militarily right now.
They see it very much as a, you know, a crusade.
In fact, this word, I think even Bush used this word, and of course Republicans and Democrats alike, you know, Obama, no, no, it's not a crusade, not a crusade.
But, you know, a lot of people in this country, sadly, associate government, God, country, patriotism.
It's all one big blur.
You know, they don't make a difference.
And so if you're killing for the state, then you're killing for God, their God, whichever God, you know, God of the state.
To me, that's what it is.
But, of course, you know, they mix up religion with government.
And, you know, there's a reason that the founders separated church and state.
It wasn't because they didn't, you know, believe in God.
It wasn't because they weren't religious people.
It wasn't because they weren't moral people.
You know, they certainly expected rules to be followed.
It was for this reason, because with the power of the state and the power over people that religious fervor takes on, you can do anything you want.
And you can say it's okay.
But you know what?
When these guys come back, when they rot in jail, some of them will rot in jail.
Most of them will just rot back at home, you know.
They'll drink themselves to death, drug themselves to death, do dangerous behaviors, suicide by cops.
They've been doing that.
And they're going to keep doing that, because at the heart of it, it's morally wrong.
They actually get what you got when you were seven.
You know, there's a dichotomy here.
And actually, there shouldn't be.
Okay, there shouldn't be.
If you're a Christian, if you're a Jew, you've got the Ten Commandments, you know, you've got to follow them.
Since thou shalt not kill.
That's not what the state tells you to do it.
You're not supposed to do it.
You're going to suffer, you know, the victim of your crimes.
My God, we could care less about those victims.
But the victim is out of the picture, you know.
That's in God's world now.
But the person who conducts that crime, who commits that crime, you've got to live with that.
And, you know, you're going to suffer.
So, you know, the state, I think, takes advantage of people.
And, of course, it would, because it needs people to follow it.
And the mixing of religious fervor and patriotism and the state and God, yeah, we do a lot.
And then it's so silly that we say, oh, you know, Iran is run by Mullahs who believe that, you know, the Muslim God makes the state.
Oh, isn't that so awful?
And what are we doing?
What are we doing back here in the heartland?
It's really, it makes me sick.
I'm sorry, but it really does.
Well, you know, the other thing is, too, you mentioned about people coming home, drinking themselves to death and the suicide by cop and all those things.
A lot of these people are going to be cops, too.
That's part of it.
But, you know, Ron Paul one time pointed out, I mean, basically, I mean, you're right, too, that it's getting harder and harder.
So they're recruiting, you know, more and more gang members and Nazis and whoever to be soldiers at this point.
But even still, a lot of these kids are, you know, the star of the football team and their coach and their dad believe in the war.
And they go over there.
And basically, as Ron Paul was saying one time, you know, they're good kids and they're put in a position of committing psychopathic acts and their psyches can't handle it.
They're not psychopaths.
They're not mass murderers.
But you give them that job.
You fill their head with all this honor and glory and valor.
And this time, you know, it's not going to hurt you.
It's not going to be like Vietnam with all these broken men on the side of the road begging for money.
This time, it's going to be great.
It's valor and God and country and all these wonderful things.
And then no wonder you have this epidemic of suicides and what they now call the post-traumatic stress disorder, eight syllables and a hyphen, like George Carlin said, to describe the shell shock, the madness that comes with having to remember the things that you did.
I read something just two days ago about I waxed this old lady, man.
I can't get it out of my mind.
I think this was even this is Vietnam.
The guys in 2010 talking about all day, every day, I just think about that old woman I killed.
That's right.
And it's an awful thing.
And once it's done, and also I think it's not just the folks that do it.
It's those that witness it and those that tolerate it.
I mean, you know, you mentioned World War II earlier.
They said like well over half, I don't know what the percentage is, of guys in World War II, even in the European theater, never fired a weapon at all.
But they still were shell shocked because they saw the things that were done by the guy next to them and the things done to the guy next to them.
So, you know, this whole thing, war is, you know, and it kills me that it doesn't really ever seem to touch or hurt the bureaucrats in suits in Washington, whether they're top military leaders or the civilians, you know, the politicians.
You know, none of them feel it.
What is it?
One congressman had a son, Jim Webb.
Jim Webb's son came back, and Jim Webb was a late elected.
When Jim Webb entered the Senate from Virginia, he had a son, I think, in the military at that time who had done some time in Iraq or was going to.
But, you know, overwhelmingly, those 500 or so folks, whatever, they don't have kids.
Yeah.
Michael Ledeen is the only neocon I've ever heard of who has even a relative in the military.
Yeah.
And also are elected politicians, those who shout and clamor for war.
You know, they're not touched by it.
Now, they say that a lot of these guys are running, you know, and maybe some more have gotten elected, guys who have had some experience in Iraq.
And I got an email from somebody saying somebody's running down in North Carolina who actually was not indicted but had participated in one of these similar type killings in Iraq.
Yeah, I'd read about that, yeah.
Accused war criminal running for Congress, proud of it.
Well, he'll fit right in, okay?
I hope he gets elected because he will fit right in.
And the more we can become aware of the kind of people Ron Paul accepted that are up in Congress making these rules, the more we can have contempt for them and basically begin to start, you know, building a big wall between us and D.C.
Because we don't need to support them, we don't need to pay its debt, we don't need to do its bidding, we don't need to fight its wars.
It's just getting old.
Well, agreed, indeed.
It's funny, you know, Patrick Henry said what we're creating here, what you guys are creating here, will eventually just be a walled-in imperial city that rules this whole land and will have no recourse against it.
But I like your idea better.
Let's us build a wall around it to just keep it at bay and safe from us.
Absolutely, and you know, if you had a real, I'd go for an economic embargo.
I'll do just like our foreign policy.
Let's not kill them first, let's starve them.
Why not an economic embargo?
In a sense, we're already getting that.
You know, people who are either unemployed or earning less than they could or earning it in a non-tax way, these people aren't paying taxes.
And why should they?
Why should anyone?
You know, people say, oh, the rich don't pay taxes.
Why should they?
Why should anyone pay them?
Why pay to support Washington?
I'm with you.
Boycott D.C.
There you go.
I love it.
Sounds great.
All right.
Everybody, that is the heroic Karen Katowski.
She's still doing her penance over there at luerockwell.com.
Thanks, Karen.
Okay, thanks a lot.
Talk to you later.
