Judging Freedom - LtCol. Karen Kwiatkowski - The Lost Interview: The Whistleblower Who Tried To Stop A War

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

LtCol. Karen Kwiatkowski - The Lost Interview: The Whistleblower Who Tried To Stop A WarSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and kind of... Do I talk to you the whole time? Yeah. Okay. I'm Karen Katowski, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, and I spent my last four and a half years of 20 in the Pentagon and my last almost a year working in the Office of Near East South Asia. And that's where I...

Near East South Asia is like the Middle East policy, Office of Secretary of Defense policy for the Middle East policy, Office of Secretary of Defense policy for the Middle East region. And that's where I really, in that final year of my service, is where I was really exposed to some of the things that I've been speaking out about since I retired. So let's start off here. Let's see. We're going to start off with all this stuff. At what point did you realize that something was seriously wrong with what was happening in this environment? I was moved into Near East South Asia from Sub-Saharan African Affairs in May of 2002. The folks in the Middle East office had

a shortage of manpower. They had lost some people earlier than they expected. And they had put out a call for volunteers amongst the policy staff. And I did not volunteer. No one volunteered to come work in the Middle East office. So finally they mandated a few folks. And I was one that was basically directed to go over there. And prior to that I worked in Sub-Saharan African Affairs, not an important area for George Bush. So when the George Bush administration came in, you could kind of call Sub-Saharan African Affairs defense policy a backwater.

So I had no real concerns about anything going on until I was moved into the Near East South Asia office. And my very first day in the office, I sat there with my co-worker, who was at the Egypt desk, and she explained to me, as we were talking about different things, and I was probably griping a little bit about, I can't believe I got sent over here and that kind of thing. And she was saying, well, and this was out of the blue in a sense,

she said, if you have an opinion on the, if you have a pro-Palestinian opinion on the Israel-Palestine issue, this is not the place to bring that up. You keep those opinions to yourself here in this office. And I thought that was strange because my assignment was, at that time when I first worked there was southern Arabian Gulf. I had Bahrain, Yemen, those kind of, those countries. And, you know, I just didn't think of those as being an issue, a place where I would be concerned about Israel and Palestine. It wasn't in our conversation. She brought that

up out of the blue, and that was to help me understand the environment that I had just entered into, a very politicized environment, a very pro-Israel environment. There's really nothing wrong with that. I mean, Israel is a military ally of this country. But to be told about a certain political opinion that you should either hold or otherwise be wary of, that was surprising. So I would say the very first day I had a sense that some things weren't right. As I look back, I think part of the reason that this person advised me in such a way is that she had already found this out the hard way.

She's trying to help me. That was the first day. Shortly thereafter, other things happened and my eyes were opened. I asked coworkers to explain why things were being done in the way they were being done. I was very surprised that we were so far advanced in the planning for an Iraq war in May of 2002 when I had no sense that there was any planning for a war in Iraq prior to that. And so I asked the folks and

pretty much the conclusion that, or the the answer, the cumulative answer that I got was that the people that make the decisions here are all political appointees, and they're not just regular political appointees, but they're neoconservative political appointees, and there is no debating, and there is no argument, and your job as a staff officer is not to advise. They don't need to want your advice. Your job is to simply do what you're told and that's what you'll do. And people who aren't in the military may say, well of course that's what the military person's job is, but it's not really true. In the Pentagon

when you're a staff officer, whether it's a professional civilian or a military officer, your job is to think. We have people at the mid-level and higher level field grade ranks, and their job is to think and to assess and to advise at a low level, but certainly to advise and to think. And we, I was being told in this office, no, that's not something that is needed. It's not necessary. The people doing the thinking already, they're not you. They are these other folks. They're political folks and neoconservative in their viewpoint. You're not really needed to contribute to this. And it wasn't just me, it was all of us.

I mean, the people advising me this were folks who had been there longer than me, who had either complained about it or come to terms with it. It's interesting that a number of those folks left the office, found ways to have their three-year tour curtailed, moved on to a lateral position if they were civilian, got a by-name request if they were military into another office so that they could be pulled out. So I don't think that my reaction of concern was unique. It was not unique at all. Anyone who was seeing it with their eyes open

around them knew that this is a place you did not want to be. And when you looked at both the print and television news media during this time period, what are some of your reactions to what you were seeing from the inside and what you wish you would have been seeing? Yeah. Well, during the summer, of course, the big thing in the summer of 2002 were the famous leaks to The New York Times of PowerPoint slides from Central Command showing the advanced stages and proposals for this invasion of Iraq. And at that point, prior to those leaks, well, particularly The New York Times leak in July, there had been a previous leak that

didn't have legs. It didn't have media legs. It didn't go anywhere. To the LA Times, William Arkin had done an article which said kind of the same thing, and it didn't go anywhere. So there was a second leak. I'm insinuating here that this leak was done purposely. My observation of it was certainly that it was done purposely to kind of generate a national discussion on the doability of an invasion of Iraq and to kind of break the ice with the American people that this is where we're going to go next. As I watched this happen and saw the advanced levels of planning for this war in Iraq, almost

to the extent that it was a done deal, even as early as May or June of 2002, the sense of it was, yeah, we're going to do this. We just have to get everyone else on board. And the everyone else on board was the media and the American public because they would have to be behind a war. They would need to have some sense of excitement about this war that had to be built up. And so it seemed like what I was seeing in the media was, as I look back now, was being shaped by the Pentagon. The Pentagon was actually pushing for war. Now, the Pentagon rarely pushes for war. If you remember the Powell Doctrine, Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, kind of the recuperation from the Vietnam Syndrome, what we said was we would only, the American military would

only go to war when there was a clear objective, when there was an exit strategy of some kind up front. And we would only go to war when we were able to mobilize with overwhelming strength against whatever that enemy was based on the objective that we had. And this is And we would only go to war when we were able to mobilize with overwhelming strength against whatever that enemy was based on the objective that we had. And this is the POW-Weinberger Doctrine, and it was kind of seen as the cure for the problem that POW as a young soldier and others dealt with through Vietnam. So the POW Doctrine was totally not what these guys were going with.

I mean, the clear objective, certainly that Sodom was evil, but everything else was kind of mushy, right? You know, WMDs, what WMDs? They had to wait until September 2002 before the CIA could even put together an assessment on WMDs. And that, of course, has since been shown by the Congress to have been full of just really bad intelligence work, number one, and number two, subjected to politicization at the higher levels. So the idea was we need to convince. So here's the Pentagon, or at least the civilians at the Pentagon.

Certainly I don't think the military were thinking this up, even at the general, even at the flag officer level. But the civilians at the Pentagon are political appointees, guys like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, Doug Fyfe, our boss Bill Lutie, who served underneath Doug Fyfe. These guys are saying, how do we drum up a positive rationale for war, a war that we've already planned and are basically ready to do, ready to go do this thing. But we can't do it unless, you know, we need to help the president, convince the people to do this. First off, that's just not something that I had ever seen in 19 years prior. I only worked in the Pentagon for five years, but I don't recall during the Clinton years we did the Bosnia-Kosovo thing, we did Operation Deny Flight, which

I served for a part of my time in Aviano there under that mission. And I don't recall military folk pushing for this or that. The only thing I can recall is a certain Air Force general wanted to make sure that he had the authorities that he would need to go do things, things like that, operational issues, but not political issues. In fact, the military, if anything, was kind of keeping Clinton and his advisers at length, saying, look, let's take this thing slow. Let's kind of make sure that we do this the right way with minimal risk to Americans, that we know what the objective is. And it wasn't a perfect result in any case, but that's

how I recall the military behaving. That's how I recall the Pentagon behaving. Not the way I saw them in 2002 with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith and these guys basically going out, drumming up support for a war, not ever saying, hey, let's think about this, which is usually the role that the senior commanders in the Pentagon play. They didn't play that role. At least the civilians did not. They played the role of war cheerleader, basically. And of course, the intelligence budget, 70% of the intelligence budget, 70 or 80, falls under the Defense Department. And that was also being mobilized to try to build up a sense of public necessity to go in and do

Saddam Hussein. Now, do what to him? It's not clear. I guess we wanted to topple him. Very little discussion was ever held prior to the invasion as to what we really envisioned, other than, I guess, Wolfowitz thought that they would throw candy and flowers. I think there would be parades welcoming the liberating American soldiers, some kind of retro liberation of France or something. Of course, none of that was realistic. And I don't recall large, widespread American discussion on what it was going to be like afterwards. They didn't care. The idea was to get Americans behind a war such that we could go do this thing. And I can, my view, which I came to several months after I realized

this war was going to happen, it was inevitable. All we were waiting on were the American people to get behind it, which the President and Vice President did. They succeeded in that with the help of the Pentagon senior leadership. But once I knew it was going to happen, the idea of what would happen afterwards and the very glaring absence of an exit strategy at that time told me that there was no exit strategy. We're not talking about an exit strategy because we're not leaving Iraq, which is pretty much clear now. One of the first things that we've done as soon as we invaded and seized the halls of power basically was begin work on bases, base building. Halliburton,

Kellogg Brown and Root, Bechtel, these are base construction contracts and that's what they've done. And those bases are mostly done now, a year or so later. And we're not leaving those bases. If we have to, if the whole place falls apart around us, there'll be little Guantanamos in the middle of a hostile territory, but they'll still be American bases. And as I look back in 2002 as I saw this thing happening and I wondered why the Powell Doctrine was being so viciously and blatantly ignored, especially given Powell was over there in the State Department. You'd think he might have some incentive to maybe push for sanity, and I think he did for a time. But the POW doctrine was ignored, because had

we applied the POW doctrine, there would have been no war in Iraq. First off, there was no clear objective and overwhelming reason. There was no exit strategy. They didn't want an exit strategy. And the idea of using overwhelming force was not something they could sell to the American people. They needed to be able to tell the American people, we can do this, the very small amount of force is a minimal effort, minimal cost to you, Mr. and Mrs. American citizen. So it was clear why they rejected, after the fact, it was very clear why they rejected the POW doctrine. During the time, I really thought that what a lot of people thought, and that this is the neoconservatives rejected the POW doctrine because they'd never heard of it. You know they really don't have military

experience. These guys are not, most of the people making the policy have very little sensitivity and understanding of what the military is, how it works. Their views on world power and balance of power and how to change the world are really immature, very immature views. Like boys that play with toys, you know, you play war games, you're not limited by reality. There's an element of fantasy involved when you play cowboys and Indians. That's what these guys are. That's where they are in their strategic thinking as far as war. Now, at a larger level, the idea that the neoconservatives had of permanently reshaping and changing the Middle East through permanent placement of very, very strategically located bases in Iraq, there's something of good strategy there. If you are okay with lying to get there, which is what they did and what

they had to do was to lie to get there. I mean, because they could have told the American people, look, the biggest oil fields, certainly the second biggest, but possibly the largest oil fields in the world that we know of are in Iraq. Saddam Hussein is not our friend. We are dependent on oil. China wants this oil 15 years from now. They'd like it now. The only way that we will be able to stay on top, which is what the neoconservatives care about, staying on top, is to occupy Iraq and place our military bases there and basically leverage the rest of the Middle East through this process. Now, that is something that we could debate.

Sane and normal people can discuss this. Is this in our interest? Is it something we can do? And it could have been sold to the American people. Most likely, American people would have said, is there a non-war way of getting to the same conclusion? And of course there are many non-war ways to have gotten to the same place. The neoconservatives did not want that debate, therefore they created the artificial reasons, which we now know, in 2004 we now know that these reasons were almost entirely false, which is just an awful thing to think that your government would lie to you in order to take over another country. It's not unprecedented, certainly in their history, you know, that's happened. But you'd think in the age of the Internet, in modern media,

connectivity, you know, global connectivity that we have, you'd think that we couldn't, that the American people could not have had the wool pulled over their eyes so easily, or the Congress itself have the wool pulled over its eyes, and yet it's exactly what happened. Do you fault the media to some extent for not asking why we were doing this? The American media is at fault. If you think about the media in an interconnected world and you include the international media,

it really makes the American media look a lot worse. Because the international media, who are often predisposed to be critical of United States policy, granted American media shouldn't be predisposed to be critical of our policy, but the overseas media in their predisposition to question what it was America was doing and in their use of a far wider range of sources, international sources, understood very well and very quickly what was going on in this country. They understood, the international media. And many, if you look back now, you'll find that the same questions that the American media two years later are beginning to ask and are beginning to say,

you know, we really should have asked that question. These questions were being asked in the international media. And folks who are news nuts or people that stay on the Internet and read a lot of news and get their sources from more than just domestic media on international subjects, they knew. In fact, that's the core of your criticism that came from academia, that came maybe from some of the left wing side of the house. These guys were getting information, very valid information, from sources that the American media was pretty much not even including. And I don't know if it's reporters or if it's editors, because the editors are

the ones who say, I don't want another story like this. I want a story like this. The editor is the one that says, look, if you lose your access to your Pentagon sources, if you lose your access for my media corporation to the White House because of this story or that story, you cost me money. Therefore, I'm advising you as your boss, don't lose my access. And it was very clear that this administration has been effective in holding access to reporters hostage to the kinds of stories that they produce.

And if you notice, there's a few old, I shouldn't say old, but there's a few independent American broadcasters. The one I'm thinking of is the, who's the lady, the White House correspondent? Helen Thomas is a prime example. Okay, but there's some American reporters who stood up to this kind of thing, and I think a good example of this is Helen Thomas, who reported on many, many White Houses. And she is one of the few who sets the standard for asking hard questions.

I don't know if it's because she is very experienced. I don't know if it's because of her particular views. But whatever it is, she sets an example. And it's an example that many of the baby boomer age reporters, Helen Thomas is far beyond baby boomer age. The folks in the generation after her, the baby boomer generation, 45 to 65, these reporters conformed just as that generation has always done. I'm sorry to say, and I'm the tail end of the baby boom myself, but that generation has conformed consistently and has indulged itself and has never really achieved. I think we talked about, we haven't talked about it,

but the idea of a greatest generation, that's a false concept, but the idea that the World War II generation was somehow a very unique and special generation, people that could self-sacrifice, people that could contribute of themselves for the betterment of the country against odds, against harsh economic conditions, whatever. This is a false idea that there's some such thing as a greatest generation. However, the baby boomers would never receive that label, okay, because they don't sacrifice and they don't take risks that are anything beyond comfort zone risks.

And so I think they are the ones that failed. And if you look at the reporters in this country who have, American reporters who have pushed the envelope, who have asked the hard questions, it's been the ones younger. This is the X and Y generation reporters. These guys are not conforming. These guys are asking hard questions. Unfortunately, their bosses are the guys in the baby boom generation. So they have some restraints placed on them. But to an extent, this whole problem of being sold a package of lies in order to go conduct a war for reasons that exist but are still not openly shared. You know, occupation, permanent occupation of Iraq is an objective.

We haven't talked about that. We haven't really admitted that we intend to be there for 20 years. People, senior military officers have said this, but it hasn't really become part of mainstream thought. But this is a problem that all Americans share in to a certain extent. It's not just the media that didn't ask the questions. It's not just the Congress that didn't do their job. It's not just George Bush and Dick Cheney, baby boomers themselves, who are pushing lies, who feel that it's okay to lie to get your way.

It's all the rest of Americans who say, you know, I don't really want to rock the boat. And not rocking the boat is, to me, a very clear characteristic of the baby boomer generation. And, you know, we think of them, oh, but they're the ones that marched at the college campuses. But most of the people who marched, anti-Vietnam demonstrators, went there, like we do a lot of things, for the free booze and for the fun and for the, won't this be something different, something entertaining. I don't give them huge credit for being independent thinkers. I give them huge credit for following the pack, and that's exactly what we've all done in this country, and that's why we have the situation in Iraq, which we have to live with. We've gone into

a country, destroyed its infrastructure, destroyed its form of government, not that it was a very good form of government, but it was something that worked, and replaced it with something that is not only very, very corrupt, financially corrupt. The folks that we've put in place in Iraq are awful, crooked people, no better than any of the folks that they had under Saddam Hussein. But also it doesn't work. See, there's some things that the folks that they had under Saddam Hussein. But also, it doesn't work. See, there's some things that are corrupt that actually work. The mafia tends to work.

It's sustained itself for a long time. You can say, well, they're crooked, but they work. What we have put in Iraq does not work. It's not only crooked, but it does not work. So we have to live with that. All the dead folks on the Iraqi side, all the dead Americans, maimed Americans, people that are injured psychologically as a result of being put in that situation unnecessarily. All of us in America will live

with that. It's not just the media's fault, not just the Congress's fault. It's all of our fault in a sense for not standing up and demanding answers and demanding that the rule of law be followed. We have a constitution in this country and the Constitution says that the Congress declares war, not the President. And the Constitution doesn't really prohibit the Congress from doing what they did, which was to say, whatever you want to do Mr. President, it's fine with us. But it by its very nature discourages

that kind of granting of executive authority. And our Congress of course ignored that. But the people also ignored that. The people were only too happy in this country to say, oh yeah, Saddam Hussein is a really bad guy, and we should go do something about him. We should finish what we started back in 1991. So all these things, lazy thinking, lazy Americans, and we all are going to pay for that. And when you look at the kind of state of the news media, what you have is reporting events, following the public relations campaign or the Bush administration every day. They're out there giving little incremental news.

They're pushing the story forward, and that's what the beat reporters are focusing on. Now, as an intelligence analyst... Well, I'm not an intelligence analyst, but a policy analyst. A policy analyst, when you're looking at, you know, events and issues, complex issues over time, now, when you look at this time period and you look at shifts that are being made, you know, the Bush administration's attitude towards the U.N.,

can you kind of elaborate what kind of patterns that you saw within the Bush administration's PR campaign? Well, certainly fear-mongering is the biggest characteristic. The continual hammering of information, information that we at the time inside the Pentagon knew to be false, false information about Saddam Hussein's ability to send UAVs with chemical weapons, Saddam Hussein's capabilities. This was something that the military and the intelligence community had looked at for a long time.

And so the focus that Saddam was dangerous because of these things didn't ring true to most people watching it. The fact that they continue to hammer this tells me that the objective was not about the truth or even educating people, but the objective was to inspire fear. Certainly the linkages back to 9-1-1, certainly we knew. The Congress has said, oh yeah, there was no relation between 9-1-1 and Saddam Hussein. Well, we knew that. People who watched the intelligence already knew that. The neocons, of course, didn't believe it, but the rest of us, the body of the intelligence work,

knew that there was no relationship. And so the fact that Bush and Cheney would continue to make those public statements tells you that what they were doing was pure propaganda. It was really to inspire fear, to kind of tag on to that anxiety that had been generated from 9-1-1 in order to gain support for their war. So that was one thing. Now, Bush has always had contempt for the United Nations, and so in a sense does one of the Republican platforms, in a sense is this idea that our sovereignty is sacrosanct, which it is, and

I certainly agree with that. I'm a conservative myself. So Bush made points in treating the UN badly with some of his conservative base, who doesn't like the UN for other reasons. But in, I think it was November, Secretary of State Powell was able to convince George Bush that if he wanted to have a real coalition, not just this fake coalition or a coalition of the willing, you know, the odd 20 soldiers here and 20 soldiers here with 150,000 of Americans, you know, that's not quite a coalition. If he wanted anybody beyond Great Britain, that he would need to try to get some support from the United Nations. And he convinced him to go back there. Now, Bush, I think,

as a person, I don't know him, of course, I don't believe that he really cares what the UN thinks in his heart of hearts. But it is interesting that now that he's defending his position long after the fact, now that the truth is coming out about the lies that were told, that one of the things he says is that, look, the UN wanted us to do this, which of course, you know, is again rewriting history to make it fit your own needs. But the patterns were very much, you know, not, the patterns that you saw with the bush administration it may be normal for governments to do this but i would see it much more consistent

with an advertising campaign you know with the product was marketing they were basically marketing a product that product was we need to go and do this war in iraq we need to get rid of Sadr Hussein they didn't say occupy the country but that they didn't need to, because once we were there with our troops, we would occupy the country. We would build our bases. That was the unsaid part of the deal. But really what they were doing was marketing a product. And I think that's very

different, I think, than making statesmanlike decisions or conducting the government foreign policy in such a way that it preserves American interests. That's not what they were doing. They were marketing a product. They had this product on the shelf. That was the, we're going to take over Iraq. We are able to do it, but we need to find out what the customer base looks like.

Will they buy this new Coke? Well, they did buy it for a while. And then after they tasted it, the American people and the media and everybody else has said, oh man, this really sucks. Not good. But it was a marketing campaign, not a governance, not anything that is a mark of governance. That's how it looks to me. And if you were, you know, put your shoes in a journalist, you know, outside of the information that you were hearing, but with your kind of background of, like, looking at these type of patterns,

what would you have done just with the declassified information that was out there? It's a hard question. The pressure on American journalists from their media corporations and from their bosses who didn't want to lose access was a lot. So there were journalists, American journalists, who did try to publish stuff. And I think you've talked to some of them, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Knight Ritter. Yeah, Knight Ritter. Yeah, Knight Ritter. These guys...

Just start that segment. Okay. Oh, there were some examples of American reporters who, within the constraints of their employment, were able and did ask many of these hard questions and expose some of this stuff. And two examples of them are the Knight Ritter reporters, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel,

who I know Warren personally. And there's others there at Knight-Ritter as well who worked closely. Some of them had some good contacts down at Central Command. And so they understood not just what was the unclassified information, but also with good reporting, actually talking to people in the Pentagon about specific things. They did that, and they reported on it. And if you go back and look at the body of work that the Knight-Ritter organization produced, you will see that if only that had been on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post, things

would have been different. But those things were not on the front page. Knight Ritter's reporting, in fact I believe they've won an award for the level of war reporting that they did, very good stuff. American produced stuff, we didn't have to rely on overseas media. But it was not on the front page of the mainstream papers, and it was not being echoed by television news at all, not by any of the main ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, certainly not Fox, but even the other media outlets were not pushing this line. So for some reason, and this I don't know because I'm not a media person,

but for some reason reporting the truth on the Bush-Cheney administration in 2002 was not popular amongst the people that make the decisions as to what we will report. And I don't know exactly why. You know, it's funny. I remember during the Clinton administration, there was a huge amount of talk, and I guess you still hear it, about the American media being liberal, being left liberal, Democratic in orientation as opposed to Republican. You hear these things, and yet Bush and Cheney were Republicans, had a very narrow mandate, if any mandate. I mean, you know, there was some concerns in the 2000 elections. And you would think that the so-called liberal American media would have picked up on things that Knight Ritter was doing and said, oh, yeah, this is true. Here's a fact. Here's evidence. Here's what we know. And yet they didn't do

that. So I think there's another question we have to we know. And yet they didn't do that. So I think there's another question we have to ask ourselves. What does it mean if... Is the American media liberal, first off? And second off, does it matter? If they're all registered, or 90% of them are registered Democrats, and yet they really do whatever the administration, whatever administration wants them to do in order not to jeopardize their contacts, not to jeopardize their contacts, not to jeopardize

their ability to reach audiences, then it really doesn't matter what their politics are because effectively they will serve as mouthpieces of whatever the administration is. And certainly we've seen that now. But it's not just the media. Congress had access to far more information, not all congressmen, but many of the committees had access to far more information about what was going on. Certainly they could call in and did call in people like Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and ask them hard questions. They had far more information than even the media did and did a far worse job in trying to sort it out and to play their role as representatives of the people.

The Congress represents the people who are the parents and the siblings and the family members of soldiers that we sent to Iraq, and almost 900 of them came back in boxes. So far they continue to die. And so I think they did a really criminally poor job in representing the people and the interests of the people. So, I don't know. It's an awful thing. And when you look at the, you know, I think you mentioned these talking points that you're receiving in the Office of Special Plans.

Oh, yeah. And then when it was on the front page of the New York Times, it was deleted. So can you... Yeah. Well, in the fall of 2002, the Office of Special Plans was formally split off from where I worked in Near East South Asia to be its own entity. It was still under the same boss, Bill Lutie. But one of the services that they would provide to us, the sister organization,

and other staff officers throughout policy was a set of classified talking points that we would include. We were directed to include these talking points in all the papers that we would prepare for internal use up the chain to brief various people. So for example, if my civilian boss had a meeting with the Moroccan ambassador to chat about what's going on in the world or the region, I would include those talking points from OSP in their entirety. We were directed to use them exactly as they were, completely, don't edit anything, and if you had something that came up two weeks later, don't go use the old ones. Call them and get a new set. So I actually received not just a set of OSP talking points, but multiple sets as they evolved over time. And I actually

looked at them and read them, which was my mistake really, because as I saw what they were saying, they were written in a way that made them sound very believable, but the things that they were saying were not substantiated by intelligence in all cases. One of the, an example of this is one of our talking points from OSP would say, Saddam Hussein actively seeks uranium in Africa. Well, the intelligence on that said that Saddam Hussein in the late 80s during the Iran-Iraq war actively sought uranium and other nuclear-type support materials in Africa, but he hadn't done it during the 90s. He hadn't done anything like that since then. But that's not what the talking point would say. The talking point would gloss over the fact that things have changed and simply

indicate that this was an active, ongoing-type program. The talking points would emphasize that Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds. Of course, this is something we talked about. I mean, the media had this frequently. He gasses his own people. And of course, the whole story of the gassing of the Kurds is, yeah, he did use some gas. We actually sold him the materials, because at the time we were supplying Iraq in their war against Iran, and Iran also was gassing Kurdish villages on the border country there. So it wasn't as if the context of that gassing, there's no justification for that, but the

context of it in the talking point would be not only did he do it unprovoked and under no other contextual reasons, but that he was ready to continue to do that. And again, that's false too, because we knew when he had last used his gas against his own citizens or the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War, and it was back in the late 80s, not any time sooner than that. So that was another example. They had one of the talking points that ran for a long period of time up through November and then it was suddenly eliminated was the Mohammed Adem meeting in Prague. The meeting that Mohammed Adem allegedly had in Prague with a member of Saddam Hussein's intelligence organization. This was reported as if it was a fact, when in fact it was never

a confirmed fact. It was a single point of report denied by the Czechs, denied eventually on the front page of the New York Times by the FBI, who said, well, it didn't happen because we were watching Mohammed Adda and he was here in the States during that same time frame, therefore we know that meeting didn't happen because we had eyes on this guy prior to 9-1-1. Of course, that's embarrassing for the FBI as well to know that they were watching Muhammad Atta. But beside the point, once the New York Times came out with that statement by the FBI and by the American intelligence communities that basically said the Muhammad Atta meeting in Prague did not happen, then it was eliminated from our talking points.

Now, the interesting thing is Dick Cheney continues to insist that that meeting happened, which just tells you how behind the power curve Dick Cheney is when it comes to the truth. But the OSP talking points did eliminate, they did respond to the news media to eliminate a very stupid talking point. But there were other stupid talking points that were not exposed by the New York Times, that were not corrected in the public mainstream, should never have been written in our talking points, because certainly the intelligence never backed these things up anyway. But we were still propagandizing our own people through these talking points. This is what you want to say to all of your guests and visitors so that

they'll understand why it is so imperative that we do go into a wreck. So, yeah, I saw these things. And the use of internal talking points to help and guide people is very common in the Pentagon. You know, if you need a legal opinion, you go to the lawyers and you get the legal opinion. But these talking points were largely, I would say, 60% invalid in the sense that what they indicated was not what was substantiated by the intelligence. And the other weird thing is we were told to not draw from them, but to use them in their entirety, because it was clearly a method of kind of ensuring that the propaganda storyline through our outlets in the Pentagon continued to be supported.

Of course, it was very surprising to me shortly after seeing the first set of talking points when I saw the same things being said by the president, vice president in speeches, and read those same stories in the front page of the New York Times and Washington Post. It seemed to me very clear that this set of talking points was not just for us inside the Pentagon, but also being used as part of the public campaign to generate support. And again, that's white propaganda. That's propaganda from the government to the people to convince them of something. And that's not something that is normal, and it's not something that is accepted, and it's certainly not something the Pentagon is supposed to be involved in doing. So can you describe the difference between

propaganda and education? Well, education, I think it's pretty clear what education would be. If I was going to educate you or let's say your child, let's say I was a teacher and I was going to educate your child that 2 plus 2 is 4 except sometimes when it's 5. And your son or daughter came home and said, I'm learning a lot in school, 2 plus 2 is 4 but then sometimes it can be 5. Now you would respond to that and you would say, well actually son, no. 2 plus 2 is 4 and it's always 4 and it's never 5. Your teacher isn't educating you. Your teacher is not... Education is based on fact, okay?

It's based on truthful understanding of the reality that we see. And certainly different people have different perceptions. But education is to give you the grounding so that you can articulate various things, you can understand different perceptions, and you can analyze, and you can think. That's what education does. American people were never being educated by George Bush and Dick Cheney or by Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld or any of these folks that were advocating this war. What they were

being done, not education, they were being propagandized. They were being told, here is something awful that you need to be afraid of. I don't want you to think about it or ask any questions. Trust us to solve this problem for you." That's what it is and that has nothing to do with education. That is, well, propaganda. It has a purpose and the purpose is to change someone's mind about something. You can propagandize with the truth, obviously, and all good propaganda has elements of truth in it. Is Saddam Hussein a bad guy? Yes, Saddam Hussein is a bad, awful guy. It does not follow from that that we would need to do all those things that we did.

We don't need to invade his country. We don't need to run his country. We don't need to hand-select his follow-up government. We don't need to do these things because he's a bad guy. In fact, it's very illogical that you would do that because there's about 50 guys as bad or worse than Saddam Hussein around the globe. And we certainly don't have the resources to go solve their problem. That's assuming you could even do it through force, which we're seeing in Iraq that you cannot do it through force. We've actually made things far worse for most Iraqis than it was under Hussein's regime, which

is an awful thing to think of, to think that we've actually made it worse for these poor people than they had it under Saddam Hussein, but we have. That's the end result. But propaganda is trying to change your opinion about something. Education is simply to help you think about something. Here are some facts and here are some strategies on how to deal with these facts and here are some rules and you put this all together and you can come up with solutions. So there's no difference, I mean there's a huge difference between education and propaganda. Had Americans been educated about the truth about Iraq or the truth about the Middle East, what would happen, the situation we would have today is very different than what we have now. First off, I think Americans would be

paying far more attention than they do to how the Israel-Palestine question is perceived throughout the Middle East. That's number one. Number two, I think Americans would be looking at the various governments in the Middle East, including those that we have allied ourselves with. We tend to ally ourselves with monarchies and dictators, which certainly Iraq was a dictator that we had allied ourselves with up until 1991, actually, when we invaded him. Pakistan, Musharraf in Pakistan is another example of the kind of guy. You know, Musharraf in Pakistan conducted a military coup over the elected Democratic leader of that country.

And we not only failed to strongly condemn that, we immediately stepped up aid to Musharraf after he had done this. And so I think if Americans were educated on our Middle East policy, they would not see the need necessarily to go into any of these countries militarily, but they may well see the need to adjust some of our foreign policies that we've had for a long period of time, which don't promote our interests. I mean, if you're going, if you're the country that's seen as backing up corrupt dictatorships and despots and old fashioned monarchies that don't have any kind of popularity in their own country,

if you're seen as the country that makes this possible, certainly the country that backs up Israel, Israel is perceived by many in the Middle East as being very heavy handed, being very careless about the humanity and values of the Palestinian people and other Arabs. So this is what education would do. Education would eventually allow our foreign policy to be much more rational. But obviously we didn't want education. What we wanted was propaganda. And propaganda is beating the war drums, which they did very, very effectively. And they're still trying to do that, but Americans have been educated against the will of the administration, but because of the way the Iraq thing has

turned out, very ugly, very interminable, very awful. Some of the stories about Abu Ghraib and other examples of where we're not behaving ourselves in the American standard or what we like to think of as the American standard. This has caused education to happen. And that's why Bush is in trouble, of course, this time around with the upcoming election, because Americans have been educated, but they have not been educated because Bush, Cheney, or the administration wanted them to be. They wanted them to be propagandized, and that's what they spent all their time doing in 2002.

Can you speak from your libertarian perspective, your conservative perspective, how you and other conservatives view the UN, but then at the same time how Bush is using these resolutions saying we've got to enforce the national law while at the same time violating the national law. Yeah, it's true. Well, certainly national sovereignty is a concern. People want their country to be able to make decisions for its country. And there is a fear and a concern amongst many conservatives, probably a lot of liberals,

and certainly libertarians, that we wouldn't want to see an international rulemaker impose rules on this country. I can't speak for some conservatives, because there are a number of conservatives that are very protectionist-oriented, and they're not really pro-free trade. But a libertarian is very pro-free commerce. So like the Adam Smith kind of thing, we would trade with everyone and be an enemy to no one. That kind of thing. And if you want to have international trade that's free and fair and open, you will pay attention

to the interests and fair and open, you will pay attention to the interests and needs and desires of all kinds of foreign countries. So it's not that there's a contempt for foreign countries at all. And if foreign countries organize and have a body like the United Nations, the United Nations is easy to criticize because it tends to be a little, you know, it has problems. It has some corruption. It has waste of money. It has, in some places, some places they've done well, but in other places they've done very poorly.

Their track record is not strong. So it's easy to criticize the United Nations. But for libertarians, it's like not an issue. You know, I don't think that they're concerned that the United Nations is in any way going to try to affect a country's sovereignty. Now, the conservatives take a harder look at that. They are concerned that the United Nations, things like the International Criminal Court, will come in and impact a country's decisions and sovereignty. And when George Bush speaks and Cheney speaks kind of denigratingly of the U.N., contemptuously of the U.N., that's the audience that in part they're appealing to,

the folks that think that the U.N. is awful and it's just sitting there ready to have its clutches on our Constitution and tear our Constitution up and tell us what to do. But the overwhelming, the driving force behind the Bush administration, and I would say any administration, probably Clinton was the same way, is self-interest. And it is in Bush's self-interest to do a number of things that seem very inconsistent and hypocritical. He says after the fact that we needed to do something about Saddam Hussein in order to restore the honor of the United Nations because the United Nations had become ineffectual. That's not necessarily true, but that's one storyline. At the very same time, we have

just cut off aid, military assistance and other kinds of aid to all kinds of countries who refuse to give us an Article 98 exception to the International Criminal Court. And an Article 98 exception means that if George Bush or Henry Kissinger – he's a great example to use because he's on the wanted list, I guess, of some of these countries – if Henry Kissinger travels to a country and he is then arrested by a citizen's arrest by some other nationality and turned into the International Criminal Court for some case, an Article 98 exception means that that country will not extradite an American citizen to the court or to a third country where the court might

be conducting its work. So we ask for all these things. We don't want international law. Certainly the invasion of Iraq was never justified in any interpretation of international law. It just doesn't make any sense. It's inconsistent with that. So it's really just a matter of self-interest. Bush uses the UN when it looks like it's something that can justify a sovereign decision

or a unilateral decision that he has made. And when it serves his purpose, then he also rejects the UN. I think it's really funny. You know Bobby Fischer, the Bobby Fischer story? Have you followed that at all? Well, Bobby Fischer played chess in Yugoslavia when Yugoslavia was under UN sanctions. And the United States said, we don't like that. We want to uphold the honor of the UN.

This is back in 92, 93. So put out a warrant for Bobby Fischer's arrest for violating sanctions with Yugoslavia because he went and played chess there. And he recently was picked up in Japan. I guess he'd been living in Japan and he was at the airport. Japanese picked him up and they're going to extradite him to the United States to face trial. So we're going to try Bobby Fischer because he violated UN sanctions back in 92. At the same time, George Bush is not, you know, he's punishing and threatening, or the administration is,

all kinds of countries who will agree to extradite American citizens who might come under international criminal court proceedings. So it's very much a game of what works for me, and that's all I can say. I think, truly, George Bush has contempt, like many people in America do, for the United Nations. But the real thing with George Bush is he has contempt for anyone, including American citizens who have something different to say, who disagree with him. And I think that's very clear with these so-called free speech zones that have been set up.

I think it's very interesting. We've gone in this country, how many years, 226 years, at least over 200 years, and we never had a need for a free speech zone. I think most people thought that the whole country was a free speech zone. And now we have free speech zones. If the president goes to a city, if you have a T-shirt that says something, maybe a pro-Kerry, I don't know, something that doesn't please George Bush, they'll relegate you to a free speech zone, which is very strange, very, very strange thing. So I think Bush has contempt, really, for anyone who disagrees with him, and that would include the UN, unless it serves his purpose to use them, which he clearly

has done. And when you look at the beginning of March, March 2nd, and then March 9th, the London Observer reported that Frank Cosa of the National Security Agency had actually ordered the United Kingdom to continue, to kick up their surveillance on the UN. Can you speak to... Oh, I know nothing from a firsthand basis of that at all.

But, yeah, I think one way that we look at the UN is as an adversary, kind of as an entity. Instead of an organization, we actually see it as one more entity, a force to be reckoned with. And, you know, would we spy on them? Yeah, of course we would, And I'm sure we're not the only ones. But yeah, I think it just speaks to the adversarial relationship that George Bush has really with almost everyone. And that includes Americans. That includes, you know, it's funny, to this day, George Bush has yet to attend, or Dick Cheney, a funeral as far as I know, not a single funeral from soldiers.

He has visited, Bush has visited soldiers in the hospital, you know, he's done that. But he hasn't attended any funerals. It's a huge amount of contempt for the average American, for this country, who has gone ahead, based on the lies that George Bush and Dick Cheney promulgated, have gone ahead and said, well, you told us this, we believe you. Now we've discovered these things are lies, and yet we still don't see any sense that Bush and Cheney owe anything back to the American people. It's not like they were owed any sense of more truth.

We're not owed a policy change. Certainly we're not seeing any changes in the policy. In fact, I think the latest thing from Bush is that we got the wrong country. We should have gone into Iran. So, you know, I mean, there's really no sense that Bush and Cheney are responsive to the reality around American people or the international community. They're just not responsive to either one of those two sets. When you look at where we're at now and where we want to be with the whole world, world peace, and from a libertarian

perspective, can you work with other people towards world peace? Or how do we go from where we're at now to a place where we're all living in peace? Well, you kind of touched on it with your question about education and propaganda. I think if Americans and politicians in Washington as a group become more educated on the facts about where conflict comes from, particularly anti-American conflict, obviously, you know, we're not as concerned with conflict between two third parties that don't affect us. But when it comes to how the world views America, it would be very good for Americans and Congress to recognize where that comes from. And this is not to say that we are self-flagellating Americans. Oh, we're so bad. Our policies are so bad, and that's why everybody hates us.

Or we're so wealthy, or we use so much gasoline that this is why we're hated. That's not true at all. We are a wonderful country, and the whole world knows it. In fact, our doors are being knocked down continually for decades and decades and decades, for hundreds of years, folks coming to this country because they want to be Americans. They want to live in America. So we have a huge strength in what's good about America, but we don't have a good understanding of how, not just how we are perceived overseas, but most Americans have no idea what we're doing overseas. Now libertarians would tell you most of the things we're doing overseas we don't need

to be doing. We should stop doing those things. Libertarians will tell you and some conservatives will tell you that we don't need 100 or 150 bases around the globe. They'll tell you we don't need that. Libertarians may say, do we really need 13 carrier battle groups? I don't know, but they would ask that question. Most Americans have no idea the presence,

the military forward presence that we have around the globe. It's just invisible to them. So when they see people from foreign countries or the Middle East that complain, if they see attacks like 9-1-1, and we said that was al-Qaeda, bin Laden was behind that, they think that there's no reason for that. Why would we be a target? Why would the Twin Towers and the Pentagon be a target? Now, the rest of the world sees it, and they see a target like the Pentagon, and they see that as a very symbolic target against this huge military empire that we currently have. Not that we're

growing. We certainly are growing it with these new bases in Iraq and new bases in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. We are increasing our global military empire. But most Americans don't even have a clue that we have a global military empire. It's just not something that we talk about or think about. And that's the kind of education that needs to happen. We Americans pay a lot of money for their government. From a libertarian's perspective, we pay way too much for far too little. So we would say less government in general. But certainly the average American who's not a libertarian ought to have a real good understanding of the kind of money we spend on the military and what we're actually getting for that. You know, one of the things we're finding out with the 911 Commission, and certainly even before the commission has come out with their report, people knew this.

How come four airplanes, four commercial airplanes, could be hijacked in a period of 90-something minutes and nothing happened? And, you know, there was no domestic, significant domestic response to that. And one of the reports that I read had to do with the number of resources, fighter airplanes that could have gone up to intercept or eyeball the situation. We only had like 13 in the whole country. We're a very large country with a lot of border, and we only had 13 aircraft that were done. So where is the military defense budget being spent?

Well, it's being spent projecting outwards. That's not defense. That's offense. We call it the Department of Defense, and everyone thinks that they're defending America. But quite frankly, that's not what they're doing with all those billions of dollars. They're not defending America. We are positioned for a forward battle, a Cold War battle, which has certainly been over with for 15 years,

and we have never really downscaled our military and shifted into a true defensive military. We don't have one. I think what's teaching, you know, we talk about education, what's educating Americans that this is true is this huge, radical, unprecedented call-up that George Bush has done of reservists and guardsmen who are considered truly defensive in nature. And yet he's deployed more of those folks to Iraq than anywhere before. And most of the guys over in Iraq understand they're not defending America. They may be doing many different things, but they understand they're not defending America. Of course, we all know that now. Saddam Hussein was no threat to America, so there was no reason to go over there. But

even the folks that are there now, they might be helping Iraqis, they might be shooting Iraqis, but they're not defending America. So I think one of the good things that would help to have peace in the world, particularly in America since that's the one we control, we are Americans, we ought to be able to do our part. Part of our part is to truly maintain, and that may mean downsize, but truly maintain a defensive force, not an offensive force. Quite frankly, right now, we don't have anything that can defend this country. We have an offensive military. It can go and do damage to other countries.