The day after 9/11, Kagan father-son duo said ‘take the war’ to Palestine

Originally published at Mondoweiss by Annie Robbins on 8/5/15

Here’s some radical news. A video has emerged with a montage of clips from an interview recorded the day after 9/11 featuring Donald and Frederick Kagan, two members of a leading neoconservative family. This father/son Kagan duo were advocating responding to the 9/11 attacks by invading Palestine and taking out the Palestinian Authority. Speaking of those who had attacked America, they said with assurance that we should attack Palestine. “We have to take the war to these people,” Frederick Kagan said.

Donald Kagan is a Greek scholar at Yale, so he must know! Son Frederick is at the American Enterprise Institute. The year before they’d penned a book called While America Sleeps.

Milt Rosenberg: Are you suggesting that we’ve got to go to war or rather we should..

Frederick Kagan: We are at war. We are at war. We have no option. See, I would like to see military operations commencing immediately.

Donald Kagan: The longer we go chasing around the actual perpetrators our job is going to be next to impossible.

Frederick Kagan: I didn’t say that we know exactly who conducted this attack. What I pointed out is that there are a few groups out there that are dedicated to conducting exactly this sort of attack and I said that we should attack those groups regardless of whether we know exactly which one specifically conducted this. But we hardly need any more evidence to know that it would be a very good idea to take Bin Laden out even if he had nothing to do with this.

Milt Rosenberg: He’s done enough already is your point.

Frederick Kagan: Exactly

Milt Rosenberg: Who else is?

Donald Kagan: And one key place is certainly the Palestinian Authority, these guys are at the center of all sorts of terrorist organizations that we’ve seen operate before.

Frederick Kagan:  And we also know furthermore where they’re located. We know that they have extensive bases in Palestine and Palestinian area. —- We have to take the war to these people, I think we should hit them immediately.

Milt Rosenberg: How? Airpower?

Frederick Kagan: No,  I would prefer to see ground forces go into Palestine and hunt out Hezbollah. I would like to see Delta Force raids,  I would like to see the panoply of covert operations —- but I would also like to see American ground forces deployed into Palestine to restore peace in that area.

Published on the new blog of Robbie Martin, named after his upcoming documentary film, A Very Heavy Agenda, Martin writes he was “archive digging” for the film when he discovered the clip from an old radio program on WGN AM, a Chicago radio station. (Martin is a radio host himself,  co-hosting Media Roots Radio with Abby Martin).

The revelation of this information is astounding.

Martin offers a brief forward on his blog– a run down on “insane warmongering neoconservatives”– mentions Frederick’s bother Robert Kagan is a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, which proselytized the Iraq war by saying Israel’s war is our war, and married to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (of “Fuck the EU” fame). Speaking of marriages, Frederick is the husband of Kim Kagan, founder of the DC neocon war spinning think tank Institute for the Study of War (most famous for the Elizabeth O’Bagy scandal, and Bill Kristol is on the board of directors – what’s not to like eh?).

Martin picks up a little more transcript, the whole thing is a shocker. His headline, Neocons Fred & Don Kagan wanted a US military invasion of Palestine in response to 9/11, pretty much sums it up. The entire appearance (available here) is about 20 minutes. Martin edited down to 3 minutes using dashes where he edited it. It’s “the worst stuff they say but nothing is taken out of context,” he told me. Check it out.

*The transcript above is transcribed from the video, of clips edited  from the interview. Listen to the entire 20 minute interview on WGN’s Remembering 9/11, Extension 720 – September 11 and 12, 2001.