endecopt, thx for pointing this out. i did realize this and redid shortly after, still got the error: " tj downloads % ssh -i "us-east-kp1.pem" "amazon instance" "amazon instance": Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic). "

i just re-did the instance with new key, all good now

re-did instance and new key, i can connect to AWS but keychain still does not accept the PEM file, I can proceed so it's not an issue at this point