Former FBI Whistleblower calls for new 9/11 investigation
WhoWhatWhy.org | JEFF SCHECHTMAN | 9/16/16
Coleen Rowley was the whistleblower who exposed the FBI’s cover-up of the information from the Minneapolis FBI field office that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Rowley tells WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman that in her view, we still don’t know the truth about who was behind the attacks and she urges a new independent investigation. She argues that not just the FBI but other agencies also ignored a whole range of early warning signs
She explains that, when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June of 2002, it was already too late to change course and that no one was interested in the truth she had to tell. She gives us firsthand stories of how she has seen the cover-up continue and become more pervasive.
Coleen Rowley Credit: Slowking/WikiMedia
Full Text Transcript:
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy I’m Jeff Schechtman. For the 14th time we’ve recently marked the tragic events of 9/11. In so doing we are also marking an event that set in motion a chain of events that is bequeathed just two wars, thousands of deaths, random terror attacks, fear, and ultimately confusion about how we got here and what’s next. How did the cause of those attacks and even the failure to take action that could have prevented them lead us perhaps in the wrong national direction?
All of that and even the release of the 28 pages of the 9/11 report that we spoke with Sen. Bob Graham about last week, raises the specter of what we still don’t fully understand about what really transpired. And if we don’t, how do we know that what we’re doing today is the right thing to deal with terror, and to prevent future attacks? My guest Colleen Rowley was a longtime FBI agent and division legal counsel. She blew the whistle on the FBI’s failure to act on information provided by the Minneapolis field office that might’ve prevented the attacks. She ran for Congress in Minnesota and she continues to write and blog about US policy. It is my pleasure to welcome her here to the program. Colleen, thanks so much for joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy.
Colleen Rowley: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Jeff: You know in politics and I guess in the corporate world as well people like to say that the cover-up is often worse than the crime. In your view, talk a little bit about how did the initial FBI cover-up played a role, not in shaping the events of 9/11, not in allowing those events to happen, but in misdirecting us in terms of our response once it happened.
Colleen: Yeah, and it was not only of course the FBI if you realize that the Bush administration fought tooth and nail to have to stop or prevent any inquiry at all from the start. Dick Cheney made calls to Daschle so that they would not have the congressional inquiry. Basically at least I know from the FBI, eventually when a joint intelligence committee was started there was timeline made that [?] some crucial things, but actually then skewed the facts in one direction. People have kind of forgotten about this. It’s 15 years ago but in those first few months after 9/11, Condi Rice had gone out and said no one would ever have expected a plane to fly into a building. And that was really the narrative, that was the prevailing narrative. Nobody spoke up and said, “No, no, there had been [?] training exercises with that premise.” There had been planning for international conferences that plan, that took that into account. There had been a prior terrorist who had threatened to fly into I think the CIA headquarters etc.
All of the government aligned itself so as to put out a narrative that 9/11 was not ever, there was no warning about this and that there was nothing that could have been done. And at the same time then they were, with this prior agenda, to launch war on Iraq and course in the meantime they had to launch war on Afghanistan. And very quickly, what people didn’t know is that they got the lawyers at the office of legal counsel to begin writing memos that legalized, put legalized in quotes, things like torture. And this wasn’t a year later. This was really quickly, within days they were writing these memos. One memo written within a couple of weeks of 9/11 said that there would no longer be freedom of speech-that the First Amendment would have to take a backseat now to the necessities of war. And that’s almost a form of martial law. And that was all done secretly and so the people didn’t have any idea and again the news was not able, that quickly, to get out the facts. And that’s the sad story, that we ended up doing all of these things-launching war in Iraq that had absolutely no connection to 9/11, beginning to torture, beginning these series of kidnappings and indefinite detentions and black sites. Even the massive spying was begun quite soon after 9/11. And none of this had any real relevancy to how the attacks had actually occurred, weight of the facts behind it, because there had been no inquiry or no investigation...snip
Audio Interview and Full Transcript: http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/09/16/former-fbi-whistleblower-calls-new-911-investigation/
Download MP3 http://www.whowhatwhy.org/files/Rowley%20final.mp3
Coleen Rowley's Website
http://www.coleenrowley.com/blog/index.php
Coleen Rowley at her rally in Rosemount, Minnesota on September 17, 2006 Credit: Krispos42/Wikimedia
Coleen Rowley
...In January 1981, Rowley became a Special Agent with the FBI and was assigned to the Omaha, Nebraska and Jackson, Mississippi divisions. Beginning in 1984, she spent six years working in the New York field office on investigations involving Italian organized crime and Sicilian heroin. During this time she served three temporary assignments in the U.S. embassy in Paris and the consulate in Montreal. In 1990, she was transferred to the FBI's Minneapolis field office, where she became Chief Division Counsel. There she taught constitutional law to FBI agents and police officers, and oversaw the Freedom of Information, Asset Forfeiture Program, Victim-Witness and community outreach programs.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Rowley wrote a paper for FBI Director Robert Mueller documenting how FBI HQ personnel in Washington, D.C., had mishandled and failed to take action on information provided by the Minneapolis, Minnesota Field Office regarding its investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui had been suspected of being involved in preparations for a suicide-hijacking similar to the December 1994 "Eiffel Tower" hijacking of Air France 8969. Failures identified by Rowley may have left the U.S. vulnerable to the September 11, 2001, attacks. Rowley was one of many agents frustrated by the events that led up to the attacks, writing:
During the early aftermath of September 11th, when I happened to be recounting the pre–September 11th events concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone's first question was "Why?--Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case? (I know I shouldn't be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBI HQ personnel had to be spies or moles like Robert Hanssen who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis's effort.)
In May 2002 Rowley testified to the Senate and the 9/11 Commission about the FBI's pre-9/11 lapses due to its internal organization and mishandling of information related to the attacks.[2] Mueller and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) pushed for and achieved a major reorganization, focused on creation of the new Office of Intelligence at the FBI.[6] This reorganization was supported with a significant expansion of FBI personnel with counterterrorism and language skills.
In February 2003, Rowley wrote a second open letter to Mueller, in which she warned her superiors "that the bureau is not prepared to deal with new terrorist strikes that she and many colleagues fear would result from an American war with Iraq."[7] In April 2003, Rowley stepped down from her legal position to return to being a FBI Special Agent. At the end of 2004 she retired from the FBI after serving for 24 years.
Honors and awards
Rowley jointly held the TIME "Person of the Year" award in 2002 with two other women credited as whistleblowers: Sherron Watkins from Enron and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom. She also received the 2002 Sam Adams Award.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleen_Rowley
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