Former FBI agent, Whistleblower, Activist. b. 1954
"What if you lived in a country where, after the Administration negligently failed to prevent a major terrorist attack, they deliberately exploited everyone's fears and utilized shock doctrine to do INSANELY stupid and dangerous things: things like launching costly pre-emptive wars, subverting law, and destroying the checks and balances of the Constitution and common standards of decency by re-instituting torture?
Well, We DO live in that country."
It takes courage to risk one’s career and reputation by becoming a whistleblower, defined as “a person who informs on someone engaged in an illicit activity.” For retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley, after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, 2001, remaining quiet was not an option. Her actions put her on the cover of TIME Magazine’s 2002 Person of the Year issue, along with fellow whistleblowers Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Sherron Watkins of Enron.
Rowley grew up and was educated in Iowa, with a degree in French from WartburgCollege and a Juris Doctor from the University of Iowa. In 1981, Rowley became a Special Agent for the FBI and worked in several offices, including those in Nebraska, Mississippi, New York, France and Montreal. In 1990 she went to Minneapolis as Chief Division Council, and it was here that her office received word about suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. Rowley describes in a 2010 radio interview how in mid-August of 2001, her office was contacted by some flight instructors, concerned because Moussaoui had paid for flight lessons with a large amount of cash. Already thought of as a terrorist threat, Rowley’s team brought him into custody and began further investigations. He remained in custody because of a lapsed visa as they, collaborating with the French Intelligence Service, confirmed within days his connections to radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and to Osama bin Laden. Even with this knowledge, the FBI denied Rowley a warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer for any information it might have contained until the day of the attacks.
Rowley believed that a lack of cooperation and sharing of intelligence between agencies effectively tied her team’s hands in obtaining a probable cause warrant for the computer in August, and in 2002 she wrote a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, detailing the mishandling of the intelligence her office had gathered, and later testified that year before the Senate. The memo more clearly describes what intelligence Rowley and her team collected, and the inaction of the FBI. She writes, “To say, then, as has been iterated numerous times, that probable cause did not exist until after the disastrous event occurred, is really to acknowledge that the missing piece of probable cause was only the FBI’s failure to appreciate that such an event could occur. The probable cause did not otherwise improve or change….The problem with chalking this all up to a “20-20 hindsight is perfect” problem…is that this is not a case of everyone in the FBI failing to appreciate the potential consequences. It is obvious, from my firsthand knowledge of the events and the detailed documentation that exists, that the agents in Minneapolis who were closest to the action and in the best position to gauge the situation locally, did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed by Moussaoui and his possible co-conspirators even prior to September 11th.”
A year after testifying, Rowley went back to being a Special Agent, and retired in 2004. She had an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2006, and now is a public speaker, writer, and blogger on Huffington Post, stressing the need to strike a balance between giving intelligence agencies the ability to conduct rigorous investigations of dangerous individuals, and protecting the civil liberties of the public. To hear the radio broadcast, click here - http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/03/13/coleen-rowley/. An edited copy of her memo to Mueller can be found here - http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020603/memo.html.
At the time of 9-11, I had been an FBI agent for over 20 years. My main responsibilities had become teaching criminal procedure to FBI agents and other law enforcement officers, mostly about 4th Amendment search and seizure, 5th and 6th Amendment law of interrogation, right to attorney and constitutional protection of rights to “free speech”, due process, habeas corpus, and against cruel and unusual punishment. A week before 9-11, I and the rest of the FBI’s ethics instructors were mandated (as a result of an earlier public FBI scandal) to give a one hour PowerPoint presentation, a form of remedial training on “law enforcement ethics” which I accomplished in a fairly perfunctory way, just reading the slides. After 9-11, with the knowledge I had of the bitter internal dispute inside the FBI that was being hushed up but had kept some of our better agents from possibly uncovering more of the 9-11 plot before it happened, I couldn’t forget two of the slides in that Law Enforcement ethics curriculum: “DO NOT: Puff, Shade, Tailor, Firm up, Stretch, Massage, or Tidy up statements of fact.” And “Misplaced Loyalties: As employees of the FBI, we must be aware that our highest loyalty is to the United States Constitution. We should never sacrifice the truth in order to obtain a desired result (e.g. conviction of a defendant) or to avoid personal or institutional embarrassment.”
The official dissembling and excuse-making about the true causes and prior mistakes that allowed the terrorist attacks to happen, almost immediately ushered in the Bush-Cheney Administration’s egregious and lawless “war on terror” post 9-11 agenda which bore no connection to the original causes and no connection to the goal of reducing terrorism and making the world safer. When I got a chance, about 8 ½ months after 9-11 to tell what I knew, I did so and my disclosures led to further investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General and figured in the 9-11 Commission Report. But it was way too late for this emerging bit of truth to have any impact. Having seen the cost of remaining silent, I publicly warned, a few months after my first memo, against launching the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. I was ultimately forced to step down from my legal position and I retired from the FBI in 2004. But I have continued to speak out about the counter-productiveness of this misbegotten “war on terror” (which has now been re-termed the “long war” and/or “permanent war”) in every way I can think of, including an unsuccessful run for Congress and engaging in various forms of peace activism.
