10/15/13 – Coleen Rowley – The Scott Horton Show

Fact.
The new NSA data center in Utah requires 1.7 million gallons of water every single day to operate.
Billions of Fourth Amendment violations need massive computers and the water to cool them.
That water is being supplied by the state of Utah.
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There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution which requires your state to help the feds violate your rights.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We're on Liberty Express Radio.
As well as no agenda, Anomaly Radio and my website, Scott Horton dot org, where you can find my interview archives.
Now more than 3000 of them going back to 2003.
And you can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at slash Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is the courageous whistleblower, Colleen Rowley, formerly of the FBI and now civil liberties activists.
Welcome back to the show, Colleen.
How are you doing?
Great.
That's amazing.
You've been on since 2003.
Yeah.
Well, I can't find anything better to do than interview all you great journalists and activists.
It seems like, you know, everybody gets to hear from the bad guys all day long on TV.
That kind of thing.
I try to shine a light on people who really deserve it.
And you certainly do.
And that's actually what you've been up to as well.
I'm only second hand shining a light on somebody who deserves it this week.
The subject, of course, being Edward Snowden, where you and some other whistleblowers and Ray McGovern all went to Moscow to give him the Sam Adams Award.
So please tell us the story in as excruciating detail as you like.
I'm all ears.
Sure.
Yes, we have had the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity and Intelligence Group now for well over a decade and have awarded a number of other whistleblowers a lot.
Of course, early on, these were whistleblowers that spoke out about the Iraq war.
And then there were people who spoke out about the faulty intelligence afterwards, like Larry Wilkerson, who had seen things close up.
There were some awardees of the Sam Adams Award have actually been not whistleblowers, but were people who fought the good fight internally and were able to put out correct intelligence, such as Tom Finger, who put out the NIE in 2007 that revealed that Iran was not creating a nuclear weapon and, of course, put a damper on President Bush's efforts to start the Iran war at that time.
So this group stems from the person that's named after Sam Adams was a CIA analyst, a colleague of Ray McGovern's, who knew that the enemy troop strength in Vietnam was twice the number as General Westmoreland and others would admit to.
Because they were trying to show progress, and the message was that you're killing so many enemies, so then the number of enemies had to go down.
Well, the CIA analyst Sam Adams found out that it was absolutely twice as many, over 500,000, and they just halved it arbitrarily.
It's all in a book called The War of Numbers that Sam Adams kept notes and wrote right before.
He didn't write it.
It was published after his death.
And he went to an early death regretting that he had not spoken out sooner, because the Vietnam Wall could have maybe been half the number of American casualties, and certainly the Vietnamese casualties would have been half the number as well, if he had told the truth.
I mean, if he had gone to the press.
And so this is very important for people to realize that speaking truth to power is a life and death matter in many cases.
And Jess Radick and Tom Drake, the NSA whistleblower, were awarded this, I think it was 2009 or 10, where they got the award.
And they went to Moscow, and Ray McGovern and myself.
And we arranged this through Edward Snowden's human rights attorney, whose last name is Kutcherena.
And we had to get visas.
Of course, it's not that easy to travel to Russia, but it can be done.
You fill out a long form.
Our category was actually for a humanitarian award.
And so we got to travel there.
And we had a great opportunity to see him and speak with him and listen to him, of course, reveal why he had done this, why he had sacrificed his career and basically his entire friends and life and everything in order to get this information out about how the NSA was spying on everyone.
American citizens and citizens of other countries as well.
And anyways, it went very well.
His father actually came in the next day, and so Edward Snowden finally has, he's not completely alone, he's had a chance to meet with people now, finally.
Right.
Okay, well, so I guess – well, I talked with Ray McGovern on the show about his role in this yesterday and some things that he had to say.
But one thing I didn't really get a chance to ask him was if he would just tell us all about – I think he mentioned you guys got to hang out with Ed Snowden for five hours or something.
And I got about two minutes of audio of him speaking that I pirated from Amy Goodman here that I guess I'll play in the next segment.
But so tell us about, you know, the time that you spent with him.
You know, I try to do as best I can on the show to cover the ins and outs of the NSA stuff.
Trevor Tim is going to be on the show tomorrow, had Rachel something from the Brennan Center yesterday.
But I want to know all about this Snowden guy because he's an American hero, and he doesn't get quite as much credit as American hero as he should because he hasn't been persecuted the way Bradley Manning was.
And so people really felt bad for Manning, they're like, wow, look at how hard they're cracking down on him.
Where Snowden was exiled, yeah, not to Siberia, but to the Moscow suburbs, and that probably ain't too bad, right?
And so he's not getting quite the praise that I think he deserves.
I think he's given up a lot so that we can have this information.
And in fact, he learned from these other examples.
He saw what happened to Manning.
He saw what happened to Thomas Drake, who tried through internal channels, including inspector generals, including the 9-11 Commission and the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Tom Drake had gone to all of those internal channels initially and still was prosecuted and was facing 35 years.
So Edward Snowden actually was able to see this and realize that if you knew about these terrible illegal goings-on and counterproductive, I should say, at the same time, that actually endanger us far worse than what they're even doing in terms of fraud and waste as well.
And so he knew that he would have to do this in a smart, intelligent way.
The one thing I was kind of struck by that I don't think a lot of people know because the press has painted this very – they've tried to misinform the public – is the press kind of says that, well, he was a low-level contractor that somehow maybe surreptitiously gained access to these documents.
And that, it turns out, to be completely false.
He was actually operating at a level where he could see the big picture.
He wasn't compartmentalized as many, like an analyst would be, where they're really focused on a narrow area.
And so if abuses are happening in the broader spheres or in another sphere, they wouldn't even know about it.
Snowden was operating at levels where he was even part of creating or part of instituting some of these programs.
And so certainly – what's the word?
– handling the programs afterwards.
So he was at a level – you know, it would be kind of the rare person, especially now, because I think they're going back to compartmentalizing more as a way of preventing sharing of information.
And they're so afraid of leaking that they're actually going back against what the 9-11 Commission said.
And they are doing more of this need-to-know compartmentalizing and scaring people if they happen to access something that is not within their purview.
So he was in this situation where he really saw the big picture.
And that is, once he saw the picture and appreciated what was going on, he realized he had to do something to try to get a reform going.
We, of course, carried the news that the debate has begun, and so that he should, in a sense, take some heart from the fact that his sacrifice hasn't been for nothing, that the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committees are beginning to look at proposals for bills to fix the problems that he has brought forth.
And we discussed that a little bit.
Snowden himself says that he won't rest until the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendment Acts are repealed.
And, of course, that's probably pie in the sky in terms of hoping for a complete repeal.
And the provisions are pretty vast.
The Patriot Act has 264 provisions, and a lot of them aren't even related to this massive dragnet spine.
But I know what he meant was that he wants these really problematic tools that the government has appropriated for itself illegally, you know, under reinterpreting words, et cetera.
He wants that fixed.
And so we kind of promised, in a way, that not only that he was giving this award for his own integrity, but that we would now try to, you know, help in that process of seeking reform.
The first thing I did, and even about the same time as we were going, is I went to the Senate Judiciary hearing on October 2nd.
And this was Clapper.
This is a hearing that featured Clapper and Alexander testifying first as factual witnesses.
Leahy kind of announced at the outset of the hearing that he wanted to get reforms and remedies to some of the abuses of the FISA and whatever.
And then Clapper and Alexander were not put under oath.
They asked them questions, and they were never sworn to tell the truth.
And this contrasted with the fact that the second part of that hearing, they had two law professors and a professor about technology.
And those professors, who are not fact witnesses, had to raise their right hand and swear to tell the truth.
I mean, this was the oddest thing in the world to see the Senate Judiciary Committee not swearing in Clapper and Alexander, who have track records for lying to them.
I thought you had to be Karl Rove to get treatment like that.
Yeah.
And then forcing the law professors, who, frankly, it would make no sense to have them swear to tell the truth, because they're just giving their opinions on what the state of the law is.
I mean, this literally was an atrocious procedure.
But besides that, they did get out a couple of key pieces of info.
Keith Alexander was forced to admit that there has only been one or two examples that have shown the NSA's massive data collection helpful or beneficial in a terrorism matter that affected the United States.
And, of course, this contradicted what he said a couple of months ago, where he claimed there were 54 examples.
And so, anyways, that kind of misinfo, which obviously still is continuing.
Dianne Feinstein, in the hearing, she gets a chance to go ahead of the other people.
And so she interjects this passionate speech about if the NSA had only been engaged in collecting such voluminous amounts of data, it could have possibly prevented 9-11.
And if we change these programs or constrain these programs, then we risk another 9-11.
That's what she said on October 2nd.
And since that time, she's posted an op-ed on the Wall Street Journal, which is something like, the NSA programs protect Americans, or something, from another 9-11.
So, there we go.
And in the Wall Street op-ed that was out yesterday or so by Dianne Feinstein, where she is pushing back against any reform, and, in fact, her bill expands the surveillance of the NSA.
It not only is pushing back against any reform, but it's actually expanding for further surveillance on U.S. soil.
In her op-ed, she goes back to the 54 examples.
And she doesn't say in there that those have been debunked.
It just says there are 54 examples.
She goes back to the first Keith Alexander speech.
I mean, there's a perfect example of, you know, people have to stay on this because this misinformation is just so incredibly whatever.
Right.
It just continues.
It's a flood.
The truth doesn't seem to matter to these people.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, it seems like it's almost like Goebbels or something.
Just keep lying.
Keep telling so many lies that they can't keep up with them all.
You know?
Yep.
And, you know, I could see in the hearing other senators kind of shaking in agreement with her, especially, of course, Lindsey Graham, who was even—he was worse.
When he got his turn, he was even worse.
When she was saying this, of course, most of the heads on the Senate Judiciary were kind of nodding in agreement.
And, of course, you know, people shouldn't understand, too, that—well, some people do—that the NSA, just like the FBI, the CIA, and any other agency that was supposed to be on the job that week or whatever, all fell down on the job of stopping the 9-11 attack with all the powers that they already had.
Right.
And, you know, James Bamford points out in his book, The Shadow Factory, that the letters NSA don't appear in the 9-11 commission report anywhere.
And, of course, that's because they have major responsibility for that attack happening on their watch and their refusal to share what they had with the NSA—or with the CIA and FBI both, just like the FBI and CIA had their own problems.
And Tom Drake was actually a witness to some of these intelligence inquiries—and I think on the 9-11 commission—about the NSA's failures, but they were censored out.
And the NSA was perfectly content to see the CIA and the FBI taking the heat for lack of sharing of information and not reading their own memos, etc.
They were perfectly content because they were somehow able to keep all their dirty laundry information out of the report.
And Tom Drake, of course, you'll have to have him on sometime and ask him about this because he was one of the witnesses about it.
Michael Shoyer—I'm sorry, just real quick.
I'll say it as fast as I can, but it's so important.
Michael Shoyer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, talked about trying to get the intercepts from the Yemen switchboard house, and the NSA wouldn't share them.
So the CIA had to make their own listening station at Madagascar, but they could still only get half the conversation, the Yemen half of the conversation, not the Afghan half of the conversation or anybody else.
And the NSA and George Tenet, the way he said, George Tenet would not go to the NSA and just make it happen, and so it didn't happen.
This is so important for these pieces of truth because they absolutely counterdict what Dianne Feinstein is saying.
In her op-ed and in her speech, she also made this point about how the CIA had been following some of the hijackers from a meeting in Malaysia.
Well, in her writing, she never writes that the CIA did not tell the FBI that these two CIA terrorist suspects, they were actually on their list to come into California.
You won't even see that mentioned in her piece.
And she makes it seem, in her twisted version, that if the NSA had had access to the vast amount of data that it now has, that it would have been able to stop the 9-11 attacks.
And she actually is referencing the following of those two terrorists, but she's not explaining the half of it.
I mean, it's pretty incredible.
I've been tempted to call the, or to somehow contact the Wall Street Journal.
It would be better, probably, if a Michael Scheuer or someone who actually was more firsthand could do that, could contact the Wall Street Journal and say, hey, you just published an op-ed that really is not factually correct, and can you please, at the very least, give somebody equal time to write the truth about this?
Because she's trying to scare people by saying we're going to be subject to another attack, 9-11 wouldn't have happened if we'd done this, the very same way Hayden himself got the Congress to roll over when they passed the FISA Amendment Act.
I don't know if you remember how this...you probably do, because you've been on this for long, too.
But it was August of 2007, where Hayden went about midnight, you know, it was late at night, the Senate was about to recess, and he scared them into giving him temporary authority to continue the program that had been revealed by the New York Times as being illegal.
And they all thought, of course, he actually explicitly said, we'll have another 9-11 and the blood will be on your hands unless you give me this authority to continue what we were doing.
And that was the Protect America Act, right, that lasted until the spring when they did the FISA Amendments?
That's right.
It was a temporary one, and then it expired, and everyone thought, well, since it's temporary, once that temporary one was passed, it was just a no-brainer that the permanent one was going to pass.
But he scared them a lot, and this tone is exactly the same way.
And what will help is revealing that this metadata, this vast collection of non-relevant info about innocent people, is just causing more problems for the analysts and for the people that are trying, then, to home in on somebody like Starnoff Brothers, where they actually get tips, or Abdulmutallab, whose father actually calls the State Department, or Major Hassan, who had 8 or 9 emails that were in exchange with Awlaki, that they claim, I don't know if they said they didn't read them or what, but these were actually things that they say they're supposed to be focused on, and then afterwards claim they never read.
Well, pardon me for interrupting you here, but for people who are just tuning in, this is not disembodied female critic voice talking.
This is Colleen Rowley, from the Minneapolis office of the FBI, and her team even speculated that, you know what, one of your FBI agents said, in a memo, I believe one, correct me if I'm wrong, that even went to headquarters, speculating that, I think this Moussaoui guy might want to learn how to pilot a plane so that he can crash it into the World Trade Center.
Now, a computer doesn't have intuition like that, but an FBI agent sitting there scratching his head and puzzling over what this Moussaoui guy is up to does.
That's right.
And of course he was told, you know, go ticket somebody for jaywalking or something else important like that.
Go kick in a door on a pot warrant.
There were 60 to 70 communications exchanged between the Minnesota office and headquarters.
The one you're citing about this could be a guy who could fly into the World Trade Center, that was actually in a telephone conversation, but a lot of this was in written documents, even a draft declaration, a draft declaration speaking of FISA, and it was very detailed information.
You pointed to something, which is that it takes humans to read, to carefully read, to assess, and then to either act up, to share information if they think it's important, or to act upon information.
And all of that is missing before 9-11.
Numerous examples of important memos that later the officials claim they never read.
And even including in the FBI one that said Osama bin Laden is going to attack, and he's heavily entwined with the Chechen Ibn Khattab, and the Ibn Khattab tied directly to our case in Minnesota.
And so that memo, which went to the director of the FBI and eight assistant directors, who claim this was in April, April of 2001, five months before 9-11.
And then those officials, at least some of them, key ones, claim they never read the memo.
I can tell you all kinds of instances where information, important information, was not even read.
Then the other problem is the one that Tenet was asked, why didn't you do anything?
You've got the PowerPoint information.
I think it was entitled Fundamental Islamic Islamist Learns to Fly.
That was Islamist Learns to Fly Fundamentalist.
So Fundamentalist Learns to Fly.
And that was about the case in Minnesota.
He got that information on August 23, 2001, about three weeks before 9-11.
And he's asked afterwards, why didn't you share that information, or did you share it with anyone?
Did you act on it?
And he shrugged.
He can't explain.
He did nothing with it.
He got briefed, but he never did anything with it.
You know what?
I've got to ask you.
I've got to ask you, Colleen.
You know, I can see that guy just being nothing but a big pile of shrugs in a way, and just, as Schroeder put it, lacking the moral courage to do his damn job, basically.
Here's the thing about it, though, is have you seen – and I'm very anti-truther, actually, because I resent all the nonsense.
But my very favorite truthers would be these guys that did the Richard Blee podcast, One and Two.
And they're basically – it's the sequel to Press for Truth, which my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna, was involved in the production of and which I think is the best movie out of all of them.
But then they did this Rich Blee podcast, One and Two, which are the sequels.
One's video, one's audio.
And they contain Richard Clark, the White House head of counterterrorism, saying, oh, man, you know what?
Now that you bring me this information and that information, Tenet lied to me on a daily basis about what he knew about al-Qaeda in America.
And here's the proof that he knew and what he did not tell me.
And Richard Clark pretty upset.
It obviously didn't get much coverage because it's buried in a swamp of nonsense about Building 7 and whatever.
But so I wonder if you have a comment about that.
What do you make of that?
I try to ask the questions generally as I can.
Yeah, I think there are just a ton of questions for George Tenet personally.
And when he wrote his book and got a $4 million advance book deal for his version of history, and by the way, without having to go through any pre-publication review, it just shows you that the pre-publication review that everyone else has to go through is more or less just a fake thing to keep people from writing, because he didn't go through any of this.
He got $4 million for writing his book.
And he was never asked, nor did he answer, any of the questions.
You're right, he absolutely just kind of shrugged.
And the reason is, another big question along with this is, why did he not tell the FBI or why did not the CIA advise the FBI of these two major terrorists that had come into California that they had been tracking, and they don't tell the FBI until just a couple of weeks before 9-11?
Because they could have been easily found.
They were traveling under their true names.
That's never been answered.
Those have never been answered.
And I don't think Tenet is the only one.
I think, as we were talking, the NSA probably has Keith Alexander himself.
Who knows?
But some of these officials, when the truth will eventually come out, although we're still waiting, you know, sitting on our hands and waiting for some of this, we're going to see probably that many other officials, of course Tenet being a main one, but there were many who knew a lot and either did not share it, did not read it, did not share it, or certainly did not have the courage to act upon it.
Now, what was their excuse?
Remember, this is the important thing.
Rumsfeld, I think, said this.
I think even FBI Director Freeh.
But this was this common refrain that intelligence is pouring in so fast that it's like a fire hose and you can't get a sip from a fire hose.
So they were trying to make this flowery metaphor that we had so much intelligence that we couldn't connect the dots, because we couldn't appreciate it.
Well, you know, if they wanted to use that excuse for then, they can't possibly, it does not at all jibe with what they're doing now, which was turning this fire hose into Niagara Falls.
I mean, the amount of information being collected pre-9-11 is nothing compared to what happened afterwards.
Well, they just need better Israeli software to run all the computer systems, that's all.
We need more whistleblowers, Colleen, that's the thing of it.
More whistleblowers.
Colleen Rowley, thank you very much for your time on the show.
Thank you.
Great to talk to you again.
That's the great Colleen Rowley.
She writes at the Huffington Post and a lot of other places.
She just got back from Russia where she was hanging out with Edward Snowden, giving him the Sam Adams Award for whistleblowing.
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