03/12/10 – Coleen Rowley – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest is Colleen Rowley.
She was an FBI agent for more than 20 years and was legal counsel to the FBI office in Minneapolis in the lead up to September 11th and she became, of course, the famous whistleblower about the inaction in the case of Moussaoui there.
So welcome to the show Colleen, how are you doing?
Well, I'm doing alright.
These issues are so important, I have not been able to drop it and move on and let it go just because 9-11 then ties into all these series of terrible responses that are putting us in a worse position today than we even were before 9-11.
Ah boy, touche, well first of all, before I start asking you questions, give me a chance here to tell them the name of your book, Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense, Restoring America's Promise at Home and Abroad.
That's available on Amazon.com, right?
Right, it's a little bit old now, it came out about a month before the 2004 election in October of 2004, and that book has around 40 different chapters.
I'm only the author of chapter 30, which is entitled Effective Investigation and Civil Liberties.
I see.
But it's one of my topics, you know, and even since 2004 I've had to change things, of course, because it's become so much worse, you know, every year there's been some new revelation about, you know, collecting data, illegally collecting data, or, you know, etc., so I've had to change my talk a little bit from what's in that chapter, but that was the first thing I wrote.
Okay, now, I want to ask you all about the Massawi case, and then we'll kind of, maybe toward the end of the interview, if we can tie it back into the consequences that we're suffering now in terms of our foreign policy, I guess especially in terms of our civil liberties, since you're a lawyer from the Justice Department, basically, I'm sure you have a lot of interesting things to say about that, but I want to know all about Zacharias Massawi.
This guy was arrested on August 15, 2001, what for?
Well, we got a call from, actually, whistleblower instructors at an Eagan Flight School, two different instructors who weren't his instructor called, and basically all of the things, you know, of him walking in with no explanation of why he wanted to learn to fly a 747, plopping down a large amount of cash, thousands of dollars, with no explanation of where he got the money, and saying he wanted to do this as an ego-boosting thing, and none of it made sense, and actually, the people at the school were already talking, so these whistleblowers called in, and then our agents ran out to follow up on it real quickly within just hours, and from the time of the call on the 15th to the time that they took Massawi into INS custody, immigration custody, because his visa had lapped, not because his visa had lapped, it was a coincidence that his visa had lapped, they took him into custody because they thought he was dangerous, and they actually thought, you know, he could be planning a terrorist attack.
Can you tell me why the FBI, apparently, the people, I guess, under you, or the people that you were advising there, the FBI special agents, why they took this so seriously from the moment they heard about it?
Well, a lot of reasons.
It wasn't just our agents who took it seriously and jumped on something that, obviously, different leads and different, you know, have different values, and something may come in, you know, it could even be a Ponzi scheme lead or whatever, and it may not be acted on or checked into that quickly.
It just depends on a lot of things, and in this case, not only those agents, and the INS agent and a FBI agent really ran back out there, interviewed then Moussaoui's actual pilot, and put these facts all together, sent them out as leads to Europe, but then, when it landed on, for instance, an agent who was the legal attaché in France, he saw the facts and did the very same thing.
He ran them over to the French authorities, who confirmed aspects of what were in those facts.
And then, he quickly sent them back, so that those were received in just days.
What people don't know is that these facts then, when they were met with more or less a, you know, met a wall or a roadblock in the FBI, the agents went around their own authorities in FBI headquarters and called the counterterrorism, the CIA's counterterrorism center.
Of course, that isn't kosher to do that, you know, usually these agencies have kind of hierarchical chain of commands, and you don't just call to another agency, especially not before 9-11.
And so, when that happened, and this information then made its way into the CIA, and that was, let me just tell you the time, August 16th, Moussaoui was taken into custody, and that's when this fact-checking and investigation began to occur.
By August 23rd, the head of the entire intelligence community, all 16 agencies, who at the time was our wonderful George Tenet, was the director of Central Intelligence.
Oh, my goodness, our dogs must be seeing something outside, I hope you can't hear that.
It's okay, go ahead.
But he was being briefed on August 23rd already by a PowerPoint, two-slide PowerPoint, Fundamentalist Learns to Fly.
Now, that's something that people don't know unless they actually attended the Moussaoui case, because it's actually one of the court exhibits that shows this little two-slide PowerPoint.
All of that garbage response that we can't share information, and this information never made its way to the top, etc., we needed to, after 9-11, come up with a new acronym and a new office, instead of calling the person who's head of the intelligence agency, Director of Central Intelligence, as George Tenet was called, they changed it to National Director of Intelligence, you know, a name change.
And all of those things, of course, are faulty, because in fact, this case went all the way to the top in just six, seven days.
Right, well, we know, right, that Tenet said when he first heard about 9-11, I wonder if this is related to that thing in Minneapolis, right?
Right.
Would it be a fair guess to say that the second slide on that PowerPoint was Ken Williams, the FBI agent from Phoenix who was reporting suspicious Arabs in flight schools there?
Well, you can look it up on the, like I said, the Moussaoui Court Exhibits.
They basically just had some of these suspicious factors listed in this slide.
Now, the other memo that went into FBI headquarters on, I think, dated June 10th or June 11th, from Williams in Phoenix, that, of course, is still a little bit murky, but it is claimed in the 9-11 Commission Rights that that was not read.
So the person who it was directed to, it was actually addressed to, claims he did not read it.
And that supervisor in FBI headquarters was the same supervisor that was handling the Moussaoui case.
Okay, now you say in your letter that you wrote to the head of the FBI back in, I guess, 2003, was it?
That the INS agent...
No, no, no.
I wrote...
The timing is important because all of these things, later when historians are going to look at this, you know, and try to figure out these things.
The memo that I wrote was on May 21st, 2002, and that was in connection with the Joint Intelligence Committee inquiry.
The very first thing, the very first, you know, very rough look at what had happened.
And in here you say that the INS agent happened to be on the Joint Counterterrorism Task Force.
So was it through that angle that you guys went around the bosses, or I don't know if it was you guys, but somebody at Minneapolis went around the bosses and went straight to the CIA?
Well, no, those are unrelated things.
What's important here is that Minnesota was, I think, one of the top 10, 15, something like that, offices in the FBI that formed early, you know, well before 9-11, a Joint Intelligence Terrorist Task Force, excuse me, Terrorism Task Force.
There were only about 15 of these in the FBI before 9-11, and I think the one in Minneapolis had formed a few months before.
So that's significant, because the fact that these agents ran out right away, you know, if they called a different office, one of the other, you know, 40 offices that didn't have one of these, that may not have led to anything, because it wouldn't have clicked.
So that was part of the thing.
The second part about the INS is that these task forces blend different agencies.
And so, as everyone knows now, the inability of agencies to have shared information with each other, and there was something that certainly was an obstacle to sharing between intelligence, like the CIA's intelligence and criminal investigations, that was a huge problem, that these Terrorism Task Forces broke down those walls, because they were all working together.
And my reason for putting that in the memo is I wanted to explain to people that this wasn't just a coincidence that he, that they found out his visa, that he was taken into custody for a lapsed visa.
No, it actually was because the agents suspected he was involved in terrorist activities.
That's why he was taken into custody.
Okay.
Now, when you say you guys contacted, or whoever it was, contacted the FBI agents stationed in Europe, they ran it over to the French.
The French gave everything they had.
It's my long-term memory, I'm going, it's kind of fuzzy here that I'm going from.
But the way I remember it, they gave you guys a truckload full of information all about Moussaoui and his brother, and how they were buddies with Osama, and far and away, way beyond what you could possibly need in order to get a warrant from a FISA court, if not from a regular criminal court.
Is that right?
Well, the French actually sent things, again, they scurried to get this info, and they sent some info back just within a few days, and then there was another week that went by, and then there was some fuller information that came back.
So, there was actually two times.
Now, they're probably, I don't know this, this is a little bit outside my purview, but I think French actually had entire dossier, and certainly their intelligence collection was superior to the United States'.
Europe had had more prior attacks, and they just were much more up on this.
That we didn't get until maybe afterwards.
The British actually did not even get to this quick enough, and so they, I think, were looking at their files, and maybe it came in a few days after 9-11.
So this is all in the 9-11 commission report, you know, that if they had followed up sooner, that things might be different too, the British.
So, again, when you see these mistakes that were made before 9-11, it's just a lot of things.
You can't put your finger on any one single one and say, well, this is the most terrible or whatever, because there's just so many that interlock with each other.
Well, but you guys, you were prevented by your bosses from going to a FISA court, which has a very low standard of evidence, right?
Well, the standard...
I mean, didn't you have enough to say that this guy's an agent of some kind of foreign power or terrorist group?
And so let us look at his computer.
Well, and in fact, the same probable cause, the same draft declaration, was used on the day of 9-11.
That's the point I made in my memo.
How can you say there's no probable cause when it is precisely the same probable cause with, I added one paragraph to the draft, which was now that an attack had occurred.
That's the only thing that was added to it, and some language about searching computers.
But other than that, it was already written.
And so, you know, what my big, of course, the big point I was trying to make in this memo was to cut through this kind of defense on everybody's part that nothing that anyone could have done would have prevented 9-11.
It's hard to put yourself back in that time frame of 2001, but that was basically what everyone, certainly in the government, was saying, and in every agency and whatever.
Well, why are we talking about these things?
Just move forward.
I mean, really, it's the same thing going on now, but it's this idea that we don't have to rehash these painful facts that are in the past and point fingers at the painful process, and why should we want to tell any bad things about, or mistakes, or whatever.
We'll just look forward.
We'll go forward.
And that certainly was what had held up, that there had been no probable cause to do anything, and that no matter what anyone would have done, 9-11 could not have been prevented.
Well, the truth and accountability go together.
That's supposed to be, well, you're an FBI lawyer, you tell me.
That's supposed to be how it works, right?
You go through the process of accountability for crimes or wrongs done, in this case, some pretty serious criminal negligence, it would seem like to me, although I'm not a lawyer, that's the other scholar.
But this is how we're supposed to find the truth and figure out what to do instead.
Right.
And I don't want to skip too far ahead to the consequences here, because there's more I want to know about the Moussaoui story, but part of this is like what you say about, they just centralized power more, rather than, say, for example, decentralizing the authority over who gets to go, who gets to choose when it's time to go see a judge about a warrant.
Right.
Oh, that's exactly right.
I mean, you just put your finger on one of the potentially would have been the proper, correct answers, responses to 9-11.
It certainly was a mistake that you can't go directly to one of those spicy judges.
And what someone should have said is, why are they all sitting in their little secret skiffs in Washington?
Why can't they be where they actually live?
The judges, of course, are from all over the country, because there are those lead walled skiffs.
They are all over the country.
And so why can't they just be decentralized?
That probably would have been a very proper response, and it would have made sense.
We never even had that conversation.
That conversation, as well as other potential fixes to make us more capable of detecting and reducing terrorism, those things have never occurred.
And that's because there was never a full airing of the mistakes.
People had different reasons and motives and stuff to cover up or skew the truth of this.
One thing that people don't understand is that we all think of truth and accountability maybe as a virtue, as kind of an ethical nicety.
We think of it as nerdy, even.
I was on a whistleblower panel a couple weeks ago with Daniel Ellsberg and Serpico and others.
And the truth is people look at them and say, well, you're up in your ivory tower wanting truth and stuff about things.
And those things are not niceties.
Those are extremely pragmatic, because if you do not know why something went wrong, there is no ability to fix it.
And certainly anyone who has a preconceived agenda, as of course Naomi Klein has written the shock doctrine, if you have something bad happen, and now you want to use the trauma to basically do anything you want, has no connection to the mistake or the issue.
But you want your Pearl Harbor to launch a war or whatever it is, that then opens the door to those types of things.
And that's, I think, exactly what happened with 9-11.
Well, I think you just opened the door to the question that certainly all the people in the comment section are going to want to know, which is, are you saying that you think there was an agenda to deliberately turn a blind eye and allow this attack to occur?
I don't know.
You know, again, when I even wrote my memo, I only knew, I knew the Phoenix memo existed.
I didn't know the specifics of it.
I didn't know, of course, that the answer or the response from headquarters would be we didn't read that memo.
I had no ideas of those things.
I didn't know that much of things.
But you have to start this process of saying what you do know.
And certainly if you know of a mistake, you do have to describe it, because you'll never even get to the next step.
And certainly based on my experience in government and knowledge of an endemic, a long-term endemic problem, FBI, for instance, this is way unrelated, but the Whitey Bolger case in Boston where we, the FBI was operating this, you know, killer, the mob killer for years and years, and people were turning a blind eye to it, I've been privy to those types of situations.
And they do exist.
And when those happen, there are, the officials are very loathe to really come clean about the whole dirty mess.
And so based on what I know, I think it's probably one of the most murky areas about exactly what all of the other intelligence that came in, and again, people that did not act properly on that intelligence.
And of course we know that back when Osama bin Laden was one of the people fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, he was on our side, just as Saddam was on our side when he was fighting the Iranians.
So when you know that those kind of relationships in the past existed, there is certainly potential for people not to tell the full truth.
And it's, you know, I hate to say it, very similar to the Whitey Bolger case in the FBI where eventually when the truth came out, an FBI supervisor went to prison for seven years for operating a really totally notoriously bad mob guy for many years.
Imagine that.
All right.
Now, I want to read a sentence out of your letter to Robert Mueller and you give me the context for this.
And actually, if you could kind of describe the situation for me a bit, I'd really appreciate it.
I'd like to kind of imagine how this scene went down.
Here's the sentence.
Even after the attacks had begun, the supervisory special agent in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui's computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Minneapolis's prior suspicions about Moussaoui.
Right.
And I included some of those examples that actually I was on the telephone on the morning of 9-11.
As soon as we, my boss, a couple of my bosses and the one case agent had seen the television and seen a plane flying into a building in New York, we, you know, we recognized real quickly that it was, you know, in all likelihood related to the Moussaoui case.
And so then the calls were going to headquarters to say, hey, you know, we've not let us do this so far.
You know, you've said no, that we could not try to get a criminal warrant, nor would you take it to get a secret intelligence warrant.
But now, look, what's happening, we need to get a, we need to follow up on this now.
And when I said this on the line with one of the supervisors in headquarters, I said, you know, it's unbelievable.
I was arguing.
I said, you know, if this is just a mere coincidence, it would have to be the biggest coincidence in the world.
And then the supervisor said, well, that's exactly what it could be, just nothing but a coincidence.
And he still said we were not to do anything because we might wreck some other case in another division until we got their approval.
And so I wanted to put that in there because it just shows this strong wall that was met even after 9-11 occurred.
Now, I guess, would it be fair to summarize his action as just being a pompous ass and refusing to admit he was wrong or he, I mean, that's pretty incredible.
Yeah, I can't put myself into somebody else's head.
Yeah, I know.
I'm sorry to ask you, but then again, you got to have some kind of guess as to what was going on there.
The truth is, though, when you've made a mistake, and certainly in a serious case like this, I think all human beings are so loathe to really come forth and tell the truth immediately.
I've kind of made it a point now because I give ethics presentations, so I've looked into other government bungling.
One of the things I've looked, I read the entire Challenger in Columbia report about why those, you know, why the NASA shuttles blew up.
And actually, those are probably an example, one of the rare examples when something really bad happened that people actually did tell the truth in a pretty quick manner, if you read the Challenger Columbia accident report.
And of course, one of the reasons is because there were emails in those cases that actually explained what people were thinking at the time when the NASA manager, Linda Hamm, said, well, we don't care about if there's any debris, if this cut in Columbia, how large it is, because she actually says in an email, because there's nothing we could do anyway.
So when that existed in an email, maybe that makes people a little less reluctant to, or more capable of telling the truth quickly, because they think, well, somebody's going to read it anyway.
Of course, by juxtaposition, look at what's happened after 9-11.
The John Hughes emails are destroyed.
The 92 tapes of waterboarding are destroyed.
Karl Rove's emails are destroyed.
And so it's true when evidence exists, when there's something actually out there that other people may read, it's going to be less easy for people to kind of say these things.
All right, now, I'm sorry, Colleen, because I have a lot of questions and very little time here.
Let me ask you about what you actually found on Musawi's computer when you finally were allowed.
What all was on there?
Were you able to immediately connect it to Marwan al-Sheihy and Mohammed Atta and whoever?
Yeah.
This is a misleading thing in the media right now, that it was on his computer.
It was not on his computer.
It was not on his laptop.
And the media got confused, because they had said one of the reasons that they wanted to search was because he had a laptop, and he was protective of the laptop, defensive about the laptop.
But the evidence that connects him to the masterminds of 9-11, who were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Sheib, was not on his laptop.
It was actually in his personal effects.
And there were cards, there were money transfer receipts, that it's about a two, three connection that you have to look into these things.
You have to quickly, of course, as FBI agents do, take those numbers from the cards, then run and check into them.
There's connections to Indonesia, where one of the meetings occurred.
And again, there's a fingerprint on a money transfer that connects Moussaoui directly to Ramzi bin al-Sheib.
So if you had enough time, I think it's about three, three and a half weeks to do that investigation, it would have connected directly into the masterminds.
Yeah, that's what I was just about to say.
I don't know, you arrested him on the 15th, so you get the investigation up and going by that weekend or something.
That still gives you plenty of time.
Yeah.
And actually, one of the people, newspaper reporters who saw this story, made some calls immediately to other flight schools.
And I think there's one, I forget the one flight school, but he found out that people in the flight school, if you would have called and asked these questions, they would have given some information even quicker.
And that would have made the connection possible within the time period.
I think there was even a quote of some FBI, must have been a boss, saying, what do you expect us to do?
Pick up the phone and call every flight school?
Right.
And maybe, and the thing is, well, hey, you know what, I was raised watching American TV.
You're damn right, that's what I expect.
The slightest bit of competence, maybe?
Well, you know, making something impossibly difficult from the start, that's just an excuse for not even beginning to try.
Because if you would have called the first, you know, the flight school, for instance, with Mohammed Atta in it right at the start, you wouldn't have had to call the hundreds of others.
See what I mean?
Yeah, of course.
You know, so, so that it is very similar to what Linda Hamm said, well, why would we want to take the picture to find out if the debris hit that plane?
Because we can't do anything about it anyway.
So if you get into this situation where you don't want to try, it's easy to come up with excuses.
Can you tell us about, real quickly, about your experience in testifying before the 9-11 Commission?
I did not testify to the 9-11 Commission.
My memo, of course, was written and I was debriefed by the Joint Intelligence Committee, actually by staffers that were hired for the Joint Intelligence Committee initially.
One of the reasons I went outside, even those staffers, and gave a copy of my memo directly to senators on the Joint Intelligence Committee, was because I was minded, as were all the people that were being talked to.
We actually had FBI minders and this interview had occurred in FBI headquarters, but that was...
Minders?
You mean like in Saddam Hussein's Iraq?
Well, agencies, you know, in the executive branch, and I'm guessing it's worse now than it was even, it has to be much worse now than it was before 9-11, are not entitled to speak out of school.
And so, everything you are going to say to, now this is not, this is still inside government.
You're not talking to reporters or the public.
I was talking to people who had top-secret security clearances and they were actually retired Secret Service, CIA, Department of Justice people who had been hired as staff for this Joint Intelligence Committee.
And they're part of the legislative branch, but, you know, the executive branch oftentimes begins to treat the legislative branch as the enemy.
And you'll see this during war times, like when Ellsberg went to, with his Pentagon Papers, to members of Congress.
Now, they are considering that to be leaking, even though the people that are looking at it, probably, for instance on the Joint Intelligence Committee, they have every right to know intelligence.
They just have a different function.
They're supposed to have oversight over it.
But I didn't even realize it was that way when I was first talking.
I didn't realize that they would try to fire me for giving information to somebody who has a higher security clearance than myself.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We've got to leave it at there.
I have a lot more questions for you, but perhaps we can do this again sometime.
That sounds good.
All right, everybody.
Thank you very much.
Everybody, that's Colleen Rowley, a former FBI agent and legal counsel.
And her website is ColleenRowley.com.
And you can read her letter to RobertMuelleratTime.com.
And she writes for HuffingtonPost.com.
And we'll be back with Patrick Coburn right after this.