All right y'all, welcome to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Liberty Radio Network.
And you might remember last week we talked with Ray McGovern about this press release put out by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence on Wikileaks.
It was signed by him and by Daniel Ellsberg and by Colleen Rowley, an FBI whistleblower Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2002.
She was the legal counsel for the FBI, their Minneapolis division.
And she was the one who was denied permission to continue pressing the case against Zacharias Moussaoui.
And it was easily speculated by all concern that if she had only been allowed to do her job, the September 11th attack could have been rolled up.
You remember that?
Welcome to the show, Colleen.
How are you doing?
All right, well, we're digging out of a 20-inch lizard over this weekend.
But other than that, I'm fine.
So Colleen Rowley on the phone today from under a snowdrift.
Just about, yep.
We had a huge thing on top of our roof.
All the houses are like that.
They were always worried about climate change and everything.
But if you're worried about lack of water, I think Minnesota might be the place to come.
Yeah, you can just save that stuff up all year round for us.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, did I basically characterize that story right about Moussaoui that do you believe that if you'd been allowed permission to search all his stuff and pursue those leads that you could have stopped the 9-11 attack?
You know, you're largely right, except there's one little fact that I always have to correct.
And it's because the media somehow got this wrong initially.
And a lot of people built on it.
It's because also I am the one who wrote the memo eight and a half months afterwards, basically putting a big kibosh on this cover-up that had occurred after 9-11.
But people think that because I took this great risk and everything to write the memo that I was the one personally who sought the warrant from the Department of Justice to search Moussaoui's things.
And I actually, I wrote this in the memo.
I just had a peripheral role as the legal counsel in this office.
Our agent actually at the time, and he became well known.
His name is Harry Samet when he testified against Moussaoui, was a pilot and an intelligence, Navy intelligence officer.
And so when the call came in from the flight school and the flight instructors were the first whistleblowers because they went against their bosses to basically tell the truth about a paying customer, which got them into trouble actually.
But these, when the flight instructors called and Harry Samet and an INS agent ran out to look into it within 24 hours, they had enough suspicion that they took him into custody.
And so after 9-11, and then there's more, a lot more to that story, but then they sought the warrant.
They got France to basically run the lead and confirm that he, that Moussaoui had connections to the Chechen rebels, who in fact, if you know that whole background, the Mujahideen were actually connected to Osama bin Laden too.
And the U.S. was of course at the time, he was our ally or whatever we were funding the Mujahideen, Charlie Wilson's war and all that, all the rest.
But so it was, it was complicated from the standpoint of that, you know, who's our friend and who's our enemy.
But in fact, he was connected to a foreign terrorist power, which is the test for getting a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant.
And then the agents who were trying and basically pulling their hair out for days, arguing with headquarters, Samet and a supervisor wrote 50, 60 emails and telephone calls, arguing this with headquarters.
And this all came out in the Moussaoui trial.
And actually Harry Samet actually said, quote unquote, when, when people, when people don't understand the nature of the cover up that occurred after 9-11, Samet himself testified that FBI headquarters was criminally negligent.
This is actually in the court transcript.
And so it's not me saying this, this is actually other people.
And what, what I did, of course, is I could, I couldn't stand the, the, this, you know, obfuscation afterwards, because I didn't know that of course the Bush administration was doing the devious things it was doing.
I didn't know about them ordering torture and waterboarding immediately after that was still kept quiet for a long time.
And no one knew that they had begun to plan the invasion of Iraq on 9-12.
You know, until, until Richard Clark and Paul, I mean, what is his name?
Paul O'Neill came out with their books.
No one knew that that had begun that quickly, but we knew enough.
We knew enough that by not telling the truth about how 9-11 had actually occurred, that all of these nonsense, false solutions that were being done afterwards were just making it worse.
And so that's why I wrote the memo in May 21st of 2002, in connection with the very first Joint Intelligence Committee inquiry.
And it led to a little bit, I mean, my memo led eventually to a nine, excuse me, an Inspector General two-year-long investigation of the FBI failures.
Well, a few things to go over there.
First of all, just to nail down exactly what your role was there, if you're the legal counsel to the FBI, then would it be safe for me to assume that before Harry Samet and the other FBI agents went to try to go and get permission from the supervisor to seek a FISA warrant, that they had to come to you first and get your approval that, yeah, this looks good enough to go get a warrant to me, go get permission from the boss.
Is that how it went?
Yeah, it did.
But this actually leads right into the issue of sharing information and intelligence.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a compromise that came out as part of the Church Committee's look and investigation of the abuses and the black bag jobs that had occurred in the 60s when the FBI went after Martin Luther King and all kinds of other innocent people.
So they'd come up with this FISA law.
Eventually it got screwed up, is essentially what it amounts to.
And it turned into a wall between information sharing, between intelligence collection and investigation, criminal investigation.
And this happened in the early 90s.
So no one corrected that.
And of course, I'm here to say that many people knew this was a problem all along.
This just didn't become apparent after 9-11.
There were people all along that said, you're putting out misguidance.
And actually the guidance at the time contradicted itself.
It was a total mess.
Well, you're talking about the Jamie Gorlick's guidelines, right?
And then she sat on the 9-11 Commission?
Yeah, she was just one though.
Gorlick gets a lot of the blame for having signed off on one of these memos.
But she wasn't the only one by any long shot.
It's a long story and we're going to get real distracted here.
But this wall preventing sharing of intelligence with criminal investigation actually came about because the woman who had been the head of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review in the Department of Justice, her name was Mary Lawton.
She'd been put in charge in 1978.
There was never a problem as long as she was alive.
But unfortunately, she died an early death after a surgery in the early 90s.
And after this happened, all of her successors began to misinterpret.
And what they did, of course, you know how legal beagles can write basically everyone writes their own opinion and no one can really understand what they're saying.
And that's really what I would say it amounted to.
These memos that occurred afterwards all contradicted each other.
Nobody with a good reading skill could read them and make sense of it.
We used to go to conferences and listen to talks by people and we're like they're scratching our heads and people would ask questions and nobody could even answer it.
And so that's why I'm saying this was well known that it was a problem.
And this is where you get into these systems where everybody has an incentive to keep their mouth shut and the people on top like that, whatever, they get comfortable with the system.
So they have no incentive to reform it or change it or rock the boat.
Anybody in the FBI, people were getting punished even because they made mistakes on something that was impossible to really accomplish.
They were supposed to be checking all of the FBI prior cases to ensure that they weren't somehow subverting the criminal process.
And one of our agents had gotten into trouble and actually had been chewed out by the FISA court.
So these are all reasons why it was a terrible problem before 9-11.
All right everybody, we gotta take this break.
It's Colleen Rowley.
She's the former legal counsel to the FBI's Minneapolis division and a famous whistleblower.
Go back and read her 2002 letter to the Senate.
You'll learn some things and we'll be back to talk about WikiLeaks after this.
Anti-war radio.
All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Colleen Rowley, formerly with the FBI, now with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity and Intelligence.
And we were talking a little bit about the breakdowns leading up to, in the police workings, in the lead up to the September 11th attack.
And just to get this perfectly straight and make sure I understand, Colleen, is it the case that when you guys finally were able to search all of Moussaoui's belongings and so forth after the September 11th attack, that you found information in his belongings that could have led you directly to Mohammed Attaw and Marwan al-Sheihy and them?
Yes, that's true.
It takes a couple, two and a half weeks or so, because it's through a receipt.
It's through some of the personal effects.
It's not in the laptop, actually.
The laptop contained wind directions and, you know, for like flying a plane over crop dusting.
That type of thing, which is something that no one has ever ferreted out.
Everyone always thought of that.
But the personal effects included receipts and telephone numbers.
I think it connected to Indonesia, to that whole surveillance that occurred back there, as well as to the pay.
The guy who was spending the money was Ramzi bin al-Sheib.
Well, now, when you say, pardon me, get back to Ramzi bin al-Sheib in a second, but when you say in Indonesia, are you talking about the meeting in Malaysia?
Malaysia, I'm sorry, yes.
Right, but so this is where the bigwigs, and including two of the pilots, were at that meeting, the ones that the CIA traced to San Diego.
Right, and that's actually, you know, I said my memo led to an investigation, an IG investigation of the FBI.
It didn't go into the CIA and the other groups.
There were about four or five different pre-9-11 investigations, but the Inspector General investigation identified the biggest failure as the two guys, Midar and Ramzi, who had come into California.
They were on the CIA's terrorism list.
At that time, it did not include a million people, as it does now, and it actually was a small number.
They were on their top terrorism list, and the CIA failed to notify the FBI about that in a timely way.
I think eventually they did at the tail end, but that actually is an area that has never been totally made clear.
In fact, to this day, I think agents in both the FBI and the CIA are forbidden to tell the truth about that, even though the IG did a fair job of covering it from the standpoint of this wall, quote-unquote the wall, but there were other reasons too, and again, this leads right into what I'm trying to say to people, and I hope the public understands, which is that 9-11, and I'm just talking, these are just two small examples.
I mean, there's probably hundreds of examples of failure to share information, both inside agencies, as the Moussaoui example is just an example inside an agency.
The FBI stopped and blocked the info at a mid-level management.
Then you have the example of the CIA failing to notify the FBI, which is an example inter-agency failure to share information, and then the 9-11 Commission went even further than that, and this is where it ties in with the WikiLeaks issues.
They said it was a failure to share information with the public and with the media, and if you think about the examples of, you know, when it has been, when a terrorist has been successfully detected and prevented, it almost oftentimes, if not almost always, involves the public and the media, because that information has to get out to people who are in a position to take action, as opposed to some George Tenet who's sitting in Washington D.C. and has no ability to know what's going on out in the public.
You know, in a way, what we're doing with the WikiLeaks by saying it's a bad thing to have, to have, we want to have greater secrecy and to somehow believe that the greater secrecy protects us, which is completely wrong, we're going against everything the FBI has ever put out in its public service messages, that they need information from the public in order to solve crimes.
I mean, I spent 24 years in the FBI, and we were constantly trying to warn the public if there was a fraud scheme.
You know, I remember the Nigerian fraud scheme that grew up in the 80s, and I put out press release after press release telling people not to fall for this silly fraud scheme that would promise people millions of dollars, but that was always what we tried to do.
We tried to warn the public, we tried to share information, and then we also tried to solicit information back, and what we're saying now, and that failure before 9-11 to actually share information with the public even, not only between agencies, was crucial and really is at the root of why 9-11 occurred.
And that's not Colleen Rowley saying that, or my co-author, FAA Red Team Leader Bogdan Djokovic, in our op-ed when we rewrite WikiLeaks in 9-11, what if, and basically say that if we had had greater information sharing in 2001, we could have prevented 9-11.
That's our point.
But you know what, it's not us saying that, that is actually the conclusion of these four or five different looks at the situation in 2001.
Those are, you know, security experts, it's the 9-11 Commission.
It's really frustrating to be trying to kind of say this right now, because we got 70% of the public in the polls believing that excess secrecy and classification somehow makes them safer.
It's just the opposite.
Well, TV said so, and TV was really certain about it, so.
But you know, it's funny, because you talk about 2001, the summer of 2001 was the summer of shark attacks, and the Gary Condit intern is missing, and whatever, and it was, there was just, across media, all media in America, it just seemed like nothing serious was allowed to be in the discussion at all.
And it seems like, I'm kind of seeing it your way, like if we had WikiLeaks, then when John Ashcroft got his threat assessment telling him he ought to fly private jets instead of public ones, maybe the people could have got a threat assessment too.
If someone, you know, in the Justice Department had said, you know what, I'm sick of shark attacks, I'm going to leak this out to Julian Assange, back then.
That's exactly right.
Now, if you think about how some, you know, we're talking about our frustration, these two examples.
Bogdan had a great example, because he was the head of the red team, where he was actually assigned to look for vulnerabilities and lapses in airline and airport security.
And when he found that his red team could successfully smuggle weapons onto planes 90% of the time during those months before 9-11, he and his partner became very concerned.
And then they didn't know what to do, because their agency was not taking any of this seriously.
In fact, their agency began to warn the airports when they were coming, if you can imagine.
So what they did is they went outside their agency.
There is a culture that makes this very, very difficult to be a whistleblower.
I mean, 100% difficult to be a whistleblower, because if you complain inside, you'll be retaliated against, and there's no protection in the intelligence community.
But if you then say, I can't deal with this, because people will die if I don't do anything.
This risk is so high.
Bogdan and his partner actually went to their IG, Internal Inspector General, and when that didn't work, they went to Congress members and tried to brief directly to Congress.
And so, yes, if we had had WikiLeaks before 9-11, I think a safe and secure method of getting information out, we certainly could have prevented 9-11.
Okay, great.
Everybody, we'll be right back with Colleen Rowley, the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Rowley, McGovern, and Ellsberg, statement on WikiLeaks from the Institute for Public Accuracy.
This is the press release, anyway.
And our guest is Colleen Rowley.
She's got a statement on WikiLeaks, and I guess you were talking about how perhaps a September 11th attack could have been thwarted if we had something like WikiLeaks back then.
But in that context, you were also mentioning how there's basically no protections for whistleblowers inside the government, that the culture against it is very hard to overcome.
And we've seen story after story of whistleblowers who had to suffer professional and worse kind of damage over it.
But I thought that somewhere in there, Congress had passed a law providing for whistleblower protections.
As long as you go through the chain of command and that kind of thing, you're supposed to be rewarded.
The incentives are supposed to be there to encourage whistleblowing, right?
Well, in a lip service and the public statements, most people would be led to believe that that's the case, because there's nobody in Congress who can publicly say that they do not want to have the truth, truthful disclosures about fraud, waste, abuse, or what we were just discussing, a risk to public safety, of course, that could lead to Vioxx not being tested shoddily and then causing heart attacks.
How can you be saying, keep your mouth shut if you're in the FDA about the shoddy testing?
You're not going to ever hear a politician ever speak out that they are against disclosures of illegality the same way.
Of course, Bush is saying, we do not torture.
We get court orders when we monitor.
So he's completely lying when he's saying both of those things.
And when you're in Congress, of course, you'll never publicly state that it's okay for a public official to publicly lie and commit an illegal act, and that we need whistleblower protection for when that occurs.
Now, here's the disconnect.
Because even though the politicians will pass unanimously, when they have a chance, they will pass whistleblower protection reform unanimously.
The House passed it a couple of times unanimously, the Senate did.
Here's the deal.
It's all lip service.
In actuality, the 1989 whistleblower protection law was completely gutted almost immediately.
And they found many ways to go around it so that there were only two successful cases out of decades long, out of hundreds of cases that were brought to court by FDA and agriculture employees and different employees, only a couple out of over 200 were successful.
The whistleblower protection act did not even apply to the 16 intelligence agencies.
There is no way to go outside and get your day in court to argue if they remove your security clearance for speaking out of school.
They you know, the J. Edgar Hoover's old line was never embarrassed the bureau.
And so if you had ever tried to counterdict somebody that was higher up in the FBI, and it could be a true public safety issue, like the 911 case or others, the chances that they would have retaliated against you and you would have no ability to to challenge that.
So here's the situation as it exists right now, a decade, there's been a decade long effort to reform the whistleblower protection act unsuccessfully.
As I mentioned, the lip service only goes so far.
It was always stopped by a none other than a secret hold in the Senate.
So we are talking about secrecy.
And it stopped by a quote unquote, secret hold in the Senate because guess what, they don't want to be on record as saying they're against not having the public know the truth about things incredible.
But but but just a couple of days ago, the Senate did pass a watered down bill.
And unfortunately, the watered down bill does not still to this day does not include the intelligence agencies, the 16.
And this is again, due to this important discussion we're having about the government wanting to tell people that secrecy will somehow protect them that as long as the government can keep all of its information secret and over classify and go to war on false premises and, and not deal with waterboarding and whatever, as long as we you don't know any of this, that's somehow going to make you safer.
And that's where we're at right now.
The whistleblower protection, maybe we just don't want to be responsible.
I think the public, you know, it falls into this trap easily.
Because when you know really sad, harsh truth, there are a lot of people that don't want to know simply they think ignorance is blessed.
And you know, if you start thinking of examples that the priest pedophile example is probably one of the best examples that can kind of dispel that myth.
You know, if you knew that the priesthood had such a terrible problem with this, would you let your children become altar boys and go into the, you know, get relationships with these priests?
No, you wouldn't.
I mean, people don't like to know bad things because they're icky.
I mean, it absolutely is true that these are icky, bad things to know.
But you know, the truth is, if you knew about this, you could take precautions.
I think, you know, another great example is the poor 911 rescue workers.
The poor 911 rescue workers were not told that there were these kind of asbestos and toxins and stuff in the air at the time.
And you know, maybe at the time, some of them thought, well, I just prefer not to even know what I'm breathing, you know.
But the truth is they could have if they had known taken precautions.
Right.
Well, you just yeah, you look at 911.
I mean, they could have said, hey, listen, if your plane gets hijacked, chances are these guys want to crash it into something, not fly to Cuba or Palestine or something.
So go ahead and try to kill them.
Well, I mean, that could have saved, you know, three out of four planes, maybe or something, you know, what would have been the answer more and more so than anything was simple, simply bolting the cockpit doors, which we did immediately afterwards, but which Israel had done long before.
It doesn't, you know, in terms of liberty, a lot of things are always sold on this idea that it's going to take away your, you know, of course, the airport, new body scanners are my last example of taking away privacy, you know, needlessly, too.
But, you know, when you when you talk about measures that actually had no real downside, bolting the cockpit doors only had one downside is that they cost a few hundred dollars per door.
And I'm going to mention one more thing on on the pre 9-11 situation, which which people have forgotten.
One of the high level officials, counterterrorism people in the government was Richard Clark, and he knew the danger that Al Qaeda posed.
He had been literally trying, pushing hard against Condi Rice to try to have a meeting of the National Security Council so that they could deal with the problem.
And it was said that George Tenet and Richard Clark's hair was on fire that they were getting so many clues and information.
Finally, Condi put him off and Condi put him off.
And one of the things that was said to Richard Clark was that there was not one extra dollar in the budget for terrorism programs.
If you can imagine this, this is the summer of 9-11 and Richard Clark is being told there's not one extra dollar.
We're now at, what, four to five trillion dollars being spent on military solutions and invading countries that have nothing to do with 9-11 and etc.
And yet, the summer of 9-11, I would attribute that that huge paradox simply to lack of information.
Really, a lot of it due to, you know, even Condi Rice didn't want to know, did she?
She was all concerned about Russian ballistic missile systems, and she didn't really want to know.
Yeah, talk about saving money, about Star Wars.
What is that but an ignorance's bliss approach?
And Ashcroft told, and it's not just Condi Rice, Ashcroft told the acting FBI director in July that he, quote-unquote, I don't want to hear about terrorism, quote-unquote.
I mean, it's so bad of this, you know, putting your head in the sand approach.
Now, for the public to be led, at this point, nine years later, after every bad, terrible thing we've experienced into that same type of approach, you know, go after WikiLeaks, persecute Assange, and what you don't know won't hurt you is absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah, well, and just wait till the next attack after they spent all this time entrapping innocent people and keeping these secrets.
They'll just blame what freedom we had left for it.
All right, thanks very much, Colleen, for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
That's Colleen Rowley, everybody.
We'll be right back.
