All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
And it's my pleasure to welcome Colleen Rowley back to the show.
Yes, hi.
Hi, Colleen.
How are you today?
Good.
That's good.
Everybody, you remember Colleen Rowley.
She was the lawyer for the FBI agents who were trying to do their job regarding the evidence surrounding the person of Zacharias Moussaoui in August and September of 2001 and were forbidden by the FBI from doing their job.
And as we all know, as I believe even the 9-11 Commission report admitted, Colleen, that evidence could have led directly to the actual hijackers, and perhaps 9-11 could have been thwarted if only your team had been allowed to do your job then, right?
Well, yes.
That's one of the main conclusions, if not the main conclusion, by the 9-11 Commission.
And I would say, in all fairness to them, that they got this part right, failure to share information and intelligence before 9-11.
And the Moussaoui case was just one actually small example.
It turns out to be, I think, with all the revelations coming out, it may not even have been the biggest example.
There's many examples of this.
So I guess, you know, I'm definitely not the only one.
Many people talk about 9-11 like, and I certainly am guilty of this, well, they knew this and they knew that.
And you had all these warnings and foreign governments warned, and you had Ken Williams in Phoenix said he was worried about Arabs in flight schools, and you had Colleen Rowley and the crew up in Minneapolis.
And then wasn't there some curiosity and some FBI had been called about somebody down in Florida and whatever.
So how could they have known all these things?
How could there be 20 Al-Qaeda in America and the FBI not know?
And then the answer is, oh, no, you did know, but there is no you.
It's all a bunch of separate individuals.
And y'all weren't even sharing the information with each other, much less with the other agencies, CIA and NSA, et cetera, right?
Yes.
So the failures were threefold.
One, inside some agencies there was a lack of information sharing.
The Moussaoui case is an example of information being stopped internally in the FBI.
60, 70 emails between FBI headquarters and the agents in Minnesota, but never shared beyond that.
Then there are other examples.
You failed to mention that there's a huge one where the CIA knew of the two on their own actually at the time short terrorist list that came into California and was not shared in a timely way with the FBI.
That's just not one example of failure to share inter-agency.
And the last one, and this of course really dovetails with the need for WikiLeaks and whatever, is the failure to share some information or at least key information with the public.
And of course, if you see the difference in times where information is shared with the public, many times it's a member of the public who actually is able to stop it and able to perhaps knows further information and calls up.
And we've had all of these really going in the wrong direction, not only pre-9-11, but now they're going back after WikiLeaks, back to that same old compartmentalization and secrecy on everything.
And it's largely to prevent embarrassing disclosures about either inept or sometimes where people in government screw up or mess up, and they don't want the public to know those things.
And so they stamp top secret on everything, hoping and praying that nobody will learn.
Well, you know, there was that Washington Post series not long ago about the national security state, Dana Priest and William Arkin's series.
And they talked about how there are so many reports being written now.
You call it, you know, inter-agency communication, whatever.
And now they're all just drowning in the very same ocean of nonsense.
You know, I don't know how anybody, they don't apparently know how anybody is supposed to find what's important in these, you know, a Library of Congress worth of paperwork every year or something.
Well, and that's their own fault, because they called it, Poindexter's was called total information awareness.
The FBI put out a story yesterday about finding this Jihad Jane, and their quote in the story is, well, we have to follow up on every lead, no matter how far-fetched it is.
Right, and make a case out of it, no matter how far-fetched.
Right, right.
In fact, you know, when you talk about civilians having the information, you look at Richard Reid or the Times Square bomber, and I'm sure there's another couple examples.
It seems to me the only real terrorists in America since 9-11 have been thwarted by citizens, not by the cops at all.
Abdulmutallab, his own, you can't, you know, I mean, these three examples that I gave in my op-ed were all examples of information that was very, I mean, you can't get, where a father calls in and says, my son is engaged with a terrorist, whatever, and those three were all connected to the Yemeni cleric, too, and that Yemeni cleric was connected to 9-11 hijackers.
So these things are, even if you had a computer, let's say a computer was working to make these connections, which they claim is possible, then that is not the case, because these are the closest connections in the world.
And yet Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, Shehzad, the Times Square bomber, and Hassan, the guy who shot 13 and wounded 40 at Fort Hood, all three of those were stopped only by people on the street or next to them.
Right.
And that points out why the WikiLeaks idea of sharing information, and we're being told, of course, that makes us less secure, is not true.
It's the only thing that will make us, as a people, more secure, is for more people to know to this key data.
And again, I'm not a person who says complete openness and transparency.
I know that there are areas where you have to keep secret, at least for a time period, some things.
You know, ongoing investigations are one for that time period that it's going on.
But what the national security complex is doing is they're stamping perpetual secrecy onto these items.
And then, of course, they are going back from what they did for a while.
They said sharing, the 9-11 Commission told them that they should share information, which is probably why the supernet even exists and was shared with hundreds of thousands of employees, was probably because the 9-11 Commission said that they ought to share.
But guess what?
Now, after WikiLeaks, that's going back now.
They're clamping down, and that's all going to be compartmentalized.
Need to know.
Right.
Well, and this is what I'm interested in, is, you know, your work at the FBI after 9-11.
I guess they finally let you all do your job in regards to investigating Moussaoui.
But, you know, there's this brand new report in The Telegraph today.
The headline is, WikiLeaks, FBI hunts the 9-11 gang that got away, talking about three Qatari men who apparently were doing some surveillance and had plane tickets on the day of the 11th, or on the 10th, on the very same plane that turned into Flight 77 the next day.
But they ended up running off to England instead.
Is this the first that you've heard about this?
Yes.
I had not heard anything.
Of course, I retired in 2004, but I had never heard of this, other than what is in the paper today.
It's definitely conceivable, and it seems...it's hard to kind of tell from the news reports, but it seems like the information about these four was learned after 9-11, although that's not 100 percent clear.
But it looks like it was learned after.
But here's the question.
Even if it was learned afterwards, why is this not at all in the 9-11 Commission report?
Key information like this is left out of the 9-11 Commission report, which tells people this is the definitive explanation, whatever.
And there's another breaking story on the very same day that's coming from a very highly credible source, a former FBI translator, Behrouz...let's see what's his name...
Behrouz Sarshar.
And he had testimony to the 9-11 Commission about a briefing that the FBI got in April of 2001, well, five months before 9-11, about kamikaze pilots.
Right.
Now, this is the Iranian informant that Sabel has mentioned in the past, including on this show.
Now, here, she's, I guess, published virtually the entire testimony, secret testimony, before the 9-11 Commission here, right?
Yes.
Okay, now hold it right there, Colleen.
We're going to talk more about this when we get back.
It's Colleen Rowley, former FBI lawyer, writer at the Huffington Post, Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio.
And the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM, is their website.
And we're talking with Colleen Rowley, former FBI lawyer on the Moussaoui case and writer for the Huffington Post.
And I think we're both looking right now at this page, at the Boiling Frogs...nope, it's just boilingfrogspost.com, Sabel Edmonds' website.
And she has published now some mind-blowing testimony from a translator about, remember all these years, she said that there was an Iranian informant, not all these years, but some of these years, she said there was an Iranian informant that in the spring of 2001 warned of an upcoming al-Qaeda kamikaze attack.
Tell us everything you know about this here, real quick, here, if you can, Colleen.
Well, you know the file name, Kamikaze Pilots, again, given in April of 2001, five months before 9-11.
And then you consider Akande Rice standing up afterwards and saying, no one could have imagined a plane would fly into a building.
The irony of these revelations now are just jaw-dropping, mind-boggling.
The other thing that immediately jumped out at me is that when Bush, for instance, asked Richard Clark and others in his administration to immediately seek evidence that Iraq is connected to 9-11, and apparently he did this on 9-12, so the day after 9-11 he is already seeking to manipulate, obviously through false information, the notion that somehow Iraq is behind 9-11.
And in fact, all of these clues in this pre-9-11 intelligence existed in the Kamikaze Pilots.
I haven't even read through the full thing here, but it's basically that there's a briefing that's given to the FBI saying that there's a group now planning to fly planes into buildings.
Well, and here, let me elaborate a little bit here.
I was reading through it here during the break, actually, and first of all, this translator describes the informant here as the former head of SAVAK, secret police in Iran under the Shah, and a very important informant who has sources all over the world and is very good at his job, and this isn't some bum who comes in off the street.
This is a very important asset of American intelligence.
He said he had a source, one in Afghanistan and another on the border region in Pakistan, who said, there are guys in the country right now planning the attack.
It's going to be Kamikazes, maybe blowing up the planes over cities.
He names New York, Chicago, D.C., San Francisco, possibly L.A. or Las Vegas as targets, and says to the FBI agents that he's debriefing, or that he's briefing, I guess, take this seriously.
You know, I was the head of intelligence.
I would have my guys, all of them, on this around the clock.
This is going on right now.
Get on it.
And then, of course, they never did.
And you can see, Colleen, why people would just be suspicious.
Here you've got the whole government seems to just not do their job and let this massive attack happen on our watch.
The term blind eye wasn't dreamt up about 9-11, right, and pretending not to see something so you can get away with something else is a tried and true method of not even just governments, but all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, right?
So that makes sense that it could be such a thing there.
And then, as you say, beginning on 9-12, they wanted to go after and make it all about Iraq.
They didn't even care who did it.
They didn't even care to round up the guys who surveilled the buildings and helped the hijackers hit their targets.
They just as soon let them go?
I mean, it seems like they had an agenda already here, you know?
And even the little snippets of information that do make it.
Now, this is over a three-year period, which is another mind-boggling aspect, and that three, two-and-a-half, three-year period that the 9-11 Commission takes, first of all, because Bush fights even the initiative itself for an entire year.
He fights it.
And finally, the families, and I think my memo had a little bit, pushed it a little bit, and he finally consents to even having one.
You know, in all fairness, some of the 9-11 Commission was under serious constraints because the Bush administration was fighting this tooth and nail.
Well, they announced from the beginning that this is an outcome-based commission.
You never want to let a crisis go to waste.
And on the last day of this thing, they're going to recommend that we turn the Office of Homeland Security into the Department of Homeland Security.
And so everybody get to work.
That was the mandate from day one.
Well, Philip Zelikow, who was an administration insider connected to Karl Rove, I think did use this.
It was, exactly, it was exploited.
So once the 9-11, once they said to themselves, well, we can't stop it, well, then the next best thing was inserting Zelikow in there, so that they could, in fact, put out what they wanted to in a very selective way.
And what didn't come out, now, and what these revelations are coming out through WikiLeaks cables, that one you mentioned that shows that there was canvassing and scouting in the United States prior to 9-11 by people that actually came from Qatar, what it shows is that the story, the official story that the 9-11 commission kind of goes along with, also dovetailed with what the administration had done in the meantime, which they had launched a war on Iraq.
They certainly did not want to embarrass Saudi Arabia.
So there's 30 pages that are blacked out in the 9-11 commission.
That's the story, apparently, that comes from...
Well, even that was just the congressional report, right?
The first congressional report had the 28 pages, the 9-11 commission didn't even write the pages to black them out.
Right, right.
They just ignored it completely.
In fact, you know, James Bamford points out that the three letters NSA aren't in the 9-11 commission report anywhere.
I mean, no wonder I never read it.
Yeah, and you're finding enormous, if you want to be euphemistic, enormous deference to the same agency heads who actually, that the 9-11 commission has to know were to blame.
Tenet, George Tenet, et cetera.
I mean, all of these agency heads who made, at the very least, serious, serious mistakes of judgment and ignoring and overlooking, et cetera, they are then treated as if, when they're relied upon for this official narrative, they're treated as if they hadn't made any mistakes, that they're totally correct.
And then you have the Bush administration, who is able to deceive 70% of the country to believe that Iraq was behind 9-11.
And the 9-11 commission weekly says, we don't see any evidence of that, but they really don't tell the reading public why that is the case.
It seems amazing to me that the 28 pages haven't been leaked.
It seems amazing to me that we don't have the definitive answer about General Mahmoud and $100,000 in Pakistan.
And it seems like all this would have come out by now.
We're only finding out in 2011 that the FBI is after these three guys, or claimed to be after these three guys who surveilled the targets and had all these connections in LA, which brings us back, actually, to the point that you were mentioning about the hijackers that the CIA knew were on their way to the U.S. and apparently didn't tell the FBI.
And there's discrepancy about whether they spent, according to the 9-11 commission, they spent two weeks screwing around in LA, going nowhere, until they met this guy, Bayoumi, and then went to San Diego.
But then there was a formerly classified FBI timeline that had it where they landed maybe at LAX, but they went straight to San Diego the first day that they were here.
So the FBI seems to be, and the 9-11 commission can't seem to get their story straight about those two guys.
It seems like Los Angeles plays into this story in the Telegraph today a lot.
Never even mind all conspiracy theory stuff, it seems like just at least there were more Al-Qaeda dudes here working on this plan than they've ever told us before.
How could it go this many years, where all this stuff stays secret?
It's amazing.
One of the probable motivations for blacking out some of this information is sensitive and not for normal people to know about.
I think I can just come up with a very likely reason.
One is that the foreign policy of the United States, and you're seeing this play out now in Egypt and in Tunisia and other places, the foreign policy of the United States has been to support dictators in countries like Saudi Arabia, even Qatar.
There's an Emir of Qatar, and I guess he's not the worst guy in the world, but there is no real democracy in much of the Middle East.
And many of the countries, the oil-rich countries where the U.S. has good relations with, like Saudi Arabia, they don't want information to come out that might somehow hurt that relationship.
Now, vice versa, where they wanted to hurt the relationship with Saddam in Iraq, they actually go to the extent of putting out deceitful information about aluminum tubes designed for enrichment, etc.
So you see this wide, wide variance that actually seems to be hinged a lot on foreign policy of the United States, including war.
And we'll be back with Colleen Rowley, former FBI lawyer, writer for the Huffington Post.
Let's listen to this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And now we're in the middle of a conversation here with Colleen Rowley.
She writes for the Huffington Post, of course, was involved in the Moussaoui case before 9-11, in the office there, in FBI field office up there in Minneapolis.
And a couple of things in question this morning.
First of all, is this thing at the Telegraph, WikiLeaks, FBI hunts the 9-11 gang that got away, and they have a link there to their reprint of this WikiLeaks State Department cable.
And then at Sabel Edmonds' website, boilingfrogspost.com, is a piece entitled the FBI kamikaze pilot's case.
The informant, the Iranian informant that Sabel has talked about for a few years now, here she has reprinted the testimony.
I'm not sure all of it, but it doesn't seem like all of it, but still some very interesting testimony of this other FBI translator before the 9-11 commission, which has remained secret apparently until today, or maybe yesterday.
And then at the bottom here of this article, Colleen, is a statement, I guess, by the 9-11 family members, who I think the Jersey Girls they call them, the four widows who pushed so hard to get this 9-11 commission created in the first place, right?
Right.
And are asking the 9-11 commission now for a response, which I think is only fair.
How can they respond to the disclosures that have come out of things that they either failed to inquire further about, or actually did in a positive way they covered up?
Now, this was an actual interview that the 9-11 commission was aware of, but they chose to keep it all secret.
And that's pretty incredible.
It very much ties in with the need for what WikiLeaks and whistleblowers like Bradley Manning are doing, which is that if there is no way for a country's citizens to know what is going on in secret by their elected leaders and their military operatives and their CIA, how in the heck are we able to even vote intelligently?
And certainly now hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed, and a lot of it is based on complete and utter deceit.
And in fact, if we had known the truth, I don't know, how many people have said to you, well, we have to do something because of 9-11?
I mean, that's kind of the average...
Changed everything.
That's the Joe Blow response, this JQ citizens' notion in their head that the wars and the foreign policies that we have that are supporting dictators and places all over, especially the Middle East, is that that's a response to this fear of terrorism that stems from 9-11.
And most of it, if they actually knew the facts, if there was a way to get the facts out to people about what truly was...
Yes, there were people that flew planes into buildings.
I mean, this did exist, but let's explain who this was and what our government did to enable this to happen or fail to act to allow it to happen.
And now maybe we can fix some of those problems.
Instead, Bush administration says, let's launch wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, and that somehow will solve.
And we're seeing the blowback now from these terrible, mistaken policies starting now to affect American citizens.
And it's just so frustrating to be ten years later and still have such a lack of truth about the true problems and the true issues.
Well, you know, I think part of it is just outrage, fatigue.
If the people can't pull Egypt and rise up and do something when it came out that there were no warehouses full of sarin, much less some advanced nuclear weapons program in Iraq, when it came out that they were torturing people to death, when it came out they were slapping all our phones, reading all our emails, you name it, the outrages, just the most basic ones, the ones that John Q. Public, that everybody knows, have been going on.
If they can't get mad about that, then how can they get mad about even being lied to about September 11th?
Which by the way, I think part of this too is that the kooks, and I'm sorry to pick this fight because I hate to do it, the kooks have muddied the water on 9-11 where it's just so full of muck, the missile that hit the Pentagon, and the hologram airplanes that crashed into the buildings, like Morgan Reynolds says and all this, and there's so much mud that people, real journalists, people who are really interested in, well who really did know what, and what did they know, and did they really deliberately turn a blind eye or not, just don't even want to mess with it, because they'll be thrown in with a bunch of lunatics.
Right.
Even, I'm wondering now about this story, which is so credible, I mean this is coming from a former GS-12 translator, and even Mueller, even FBI Director Mueller was surprised, there's a quote from him saying, I was surprised that the 9-11 Commission didn't ask me about this.
So obviously someone else got to the 9-11 Commission and says, hey we're going to hush this up, obviously that happened, because Mueller, the FBI Director was surprised he wasn't questioned about it.
I mean that's how incredible, and how credible the original information was.
And you're right, credible information, real evidence, sometimes gets messed up in all the various theories out there, and I've always said that they, it seems to me, of course it was the Moussaoui case that was an example of this, but it seems to me that what was known before 9-11, this level of pre-9-11 intelligence, could have been also from foreign intelligence agencies, supposedly our ally intelligence agencies like Mossad and ISI.
And the chances, in fact this translator says that they already know, he says, ISI knows.
And so the chance that we're not getting information from those foreign intelligence agencies is pretty minimal, and yet you would never know this from reading the 9-11 Commission report, it just simply blacks all of that out.
Yeah, well and I'm not one of them, but there are a lot of Americans who lost somebody that they cared a lot about that day.
You know, it was a long time ago, but still, I mean to think that there are people inside, as the WikiLeaks have revealed even more, I guess maybe we'll never see the 28 pages, but Saudi princes have been financing Al-Qaeda, and not just to protect your money, but apparently because they like it.
You have still the unresolved question about General Mahmoud Sen and the $100,000, I believe that's still unresolved, by way of Saeed Shaikh to the hijackers just before the attack.
And it seems to me like people are getting away with murder, while a bunch of innocent people are paying the price, like Thomas Friedman said, well we just have to go kick in doors from Baghdad to Basra to show we mean business, but the people who actually are responsible are still scot-free.
Right, and people are still, the war profiteers and media moguls are still making money.
I'm going to tie this to WikiLeaks, because I think that this is the key thing.
This weekend you had the New York Times editor writing a real disparaging hit piece on Julian Assange, and really the whole notion of the idea of information and truth.
I mean, he really thinks that everything is politics, it almost seems like he himself had written an op-ed saying, I'm in the war hawk club now, the editor, Bill Keller.
He wrote that op-ed, I'm in the hawk club now, in February of 2003, so he's extremely biased.
And he seems to put all of these issues about war, you know, peace and war, and getting it right, obviously accuracy, facts really matter.
It's one thing to go to war with a country that has declared war on you, and has actually done a war, you know, had an aggressive act of violence, but it's quite another thing to launch a war on a country that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attack.
And what you see now is this transcends political parties, really transcends.
We should have good conservatives out there who say, yeah, you know, facts do matter.
Where are our good conservatives who want accuracy in both criminal justice as well as foreign policy?
Yeah, we need law and order.
Except when it comes to government, they can do anything they want to anyone they want.
That's conservatism, I guess.
All right, well, listen, we're all out of time, but I thank you very much for spending your time this morning with us, Colleen.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Colleen Rowley, you can find her at the Huffington Post.
And read her letter to the Senate in O2, you'll like it.
We'll be right back.
