07/12/13 – Coleen Rowley – The Scott Horton Show

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Our first guest on the show today is Colleen Rowley.
You know her as the FBI lawyer who tried to get a FISA warrant to search Musawi's belongings.
And if they had allowed her to do so back in August of 2001, she could have traced his connections to the ringleaders of the 9-11 plot and probably stopped that attack.
I'd give it about a 90-something percent chance, but the supervisors wouldn't let her do that, her and her colleagues.
One of whom actually wrote in the memos, this guy, Musawi, I think he might want to try to crash into the World Trade Center.
He was just speculating, but pretty keen on the ball there.
Welcome back to the show, Colleen.
Good to talk to you.
Yes, thanks for having me.
And just let me correct slightly that this was actually the agents in our office who were doing this fighting with headquarters.
It was not me personally.
I was the whistleblower eight and a half months afterwards that led to the inspector general investigation of what had happened.
Otherwise, you know, we could still be in the dark about that whole occurrence and otherwise it was correct.
It just was not me personally before 9-11.
Oh, I see.
Well, but you were the lawyer who had to basically approve the agents, like tell them to, yeah, go ahead and talk to the supervisor about going to the court, right?
That's right.
But the agents were so astute that in two days, you know, this, of course, whatever you want to call it, disinformation that 9-11 could not have been prevented.
All of the facts are on the opposite side.
This agent walked into my office, called me actually the night he arrested, called me on the night they arrested Musawi already realizing that what they had, you know, was a terrorist suspect.
Then two days later, they had put this all in writing, sent it off to France to try to get more information, and the agent identified the exact statutes that were later charged.
You know, the high-level church offs of the world took years to figure this out, and this agent had figured it out in about two or three days.
So in any event, you know, one of these days we'll get a luxury of perhaps realizing the truth about stuff instead of continuing on to the post-9-11 nonsense that continues to go on.
Well, now, I'm trying to remember if it was something that you wrote or something that somebody wrote about you or that, you know, tangentially applied here about the Boston bombing and how some of the incriminating information against Musawi and his brother, the stuff that should have been plenty good for the court that we have reason to believe at a lower-than-probable-cause standard, especially, that these guys have ties to foreign terrorist groups.
It was ties to Chechen jihadists, but the Chechen jihadists are the pets of the Americans.
And so, and maybe Louis Freeh had a specific role to play politically in that or something.
Could you elaborate about that angle?
Yeah, the neocons have gone out and the Chechen group, there's a group called Americans, I think, for Peace in Chechnya.
You'll always find Woolsey, the former CIA director, involved in these groups.
He was also involved in the group that took lots of money from the Mujahideen Kalk, which is a rebel group that was a terrorist group, too, on our U.S. own list.
But there are groups of high-level officials with neocon leanings, and you'll always find Woolsey, Rudy Giuliani, trying to think of some of the others.
And they curry favor with rebel groups in Chechnya, in Iran, certainly before that it was the Charlie Wilson war situation, and others, other places.
Because what they're trying to do is topple regimes and sow insurrection.
So they make these, the theory is the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
That theory.
And of course, this means that there is no real principled definition of terrorism.
Because if you have a principled definition of a group that is killing civilians for political purposes, the MAK, the Chechen group, and going back to the 9-11, that Chechen group was at the time headed up by a guy named Ibn al-Khattab.
And Moussaoui was directly connected to Ibn al-Khattab.
He had fought with the Chechens, he had recruited for Ibn al-Khattab, and that was known.
That was not in dispute.
The dispute that arose was how you say Moussaoui is acting on behalf of a foreign power.
The mistake was our headquarters did not consider the Chechen rebel group, or the group of Chechens, Chechen terrorists to be terrorists.
That was number one.
And number two, they had not read a key memo in April of 2001, five months before 9-11, this key memo was out there that was directed to Louis Freeh, and it went to nine other assistant directors, one of whom was right in the chain of command with the Moussaoui case, and they claim they did not read that memo afterwards.
The memo said Osama bin Laden and Ibn al-Khattab are heavily entwined and are going to commit a terrorist act.
I mean, it's the main, when you realize the true facts about 9-11, the real remedy afterwards was simply to order these officials to read the documents that were coming to them, the important documents.
That was one of the main remedies.
And in fact, as far as I know, that's never been done.
And I can name other instances of exactly the same mistake that these officials afterwards claimed that they did not read.
That occurred with the Phoenix memo, asking headquarters to check flight schools.
It also occurred in the Moussaoui case where the legal counsel, the head legal counsel, he implied he had read the Minnesota Declaration, but in fact, it turns out he had relied simply on a short verbal briefing.
So in any, I know we're way distracted on this every time you ask me, it's because people don't have, the majority of the American people don't have any understanding of what the truth is and how these reckless errors were made.
And in fact, that's why they want to launch wars, they want to launch warrantless monitoring, they want to launch torture, all of these terrible, stupid things that have happened since 9-11, because they don't really know they were misled by officials afterwards who are trying to cover their own butts, by the way.
Right.
Well, and now here goes to, and by the way, people, you can go back and search my name and Colleen Rowley's or just go to my website, scowhorton.org.
We've done a whole interview or two about 9-11 specifically, but here's a big tie-in to our current topic today, which is the new head of the FBI, James Comey.
And you wrote this great piece for the New York Times questions for the FBI nominee.
And I forget now whether you mentioned this in here, but this is so extremely important to me.
This is where I'm starting off.
And that is the Khobar Towers attack in 1996, which was an al-Qaeda attack, which I think even William Perry confesses now and others confess now was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that did that.
But the politics, especially Louis Freeh and his politics, mandated that the Israelis would prefer that we blame Iran.
So they made up this ridiculous thing about Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah did it, which was completely not the case.
And Senator Sessions just praised James Comey in the hearing the other day for you're the guy who got it wrong and indicted Iranian Hezbollah in court for that attack.
And that's one of those things where, you know, if they had told the truth about what was going on there, it was the anniversary of George H.W. Bush's putting combat forces on the ground in the Arabian Peninsula.
If they had told the truth about what was going on there back in 1996, we'd had a whole different run up to 9-11 with the embassy attacks and the coal and the attempted millennium plot.
And I mean, we'd have been living in an entirely different world except because the politics were we have to preempt any possibility of rapprochement with Iran.
We'll go ahead and level this false accusation against them.
Yeah, I think that's correct.
From what I know, Louis Freeh rushed that indictment.
I think he announced it on the day he was retiring.
It was the day before he rushed it because he wanted to take credit.
I actually attended some of the family's meetings, one major meeting of the victim's families with Louis Freeh.
He arranged this big affair at FBI headquarters that and also Perry came to the defense secretary at the time.
And it was a big deal.
And it was always there was always he claimed he was being forthright.
But I could I could see the same thing was going on where they were jumping.
What's the word?
They were reaching for straws to find suspects at the time.
Saudi Arabia was not at all cooperative.
And they they that that hampered the investigation.
And I think that's correct.
I don't think that this was right at all.
By the way, you better to call if I just interject here real quick from the the PBS Frontline documentary about John O'Neill, the Al Qaeda obsessed counterterrorism FBI agent from New York, that he got in trouble with Louis Freeh because he used a bad word when he said the Saudis are blowing smoke up your ass, boss.
It wasn't the it wasn't Hezbollah.
It was these Al Qaeda guys.
And that Louis Freeh pretended that, oh, I can't believe you use the A word in my presence when and that was the end of that trail of evidence.
Right, right.
Yeah, I think that's correct.
And Comey is very much a team player.
So he's always going to go along.
You can see this over and over in his responses.
He you know, he has this public media perception that he's a he's a bit of a whistleblower himself having stood up that one time in the hospital room.
But if you really know the full story behind that, it was less of a substantive objection to warrantless monitoring than it was merely to the legal footing, to the legal rationale that obviously probably John, you and Addington had come up, John, you and Addington favored unbridled executive, inherent executive authority to override Congress in the court.
This was a an unbelievable theory that once you have a war going on, the president has unbridled power to override the Congress in the court.
That was you.
And I think Addington as well, Cheney's legal counsel.
So after 9-11, those legal memos that that legalized all of these previously illegal things had the wrong legal rationale.
When you get to 2004, Jack Goldsmith takes over and he says, we can find a better legal way that will be stronger.
And his way, it seems like, was putting these, you know, abusive, terrible constitutional abuses in the authorization to use military force of October 2001.
So this is just a bit of a deduction or a conclusion from reading the IG report.
But again, there's a huge problem with the public perception believing that James Comey is kind of a hero whistleblower when in fact what he was actually disputing was to make the legal, the warrantless monitoring stronger and more, more legally based on the authorization to go to war.
Wow.
Hello?
So, yeah, no, that's a that's a very important point there, because in fact, that whole I forget where I read the best account of this.
I think it was in Bamford's book or something.
It really sounds like the scene out of a movie where Comey went and had even the very sick Ashcroft and Mueller, the head of the FBI, all threatening to resign in an unprecedented Saturday night massacre is kind of a thing, only worse over it and whatever.
But then, like you're saying, it really was a matter of dotting I's and crossing T's.
Don't go with the president is the commander in chief and that's all you need to know theory.
Go with the Congress passed the authorization to use military force and that's all you need to know theory.
Right.
But really, if it was any kind of substantive change to what the NSA was actually doing, we don't know what that might have been.
Right.
That's right.
That's the sixty four million dollar question that Comey refuses, not only refused on the Tuesday hearing, but he has repeatedly refused and he he claims that it's classified.
If anything, though, the legal rationale for the NSA's warrantless monitoring has undergone three different changes, major changes, because, you know, why, why, why do they have to keep finding new legal rationales for this?
Because there is no way that you can legalize something that is completely violates the Fourth Amendment.
The first one looks in all fairness, standing up against unbridled, inherent executive power is is something that, you know, we should give credit for Comey to.
But on the other hand, no congressperson, when they passed in October 2001, voted to go to war on Afghanistan, none of them realized that they were also voting to repeal the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and allow this massive data collection on Americans.
If they had been told if anyone had been told in Congress that when you when you vote for war on an Afghanistan, it also means that, you know, that's that's that's what I keep mentioning, because this U.S. now has also been used for drone assassination as a source of legal authority as well.
Yeah, well, and that's important point, too, that when you talk about repealing FISA, that's because FISA doesn't just authorize a bunch of sub Fourth Amendment searching and that kind of thing.
It is a criminal statute that says you have to do it this way or you go to prison.
It's a felony statute.
You know, the hearing record just closed, you know, it's kind of unusually short.
First of all, it was only two and a half hour hearing and a lot of the senators did not ask the questions in my New York Times, the questions I suggested.
And I was trying to get at this whole issue, by the way, in there.
They they did focus a little bit on his having authorized waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
And to their credit, two or three of the senators, especially Al Franken, read the whole gory, gruesome description of being shackled with your arms and your feet to the floor, wearing a diaper for up to one hundred and eighty hours, seven and a half days when he read that and then asked and then asked, call me, is that torture?
I mean, Comey had no other choice but to admit, you know, to say, yes, I guess it is torture.
Unbelievable.
So they did an OK job on that, but they didn't ask him to explain why he had signed off on those things in 2005.
These are complete no brainers that these are illegal.
Right.
Well, and pardon me, that is it so out of bounds to think that James Comey is a guilty felon in a co-conspiracy, a co-conspirator in a plot to break the law and torture people.
Why isn't he in prison?
And meanwhile, Franken and the rest of them are going to vote to confirm him to be the head of the FBI.
The only question is, do you kind of regret it now or some ridiculous thing like that?
If I planned with some other private citizens to torture somebody and to come up with excuses for it, they would put me in prison.
In fact, Comey would put me in prison.
Mm hmm.
Yep, absolutely.
You know, I you have to kind of grade on the curve.
So I'm kind of a relativist in some ways.
This was an improvement over the Mukasey confirmation.
I mean, you can't say that much.
It's a low bar, by the way, to be an improvement over the Mukasey confirmation.
But that's like being a better second death than Rumsfeld.
That's right.
I mean, that's about all you can say with what they did is two and a half hours.
Our one senator, Klobuchar, just made small talk and bragged about herself.
She used up her time.
And then they had a couple of days to come up with further questions.
I this morning, I actually sent an 11th hour plea to Leahy staffers asking that they keep the record open for at least another day or two so that senators could actually formulate some additional questions.
Compare there's even a you know, what I'm saying is there's even a bad comparison between the Comey confirmation hearing and the Brennan one, because at least in the Brennan one, they use their leverage a little bit to try to get the drone assassination memos.
And they did keep it open.
They postponed once or twice.
Look at the difference with Comey.
Comey's, you know, has about the same.
He authorized waterboarding.
He authorized warrantless monitoring.
And here's probably the most troublesome thing about Comey.
He still believes in indefinite detention without recourse to trial.
He was the main spokesman for the Padilla case of holding him incommunicado.
And actually, they did exercise sensory deprivation and other lighter forms of torture on Padilla.
He didn't have an attorney for two years.
This this one, they did not get Comey to even say he was sorry for like like the waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
They didn't even because he still believes in that.
And he he gave a speech here in 2009 where he said we have to find a way to incapacitate suspects, even American suspects who we don't have enough evidence to try in court or a foreign government gives us secret evidence that can't be made public or for other reasons.
He said this in 2009.
Now, those those questions should be further delved into.
And again, I think the hearing the the record probably just closed a few minutes ago unless my my 11th hour appeal, you know, Hail Mary was successful.
I don't think there's even going to be a chance now for a senator to ask those additional questions.
Man, yeah, now on that Padilla thing, that was a very brief rundown of Padilla and mostly kind of on the premise that everybody already knows about that case.
But for people who don't know about that case, you're talking about a guy who was accused of being associated with Al Qaeda, who was arrested on American soil by civilian police and it was turned over to Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet and, as you said, held without a lawyer.
So this is the ultimate violation.
What they did to Padilla is the ultimate repudiation of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
I mean, there's just absolutely no way in the world that you could say that that is legal, what they did to him.
Right.
This is actually repealing due process, which goes back 800 years to the Magna Carta, because what you're saying is you can hold somebody without charges, without evidence, without an attorney, without obviously anything.
And it's a precursor of what the fear was in the passing in 2011, the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, which explicitly says Americans can be arrested for these detained.
I should say that's the word detained, obviously indefinitely, without charges, et cetera, by the military.
And so Padilla was the exact example where they did this.
Now, the court later found that he did have that right to habeas corpus, which put them into a quandary.
And then they had to charge him with something other than what they claimed he was being held for, which was the dirty bomb.
And so the Padilla case should be definitely put back into the Pandora box.
Unfortunately, Comey believes in it.
He believes that this is the way to go.
And it's what I call the law of war, which has also been greatly subverted.
The law of war is trumping the rule of law.
And, you know, his only his only comment was, we hope it's a rare case.
You know, I don't know of any other case than Padilla.
So that's his only kind of retracting slightly was it's a rare case.
But, you know, it's all it takes is a little more of this panic.
And all of a sudden they're they're doing it on a more massive scale.
You know, even that the roundup of Japanese during World War Two, that has never legally Supreme Court held that it was OK at the time.
And so when people think that could never happen again, well, no, it could happen because it's never actually been we never had a court reverse itself on that, on the on the detention of Japanese.
So this is this is why we have a lot of work ahead of us, especially in getting this information out so that people like me that are in positions of power will not attempt to use to do that again.
Well, I mean, the thing is, too, it wasn't just Padilla and it was I mean, it is relatively rare, I guess, but they did it to Al-Mahri, too.
And Al-Mahri, he is not an American citizen, but just as well.
He is a U.S. person under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
No doubt about that.
Yep.
I forgot that one.
Yep.
You know.
And, you know, they rounded up.
Remember, they rounded up.
In fact, I don't know.
You didn't help them, did you, with the mass Ash Cross mass roundup of Muslims after September 11th under the bogus material witness statute?
Well, if we go back to 9-11, our office and I was actually the person sending this report every day that had to tell headquarters, FBI headquarters, how many people we had detained.
And every single day for, I think, three, four months.
And it got to be over a thousand nationally.
And every single day when I would fax this, it was mandated.
One time I forgot to send it in at the end of the day and they called me at midnight at home.
And every single day I kept writing one, one, one.
That meant the total.
And that was the only that was Moussaoui.
It referred to Moussaoui and it was the only person who actually was eventually charged and was actually convicted in criminal court as being connected to the 9-11.
Our office, you know, and all, I guess I shouldn't be bragging here, but our office was the only office who really did this right.
The, the leads that came in to go out and detain people, even when they had leads like this, and sometimes there is circumstantial evidence, whatever, but our agents did not just say, run out and grab them and put them in jail.
And then walk away.
What they did is they talked to them.
Uh, in one case, I think there was a Pakistani or something official that they had some circumstantial evidence.
So that agent, uh, stayed in a hotel.
Uh, he kind of like, he kind of, you know, was with the guy for a few hours, you know, or, or the better part of a day until they found out that his story matched up, but they became friends because they were eating together and whatever.
He didn't put him in jail and say, I'm throwing away the key because, you know, if somebody gave me a lead, uh, he actually did it the right way.
He, he, uh, you know, the little bit of suspicion that existed and he talked to the guy and he stayed with him for a little while and they ended up to be friends.
So that's the way these things, when the American public is misled to believe that there's not a right way to balance liberty and security, that you have to use these draconian illegal methods because, uh, you have to sacrifice the law.
That's, that's a part of a utilitarian logic.
And actually it's, it's the worst, uh, most faulty thing in the world.
And you heard all, this is what I was, I was watching that hearing and, and in about half of our senators preface their remarks to call me with, it's a struggle between, uh, the law and, uh, and security.
It's a struggle.
It's a, it's a trade-off between constitutional rights.
Where is the balance between privacy and, and security?
Every one of them use those words, trade-off, struggle, balance.
Um, I thought we already had a bill of rights.
Yeah.
What, when you do illegal actions, there is no trade-off because what happens is ultimately it harms security.
I don't know how to say this so many times.
If people understood that torturing Guantanamo, for instance, very illegal to put all those people there without charges that has actually increased the threat, it didn't lower our, our, our, our threat, uh, of, uh, being harmed.
It increased it because now it's, it's helping recruiting and everything else.
And you can find massive warrantless monitoring.
What it does is it adds irrelevant data to this giant haystack where you're looking for the rare Abdulmutallab or Sarnoff is a perfect example in Boston.
They're collecting, they're off running around collecting information on occupy protesters, irrelevant information so that they can get their statistics for putting all this data in.
And meanwhile, Russia tip that comes in that this guy is connected to Chechens gets short shift.
This, this has happened over and over again.
Um, the American people have to understand there's no trade-off between following these, these laws that make sense and work.
The only reason do.
Well, I mean, the thing of it is there is a trade-off, but we already made it when we passed constitution and created this government in the first place, allow them to exist in the first place.
And the limit on their power is the bill of rights.
And it's supposed to be absolute.
And I'm sorry that we're all out of time.
We got to go.
We got 15 seconds here.
Thank you.
Colleen rally.
Everybody in 2002 time person of the year for courageous whistleblowing.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Bye.
Bye.
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Scott Horton here.
Everything.
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Well, maybe you should.
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No, man.
I'm late.
Sure.
Hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Oh, okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Oh, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my.
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The bill of rights.
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card size copy of the bill of rights from security edition.com.
Therefore exposing the TSA is a bunch of Liberty destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything, sir.
Now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the bill of rights, security edition from security edition.com.
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