I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Colleen Rowley.
She was Times Person of the Year in 2002 because she was an FBI lawyer in Minneapolis, and her team had arrested Zacharias Moussaoui, and as lore has it, and I think it's true, they'd only been allowed to do their job, and look at this guy's computer, it would have led him right to some of the Al-Qaeda pilot hijackers from September 11th living in Florida at the time, and they could have stopped the attack, but they were not allowed to do their job because Washington, D.C. said no, and so then Colleen Rowley came out and blew the whistle and told the whole story and warned the government you shouldn't attack Iraq because, boy, you want to talk about making our terrorism problem worse.
All that was in her big letter to the Senate that was published in Memory Service May 2002 and made a big splash and has had so much great stuff to say and has written so many great things, especially for ConsortiumNews.com over the last 15 years since, too.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Oh, very well.
That was a great summary.
You know, it's been agonizing to live through 20 years of just nothing, but I don't even know how to describe it.
It's just like one domino hits another one.
It's kind of, it reminds me of the Pete Seeger song, Waste Deep in the Big Muddy.
You know, it's like we're eyeballed deep in the big muddy and the big fools still say to keep pushing on.
It's incredible that no one can figure out when really terrible mistakes and fiascos, some of them very reckless, and no one can figure that out afterwards and correct them, but instead just keep pushing on.
And that's the, I think, where we find ourselves right now, especially with the Afghanistan ending, although perhaps there's a moment, a short moment of recognition.
You know, we can hope about that.
But it's really sad to see that none of, very few, if any of the truth came out about 9-11.
I shouldn't say that.
I say some did.
Some truth eventually came out in all of these official inquiries.
The Congressional Joint Intelligence Committee inquiry was pretty good.
They actually did investigate Saudi Arabia's role, although it was blacked out for years and years and years.
And then Zelikow, when he did the 9-11 commission, he just totally omitted it.
And of course, there was an Inspector General report, hundreds of pages long, that my memo led directly to.
And even in that Inspector General investigation, we now know that one of the agents who was assigned to the CIA counterterrorism unit was told he had to lie.
And that was, again, about the CIA's failure to warn the FBI when they knew two of the hijackers had come into California.
I mean, all these years later, they still have not uncovered a lot of it.
I barely knew some of it.
Eight months after 9-11, of course, I knew a lot about the Moussaoui fiasco, where our headquarters had not allowed an emergency FISA request, even though those agents absolutely knew this from the start, and they really had so prescient that they identified the same criminal statutes that Moussaoui ended up being convicted of.
This was a day after they had taken him into custody that they actually identified the criminal statutes that he later was convicted of.
I know one of your agents even speculated that this guy might be trying to crash into the World Trade Center tower in New York.
Yeah, that was in an argument with headquarters when they refused to take this.
It turned out that the legal unit at headquarters, they lied initially about it, but their unit chief, who was a former Marine, I don't know what he was, Marine officer of some sort, he actually initially, what's the word, he didn't tell the truth.
He had not even read the declaration, the emergency declaration sent in by the Minneapolis office.
He had only listened to the supervisor give him a five-minute oral briefing, oh, yeah, they don't know anything in Minneapolis.
They think there's something here, but there's nothing.
That was the oral briefing instead of reading the actual facts for himself, but he didn't own up to that until a lot later.
I think, of course, there's always this human tendency to not tell the truth after something tragic and terrible happens.
That's always the case.
Obviously, everybody's like that.
Something bad happens.
The first inclination is not to tell the truth about how that happened, of course, to protect people and your friends and everybody else, but you would think after 20 years that there would at least be some idea that we have to get to the bottom of some of these mistakes.
As I've been saying, these were really simple mistakes to correct.
Information is bottled up inside of agencies, not shared even inside of agencies, and certainly not shared between agencies, and then, of course, not shared with the public, which isn't me saying this.
This is the 9-11 commission finding.
Their so-called failure to connect the dots was a threefold thing, that there was failure to share information inside of agencies.
I'm still learning things myself about some of these debacles of lack of information sharing.
For instance, Tenet was one of the rare occasions where he knew a lot about the Moussaoui case, probably because his own bin Laden counterterrorism unit had briefed him.
He was given a briefing on August, I think, 23rd or 24th, obviously, what, two, three weeks before 9-11, Islamic extremists learns to fly.
On the day of 9-11, when he was told that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, he said, oh, I wonder if it's that guy learning to fly in Minnesota.
First thing out of his mouth.
Here it did go up to the top, the whole director of central intelligence, and yet he still failed to act.
There are all kinds of other, oh, man, there must be dozens of these cases where officials did not even, either they didn't read the memos, intelligence memos that were sent directly to their name, it was addressed to them, and then afterwards they say, I didn't read it.
Kenneth said none of his officials read these key memos about the two hijackers coming into California, when in fact it looks like most of them did read it, but he then, of course, could lie afterwards and say, no, they never read it.
The same thing happened in the FBI.
I was made aware, I think there was an article a couple years ago, because it was an exhibit in the Moussaoui trial.
There was this really important intelligence memo, April of 2001, written in April 2001, and the title of that memo in the FBI that was sent directly to eight or nine, the director and eight or nine of his top assistants, and it was entitled, Chechen terrorist leader Abu Khattab and Osama bin Laden are entwined and going to attack the United States, and then it had all the substantive details underneath that.
Now the reason they said that the agents in Minneapolis didn't have probable cause was because the intelligence that came directly from France, he was on their terrorist list, was that he was recruiting and working for Abu Khattab, the Chechen terrorist leader.
The headquarters was arguing, well, the Chechens, they're kind of our assets.
They're not terrorists.
They've never been in a FISA document before, and so that was later determined to be a mistake by the inquiries that the Chechen group was actually a terrorist.
But besides that, besides that, here's this memo from five months before that says Khattab and bin Laden are buddies.
They were working together during Charlie Wilson's war when the United States was funding and arming the terrorists in, or what do you call them, the jihadists in Afghanistan in order to, Zbigniew Brzezinski's big plan to push out the Soviet Union.
So they were actually aligned with each other.
So there were so many different ways that 9-11 could have been prevented.
It's not just one way.
Obviously when they find out that Moussaoui was being paid by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's right-hand man, as was Mohammed Adda and all the other terrorist suspects, that was one way.
That takes a little while to find out those connections.
But then the Phoenix memo said we have to do a direct investigation of all the terrorists in flight schools.
So for instance, Moussaoui in this flight school here in the Twin Cities, he stood out like a sore thumb to the point where two of the flight instructors separately decided to become whistleblowers and go against their own flight school in calling the FBI.
So each of them called separately about an hour between each other.
And they got into all kinds of trouble with their employer for doing that.
But they said, you know, he's the most suspicious student we've ever had.
Well, if you, in hindsight, when you start asking the questions at the other flight schools, so for instance, Mohammed Adda, he stood out like a sore thumb as well.
You know, so that's another way that this could have been prevented.
But the easiest way it could have been prevented was just to have warned the Federal Aviation Administration that they needed to shut the cockpit doors so that whether it's a crazy person or an unruly passenger or a terrorist, they cannot get into the cockpit.
And that was actually broached even before 9-11 due to other incidents, not necessarily terrorism, but just due to drunk passengers or, you know, people that were, had some domestic terrorism or whatever it was.
So that had been broached, but it cost a few hundred dollars to make sure that the cockpit doors would not open.
And so that was the easiest thing.
And in fact, our agents insisted that FAA be warned.
But what happened in that case too was headquarters watered down the warnings and FAA did not follow through or warn anybody or do anything.
Let me ask you something here, because especially this is an interesting question 20 years later, I guess, that the kinds of things you describe are such mediocre failures and so many of them and leading to such a catastrophe that then had such consequences after that, too.
And so even from the very beginning, people said, and especially when you look at how cynically the Bush administration exploited this tragedy, that it seems like the CIA and the FBI and the NSA don't like each other and don't cooperate well, it's just a limited hangout, that they must have let this happen deliberately or even made it happen deliberately.
Because how can you explain this many cops and spies being this bad at such an important job?
And I'm not trying to strawman it.
I'm I'm trying to make it like a fair question.
And people think that it must have been a deliberate blind eye.
Colleen, what do you think about that?
You know, I think I have I keep an open mind about this.
And I and I also will caveat that I'm aware of a lot of for your for your listeners, if they don't know what Peter principle is, it is jaw dropping.
So the Peter principle is pretty amazing, especially in the FBI.
It was bad because no one wanted to go into management.
So people that were at headquarters were often like they were ambitious.
Obviously, they raised their hand to go.
But the best and most competent agents actually did stay in the field.
So we would always talk amongst ourselves about these empty suit officials who, frankly, when they tried to go through the revolving door after retirement, even Louis Freeh was like this.
Louis Freeh went through the revolving door to a seven figure job at a credit card company.
And I think he was fired after a short while for incompetence.
And the same thing happened with some of my of the other edicts, the assistant director in New York.
He was fired from security like a short while after.
So there was that problem.
So you can't deny that this Peter principle where, you know, they always say you rise two ranks above where you're competent.
But actually, in some cases, I think it's five or six ranks from what I viewed in the government.
OK, so besides that, though, I think it would have been possible because the CIA knew so much about this, having monitored that Al Qaeda summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
And then when you there are some researchers and they've tracked some of the documentation, not all of it has been released.
But like emails back and forth between Tenet and and his head of his bin Laden unit at the time, a guy named I think it was Blee, B-L-E-E, who was a, you know, a stalwart CIA.
Now, it's possible some of these people, I think here's what I think is possible.
There are some times when some of these high ranking officials think they have the green light.
So they they're they're not exactly rogues because they they actually think, oh, yeah, you gave me a wink there.
So when when they think they have the green light, then they take it on themselves to give plausible deniability to the top echelon.
And so I think this I've seen this happen.
Of course, some of this happened with the torture program and they were trying to keep, you know, Bush, the so-called White House principals from or the White House principals were trying to keep the president from knowing all of the details about waterboarding and torture, et cetera.
So that that can happen.
It obviously has happened before.
And I so I would not put it past some of these people who were very connected to like, for instance, Tenet, I didn't know this until recently either.
But Tenet was really close with Bandar bin Sultan, who was the U.S. ambassador.
His nickname was Bandar Bush because he was also close with the Bush family.
And if Saudi Arabia knew a lot of this, they were tracking.
In fact, I think Bandar bin Sultan actually once commented that Saudi Arabia had been tracking all of most of the of the 9-11 attackers.
They'd been tracking them and they knew these things.
So then the question arises, well, what did you pass on then to people like Tenet or et cetera?
So, again, there there's there's motives here.
It took how many years for the 9-11 families to learn just the most meager information about the Joint Intelligence Committee inquiry, the information that came out linking Bandar bin Sultan and some of the other Saudis to the helping and supporting the hijackers when they came into the into the United States.
So that took how many years?
And then it took an act of Congress.
It took an act of Congress to allow the 9-11 families to even be allowed to sue Saudi Arabia.
And even then, Obama vetoed the legislation and had to be overruled.
I mean, this is quite an incredible situation after all this time that the truth about 9-11 is still somewhat, I would say that I definitely agree with the 9-11 commission about the failure to share information.
I think that is absolutely true.
And I've seen this and there are reasons for it.
Lots of reasons.
These bureaucracies are really bad this way.
But there is also the possibility that there was a little bit worse agenda.
The, you know, the the neocon project for the new American century.
If we just get our new Pearl Harbor, we can go on the war path and start our regime change operations in the in the Mideast.
So there's certainly that's in the background.
There's certainly that's in the background.
So I'm a Gareth Porterian on this, which is that the real, you know, kind of obvious thing in front of all of us here is that the narrative inside the White House was the neocons and the Rumsfeldians saying, don't listen to the CIA yapping about Al Qaeda.
They want us to go to Afghanistan.
How the hell are we ever going to get to Baghdad if we're stuck in Afghanistan?
So blow that off.
What are they going to do, set off a truck bomb overseas somewhere or something?
Keep your eye on the ball.
Going to Baghdad.
And then once it happens, they go, oh, yeah, I mean, Saddam could give weapons to Osama, you know, in the most cynical way.
But that that, you know, that kind of dividing of their attention or distracting of their attention in that way is easier explained simply by people possessing other agendas rather than really believing that somebody is going to knock a tower down around here soon.
That's that'd be a pretty big act of treason.
I don't think there's even a neocon or a Cheney that has the courage to go that far.
But I'll tell you what, the dog that didn't bark about this, honestly, to me, is from the FBI or the dog that did bark or but bark only growled in one direction or something.
Because some FBI agents talked to Greg Pallast in November one and they were mad as hell and said we could have stopped this attack.
God dang it.
But you know why we couldn't was because the Bush team told us back off the Saudis.
And that meant that was taken really severely.
And it shut down all these multiple investigations into terrorist financing inside the United States and all the money trails that these, you know, accountant FBI agents were tracking.
But the reason why and they didn't believe they weren't suspicious at all at the time that, oh, that's because Bush and PNAC wanted an attack to happen.
It was because they were worried that all these money trails went back to their friends in Houston who, you know, had all these close ties with the Saudis.
And, you know, Prince Turkey and the Saudi government have been paying all this protection money to al-Qaeda to not attack inside the kingdom.
And then, you know, a lot of that money was washing around.
And a lot of these people have business ties to Enron and whatever other, you know, companies down there in Houston.
And so let's just not look into all that.
That was one thing.
And they didn't think that S.O.B.
Bush, he wanted this to happen, which you would think that they might think that if that was actually what they were stuck in the middle of.
You know what I mean?
But it didn't feel that way to them.
And the other one is Ali Soufan.
And I kind of have my problems with him because I get his daily email and he makes me growl.
But I do think he's essentially an honest guy.
He was FBI agent investigating the coal attack in Yemen.
And he did this interview with Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright, that wrote The Looming Tower.
And it's filmed by Alex Gibney, the famous documentarian.
And he's talking with Doug Miller.
And I'm sorry, the other guy's name, who are the FBI agents who say that they were not allowed.
I'm sorry, Mark Rossini.
Exactly.
Thank you so much.
So it's Doug Miller and Mark Rossini and and Ali Soufan talking.
And they're talking about how they weren't allowed to tell the FBI.
None of these guys are suspicious that this is a let it happen on purpose type thing.
When they tell their story, you can tell you can kind of you could tell these guys that's not what they think happened.
But Soufan tells the most outrageous story out of all of them, even more outrageous than not telling the FBI about the guys in San Diego in a way.
Just in the narrative, the way he tells it, that the day of September 11th, he's called into the embassy in Yemen and, you know, CIA station.
And he goes in the back room and they open up a manila envelope and they show him, as you mentioned, the Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia meeting.
And they have like a I guess like a PowerPoint slide, you know, kind of infographic about it or something.
I think he describes where you can see where one half of this meeting is the USS Cole attack and the other half of the meeting is September 11th.
And he can just see it right there.
Oh, yeah.
Jeez.
You guys might have let us know, you know, thanks a lot for nothing, for telling us too late.
But again, he doesn't think, yeah, because you wanted this to happen.
He thinks, yeah, because that's how it is.
You don't ever tell us anything till it's too late.
Oh, one more thing about that was I used to shoot the show sometimes with Frederick Whitehurst, the FBI crime lab whistleblower.
And I had talked with him about this a few times.
And he told me that, like, listen, the TV kind of idea that if an FBI agent does a good job and takes his work to his boss, that his boss will say, good job, Jenkins, here's some money.
Go and do more of that good work pursuing that.
That just never happens ever, ever.
You don't know what happens to the work that you did.
But if anything goes anywhere, they hand it to somebody else and not you.
And you just get a new job.
And it's like working at McDonald's or something where you're just only responsible for one little piece of a thing.
And there is no kind of broader narrative.
So there is no character in this movie who gets the Florida memos and the Arizona memos and the Minneapolis, Minnesota memos and and the rest of them all and kind of can piece it together.
It's all just sort of inside the FBI or the CIA or anywhere.
It's sort of floating around.
But I don't know.
Anyway.
Yeah, I don't want to oversimplify it or let anybody off the hook either.
But I'm saying that makes sense to me, you know.
No.
And what you're describing is kind of what I was trying to say about individuals in the Peter principle.
The bureaucratic nature of the whole thing is also a problem.
But still, those things can be fixed a lot easier than launching, you know, successive wars in countries that had nothing to do with it.
And and massive surveillance of Americans and torture programs and all the things that were done after 9-11.
Fixing the way administrations are run, accountability, even ensuring that when you read a memo, I mean, this is very easy thing to fix, you know, ensuring that when you did read it, it was initialed off or something so that you later can't say, I didn't read it.
That's it's pretty, pretty basic.
That's a heck of a lot easier than spending trillions of dollars and trying to bring democracy to the Mideast and whatever.
Let me just comment there, though, about the let it happen in Pearl Harbor.
There's also this thing that when these planners, the Pentagon is famous for having backup plans, Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. So that's a smart thing, actually, you know, not to put all your eggs in one basket on Plan A, but think, oh, if that doesn't work, then we go to Plan B. So that's that becomes a way of thinking.
So that when you say if we ever get our new Pearl Harbor, there's somebody says, well, we know we're going to get something.
OK, that's just that's for sure.
You know, we're going to get things happen.
And then the question is, can we, as Karl Rove said, make our own reality?
Can we use any incident, you know, Gulf of Tonkin?
I mean, this is very famous in wars that they can use almost Lusitania.
I mean, on and on and on.
You can use any incident to then get your agenda going.
Hey, they see guns after Katrina.
Nobody blames them for causing the storm or for blowing a few, blow them up, blame them for blowing up the levees or something, but not really.
But they just exploited it anyway and said, we're going door to door.
See what that's like.
Taking people's right.
That's that's the shock.
You know, it's it's what is about the shock doctrine when anything happens in people.
We're seeing it now with Covid.
Actually, I I hate to change the subject to this politically incorrect, but I see we're seeing the way fear can be used with anything to ramp up a completely wrong approach or whatever, you know, completely wrong headed solutions.
You know, I'm very much against the forced mass vaccination project that's going on.
And I don't think it's a solution at all.
You're you're seeing a lot of scientists saying it's not.
But that's I brought up a politically volatile thing.
But it's it's this is what happens.
And so you have that shock doctrine where, you know, anything that happens.
But I want to go back to Gareth Porter, because what you said about the Bush administration not wanting to upset Saudi Arabia.
You know, he did a lot of great investigative work of these earlier Al Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah.
The Kobar Towers.
Uh-huh.
That's right.
Yes.
So once our ally bin Laden and and the other Saudis jihadists that were sent into Afghanistan to do be our proxies and fight with the Mujahideen.
So once that's over and then we we launched that set that first Gulf War, bin Laden apparently wanted to to be involved again.
You know, the jihadists could go and fight, could fight Iraq.
And Saudi Arabia then chose the United States.
And then we kept those bases there.
So there was this motive for Al Qaeda to get mad and start going after military people stationed in Saudi Arabia.
Initially, there was some bombings in Riyadh in 1995.
And then the terrible Kobar Towers bombing of this Air Force dormitory that killed 19 airmen and wounded over 300.
And you're going, this really ties in what we're talking about, how you can pull off a really, you know, completely upside down, twist the facts.
Louis Freeh allowed, he micromanaged that case, and he allowed the Saudis to tell him who to indict.
And of course, the Saudis didn't want to say anything about Al Qaeda.
They wanted to cover that up.
They wanted to indict their enemies, the Iranian connected Shia.
And so on his last day in the office, Louis Freeh made sure that 12 of these Shia Iranian connected people were were indicted for this really terrible terrorist attack in 1996.
And when you read Gareth Porter's, there's a lot of evidence that this was totally wrong.
Then in hindsight, you also see Louis Freeh becoming one of the MEC, whatever it's called, the Mujahideen Kolk, which is this group trying to topple Iran.
And he becomes one of their paid lobbyists, you know, advisors, whatever he is.
So you're seeing a lot of evidence that that whole thing was really cooked up.
And this is even what, five years before nights before 9-11.
Right.
And we had a massive twisting of facts.
Well, listen, and it was so important, too, because who was killed again?
19 American airmen.
And it was bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who did it.
And why?
Because they were airmen.
They were there to bomb Iraq.
And that was the whole deal.
And bin Laden admitted that he did it to Abdel Bari Atwan.
And it was.
And, you know, William Perry, the secretary of defense, was convinced that it was Al Qaeda, not Iranian backed Shia Hezbollah, whatever, as you say.
I didn't know the part about it was his last day in office when he pushed that lie through last day.
But, you know, I remember at that time the big scandal about that.
And this is scandalous in its own little way.
But the scandal about that wasn't even the 19 killed, much less anything about the motive, because, you know, when they blamed it on the this, you know, Iranian Shia back thing, Saudi, whatever, they might as well just blamed it on nothing.
And the thing just went away because that didn't make any sense.
They were going to bomb Tehran over it.
And so they just didn't do anything.
And it mostly just kind of went away.
So the scandal was that there was a lady at a rally who yelled, you suck at Bill Clinton.
And he had her arrested and they held her overnight, or maybe even for two days for yelling, you suck.
And her point was that they didn't have good security at the barracks to protect the guys, you know, sleep in there.
And which was the same thing that already happened.
That should have been a lesson of Beirut.
You have a barracks in a foreign country like that.
You have guys with machine guns at the gate, for God's sake, you know, whatever kind of thing.
And that was her only point.
And she was arrested.
And then that was it.
And that was the whole scandal.
I remember Rush Limbaugh and G Gordon Liddy talked about it for two days each or whatever it was.
And then it went away.
But you know what they didn't talk about was, man, some of these Saudi right wingers want us the hell off of their soil.
And maybe we should be.
Can't we bomb Iraq from our ships in the Persian Gulf?
Come on.
Yeah, I I feel terrible about Khobar Towers because one of those Air Force young man, he was only like 21, was from Minnesota.
And as the victim witness coordinator, I had to, my job, I had to relay all these micromanaged communications from Louis Freeh to the family, to the parents and to his young wife.
And I now realize everything I was telling them was really a lie.
I can't, I even also accompanied them to an in-person briefing at Quantico.
All of the Khobar Tower families went to this direct briefing from Louis Freeh.
And I went with them.
And I'm thinking back to this.
And of course, nobody, they don't know anything that the families didn't know anything.
Can you imagine though, what you're doing?
I mean, the same thing happened with the 9-11 families.
And I think back to being in the room and thinking they're blaming the wrong people.
I had, of course, I had no knowledge at the time, or I probably would have been a whistleblower.
And I would have lost my pension a long time before, later on, because I didn't know that this was that bad.
And I did not know how bad Louis Freeh was at the time.
I knew him personally from New York City, working in the organized crime, and I had no idea that he would turn out so bad.
But I go back to my power corrupts.
And that's the problem is these people can actually start off okay.
But when they're in these environments, they get so corrupted by the money and by the influences and the things that they go around the block, and they say, this is the way I do it.
And Louis Freeh is a prime example of that, because I don't think he started off that bad.
But boy, he's terrible now, along with all the rest of them.
No quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our Institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean.
And no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
I want to go back to something you said about Richard Blee, who I'm not exactly sure what his title was inside the bin Laden unit there.
Maybe he was Sawyer's replacement.
I get them confused.
There's a bunch of different ones.
I think he might have been because he was the head of it.
And there's a lady named Michael and I just get lost.
But anyway, or maybe that's her alias or I don't know how this thing.
But I get all confused.
But I'll tell you this is Ray Nowaleski.
And I have his book and I always say his name wrong.
Sorry, Ray.
I went out to dinner with the guys.
Very nice guy.
And he my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna Horton, helped make his movie Press for Truth back what a long time ago, 10, 12, 13 years ago or something like that.
And so he went and met with Richard Clark.
And, you know, I can only find the Rich Blee podcast one, but I could swear to God that there was a part two of the thing and that it was a video thing on YouTube.
Or maybe I have it confused, but I could swear there's two parts, but I can only find one now.
Anyway, they went and met with Richard Clark and Ray says to the guy, you know, X, Y, Z, about what we now know the CIA knew about the San Diego guys.
And Clark seemingly honestly, I mean, he's got a reason to deny it.
But Clark, you know, he's the White House counterterrorism coordinator guy.
And he's saying, listen, man, I mean, I would stay up to three o'clock in the morning talking on the phone with George Tenet every night gossiping about Al Qaeda stuff.
You know what I mean?
Like this is our life.
And you're telling me that he knew that and he never told me that.
And wow, man, because it was sort of, you know, it wasn't something on YouTube or whatever.
He was being confronted with actual details here.
And he and then his excuse was Tenet kept this all from me.
And then his reasoning was and he was speculating, but his reasoning was they must have been trying to turn these guys and make them double agents inside Al Qaeda.
But then they gave him too much length of rope and then, you know, or lost track of them, stopped, canceled the sting, but then still didn't tell the FBI, you better round these guys up or whatever it was, something along those lines was his interpretation.
But he seemed, you know, I don't know, this just video and some, you know, but he seemed to be honest about how kind of pissed off he was that it's pretty clear now that Tenet knew much more than he had been told at the time when he had every reason to believe at the time that he was being told everything, you know.
Right.
And there was a reason.
I think that actually does make sense.
A lot of sense.
There was a reason for keeping that effort very top secret so that very few people would know what was going on, especially not the FBI.
One one thing is it's basically illegal for the CIA to try to do an informant operation inside a domestic territory.
They're supposed to be doing this abroad, but not inside.
And if they would have something that would overlap from from an operation abroad that then comes into the U.S., at the very least, they were supposed to work with the FBI, not just do this on their own.
So that's one reason for keeping this all hush hush, because this was totally wrong, even if it had worked, even if this if this flipping thing had worked.
And then that so that does make sense.
And it is a reason why it was kept so secret.
The other thing here is informants going south, so-called efforts to develop informants.
In fact, I think al-Awlaki, al-Awlaki was a failed effort.
They approached him.
They tried to blackmail him through sexual incidents, etc.
And he says, no way, I'm getting out of here.
And he went off to Yemen.
But that he was a failed attempt to flip somebody.
And then, of course, you look at the operations of of Whitey Bulger and Scarpa and all of these cases.
And actually, bin Laden is in Abu Khattab are not too different, because when you're operating assets abroad as proxies, then when they turn, things turn, you know, it's you have to figure out if you're the official, how, how can we sell this now?
This was our, this was our guy, but now they have, you know, now they're our enemy, they turn.
So and why did we do this?
Why did we arm them?
Why did we fund them, etc.
So people want to cover up the dirty laundry involved in this whole thing about using, you know, for lack of a better term, informants, assets, proxy forces, oftentimes these go south, it's not uncommon for them to go south.
And certainly, that seems to be what might have happened in California, maybe through one of these Saudi officials, there was some way that they thought they could get their tentacles in there and somehow, you know, somehow get some leverage or something.
But if you actually did a study of how many don't work, and turn bad, and that there's an attempt, it's probably many more times than the successful times.
And again, this is just anecdotal.
But from what I see, there are many more attempts at this that don't work, that do and that actually are successful.
Yeah.
And you'll never hear this from the agencies, because this is their bread and butter.
This is the secret world of agendas.
And again, this whole thing of using different people for different reasons.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I also, you know, to be fair to the truthers, to the real truthers, this probably all sounds like a limited hangout.
And I'm sorry, it's your interview.
But I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for these people or whatever.
I accuse them all the way to the degree that I can.
And I try not to go any further than that.
But I'm happy to say and I do accuse the Bush administration of exploiting the September 11th tragedy to the degree that they might as well have done it.
Right.
There's a somewhere there's like a graph, you could chart this out, even though it's a quality, not a quantity, where if you exploit some horrible, grief stricken thing that happened like that, to such a degree, at some point, it's as bad as if you had gone ahead and killed the people yourself in a big false flag.
Because at some point, as Hillary Clinton would say, what difference does it make when you kill a million people by exploiting and making up a bunch of, you know, spinning a bunch of mythology out of a day, this horrible tragedy that they could have prevented if they'd been doing their job.
Like, for example, whose job was it to corral the FBI and the CIA and the NSA and make sure that they're protecting us from terrorist attacks?
Well, that's the president's job and the National Security Adviser's job and the heads of those and George Tenet's job as the DCI.
You know, Michael Shoyer talked about Tenet, and this is in James Bamford's book, The Shadow Factory, too, that the CIA begged George Tenet to go to the NSA, which he was supposedly the king of, and make them give the intercepts that they had from the Yemen switchboard house to the FBI, or to the CIA.
And the NSA just wouldn't give them to him.
So they went and, at least the mythology is, I hate to just push CIA narratives here, but this was the way they told the tale, was the CIA went and built their own listening station on Madagascar so that they could intercept half the conversation, but they couldn't get the whole thing.
They could hear the Yemen side of the conversation, but they couldn't hear what anybody was saying in Europe or in Afghanistan or whatever it was.
And it was just because, as Shoyer put it, as he might, because Tenet didn't have the moral courage to march over there and do his damn job and demand, General, give me the intercepts because I said so, which is what it would have taken to make it happen.
And he wouldn't do that.
And so then people's towers fall down on their heads.
Yeah, I think the more you know, and you just mentioned another case of lack of the information sharing, this one between the NSA and the CIA, the more you know about this, the worse this is.
And I totally agree with you that the so-called false flags, in fact, many of them, you start thinking, well, some of them are just accidental fires and other things, but this willingness and the cynicism to use anything at all for a pre-agreed upon agenda.
So the agendas are already in place.
And maybe this is a bit of a problem because we think too, you have all these think tanks and Pentagon, like I said, plan A, plan B, plan C stuff.
And so they've got all this down.
And so when they get this opportunity, but you think about it, this is horrible to think that you're waiting for an opportunity to initiate this prior agenda.
And I totally agree.
It's every bit as bad.
And obviously it's not justified because you are using, you're exaggerating or you're amplifying or you're misattributing, which is what happened with the Gulf of Tonkin, with Iraq, et cetera.
It's always the same.
It's just history keeps repeating this way.
And if only people would be more, I don't know, intelligent, it seems like after Vietnam, people did kind of wise up and there was this little moment of this lull for the quote unquote Vietnam syndrome that they hated.
But that meant that people were just a little more aware of how officials were so cynically manipulating and exploiting public opinion.
I think that there was this little moment, but then of course, people after a few years, they forget.
And then we go right back into square one.
Bush's father was just so happy that he had defeated Vietnam syndrome and we could get back into business.
And when they're making money, again, not to be bringing up the big pharma and the COVID stuff, but when there's this terrible incentive, perverse incentive of billions and billions of dollars, I defy most human beings not to fall into this.
A lot of people I know, oh, I would never do that.
But you know what?
You've never been confronted with somebody handing you billions of dollars.
And when that happens, like I said, I've seen so many people that started off okay, they weren't terrible, evil babies.
But as things go on, and they are in this environment with terrible perverse incentives, and also disincentives, like all whistleblowers, that become terrible disincentives from telling the truth that all whistleblowers face.
So it's both things.
Most people will fall into it.
It's just the way it is.
And I want to applaud your efforts because you're one of the few people out there all this time for all these years, trying your darndest to wake people up and get them to think and be concerned for actual facts and truth, as opposed to all of this narrative stuff from on high that we've shocked doctrine and the use of emotional manipulation to get people to do what you want.
And facts are, you know, scientists are supposed to care about facts, although don't know if that's so true anymore in the COVID thing, but scientists are supposed to care about facts.
That's what we all should be.
We all should be intelligence analysts, you know, where facts are the only things that matter.
So hopefully we get a little moment now after the Afghanistan war.
I'm hoping we get, I'm not optimistic we'll get as long as Vietnam, but you just hope that there is some thinking going on.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So if there was to be accountability, what might it look like, do you think?
How could we get there?
Well, you go back to these inquiries.
I told somebody recently, I saw one official inquiry and then maybe there's more, but of all the so-called official inquiries I've seen where they, they will give you all this euphemistic, we're looking for the truth and everybody on the panel is, is objective and doesn't have any conflict of interest, et cetera.
So you always hear that, but I've only, I'm only aware of one official investigation that possibly is more of a model.
And that, those were the investigations after the challenger and the Columbia blew up.
They did have, you know, certain NASA officials and some, some military officers, Sally Ride, the astronaut was on one of these panels.
I've read them and you know, they actually kind of aired the dirty laundry and they actually got into why did, why did the O-ring experts, why did no one listen to them when they actually knew the O-rings would not hold up on the, on the challenger?
They got into that.
And the same thing with the Columbia, there were people that wanted to go up and take pictures to see what the damage was, but they were not listened to.
So both of those official inquiries actually did out some of the dirty laundry truth.
So that, I think those are kind of the model.
For starters, one thing you can't do when you have any accountability is you can't nominate Henry Kissinger to be the leader of the 9-11 Commission.
You can't nominate Zelikow, who's a close associate of Condi Rice, who was a, you can't have, going back to COVID, you can't have Fauci, who was part of the patents and, and all of this nefarious research that's been going on.
You can't have anyone who has, is invested.
If they're invested in this, then of course there's no hope for the truth to come out.
And unfortunately, I think what we've been seeing for so many years now is, is such kind of widespread corruption of conflict of interest.
The talking heads for our, our mainstream media has Brennan and all these generals, there've been a couple articles.
Well, they're all sitting on boards where their stock in weapon companies has gone through the roof.
And if you are own, if you have that kind of stock, what I just said about walking away from money, are you going to go in there and say, oh yeah, we shouldn't, we should stop the war in Afghanistan when, when it's going into my bank account.
I mean, it's never going to happen.
You've got to disentangle our whole justice system, recognize from the start that you can't have a judge trying to, to be objective and come up with something.
If they have a conflict of interest, if they have a serious financial conflict of interest or any other conflict of interest, that's the first thing we have to do to even have a chance.
I think of some accountability is we have to remove the conflicts of interest.
And right now I think it's gotten as bad as it can get.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's end back at the beginning again.
I remember 2002, like it was yesterday.
In fact, I sort of relived 2002 constantly in parallel to whatever year I'm actually living in.
I remember every bit of it.
And I remember what a big deal it was when your essay came out.
And I remember being the only one in North America or maybe the whole world who noticed that you said in there, man, we should not attack Iraq.
And this is in May of 02.
It was not the point of your whole thing because you had, you know, your points were more about the lack of intelligence sharing and the bad job the FBI supervisors in D.C. were doing and all those things.
But you said in there, you know what?
If you do this, you're gonna make the exact kind of terrorism that we're worried about now so much worse.
So how did you know that?
Who were you talking to?
What were you thinking about that you were so confident to say that then when obviously all the pressure in the world would have been to zip your lip about that?
Right.
That where I really got more vocal about Iraq was in February of 2003.
Just.
No, I got it wrong.
It wasn't in the May letter in the first place.
No, I did do one thing in the May letter, though, in the May letter.
I already had this idea of this.
This notion was in my head that this this global war on terrorism, they you know, they they started doing this global war.
And having I worked in the so-called war on drugs, you know, I was aware of the war on poverty.
And I I had this in my head right away that now going to war was not had nothing to do.
I knew this had nothing to do with what I wrote in the whole memo about fixing these problems.
So the notion that we were going to go to war already.
And I have to say, to pat my own back in the May 2002 memo, I got to where I wrote about I don't know what I use the term global war on terrorists or war on terrorism or something.
I put it in quotes.
I mean, like, this is funny business, folks.
This isn't real.
And I put this war on terrorism or whatever.
I might have been one of the first people to even, you know, look sideways a little bit on what what had gone on.
But then as as we went from just a few months, I mean, literally, what, eight months, nine months from that memo, and I just been on the cover of Time magazine, and had narrowly survived one of the very few whistleblowers who narrowly survived, not not being fired, or whatever, for a lot of reasons.
One reason I survived was I there were four senators who wrote to Mueller and Ashcroft that I shouldn't be fired.
Our two Minnesota senators, Wellstone and Dayton, and Leahy and Grassley.
So I had four senators who immediately went to bat.
I mean, it takes a lot to survive and not be fired, at the very least fired for being a whistleblower.
But I had.
And not only that, I was on the cover of Time magazine.
And then I see they're starting, they're going to go gin up the war on Iraq.
And I had an excruciating I know Anne Wright talks about not being able to sleep at night.
But I went through excruciating time period, I wrote op ed first in February, early February, I wrote an op ed, really good op ed.
And I sent it to Time magazine.
And the people I sent it to were all impressed and said, Oh, yeah, we'll publish this.
They went to their bosses.
And they came back an hour later saying, Colleen, we're going to war in Iraq.
And there's no way we can publish this.
We've been told it's a done deal.
So I this this happened in, you know, in earlier February, then I wrote this, this letter to Mueller, because Mueller had told me anytime you see something wrong, you could you could write to me and I sent it on February 24 2003.
And he never responded.
So we get into March.
And at that point, of course, the news is saying that we're going to attack anytime.
So like March 6 or 7, I reached out to the New York Times and had that letter.
My letter was a front page.
It was one of the few few opposition to Iraq war that appeared in any kind of media.
And it was on the front page of the New York Times.
But of course, afterwards, I think the people who did that were all in trouble in the New York Times.
And, and I just tried to think of every, every reason I could think of that this was going to fail.
And this but of course, no one listens at that point.
Everybody had war fever.
And it is it's too late by the time you're by the time you're you really see this this happening.
It's very difficult to stop because they own the media.
And that's where there were a lot of there were a couple other people Scott Ritter.
And there were only a couple of other people trying their hardest.
Even Walter Pincus was buried on his own Washington Post, when he published some of this stuff that we know, oh, it's not true.
Colin Powell said this, it's not true.
But so you had to read a lot.
And I was reading Knight Ritter.
Our one paper here was Knight Ritter.
So there were reasons why I kind of maybe I'm not that brilliant, but I know a lot of these things that they gin up, you just you have to approach it for starters, and look at the agendas and the bias.
So like a Judith Miller or a Michael Gordon, when they're writing something, you can't just read what they write, you have to say, well, who, what did they say before?
You know, how many times have they been wrong before?
And if they've been wrong a lot, when they write something, then you said, Oh, my gosh, this is being leaked by so and so.
And it's for this agenda.
This is what the open source intelligence analysts have to do.
They, they can't just read a lot, they have to know the particular biases of what they're reading.
Yeah.
Well, I have to tell you, I'm completely humiliated that I misremembered that thing from 20 years ago.
Because I was sure about that.
But I found in the Wayback Machine here, because no one else has it, I'll republish it at Scott Horton.org found the Wayback Machine, the memo here, and I did a Ctrl F and you're right, it doesn't say Iraq in there anywhere.
I was so sure.
But yeah, I know that you warned about it before the before the war broke out, for sure.
Yeah, just check and see, though.
I think I put the quotes on the so called war on terror, whatever.
You know, even then, we're all excited about this.
There was nobody that was Nate, you know, poo pooing it.
Well, not exactly those words, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere.
It looks like it's a few 1000 words here.
So I'm going to post it at Scott Horton.org slash fair use.
And then I'm going to read it.
It's been too long.
I misremembered it.
Oh, I hate that.
But anyway, I'm still because I remember citing you though, before the war, that like, you know, the same lady that warned us, or could have, you know, who warned them about the attack, warned us about this attack, and that we shouldn't be doing it.
So and Scott, after the, you know, people said how stupid everybody, I mean, I even only had like, one, one guy in the in the, in the FBI who said, how stupid can you be?
The rest of them won't even talk to me.
But the guy who was the agent, the SWAT team leader was across the hallway from me, he was nice enough to actually say to me, how stupid can you be doing this?
You know, this is and I was completely ostracized after that.
I had no I mean, basically, at that point, I was just lucky to make it to retirement.
They told me that if I retired early, then they would.
They the OPR, they started a mis what is it called misconduct investigation for having talked with the New York Times not authorized to talk with the New York Times.
And so that that was hanging over me.
And they said as long as I retired early and got the heck out of there, that would you know, then it would end.
So and I would keep my pension, but you can't speak out against war during a war fever that is incredibly, almost impossible.
And my husband said, you know, there's that old Camus, there's this old classic thing called the fall by Camus.
And in it, it's about a man who knows a woman is drowning in the sand in the river, and he lets her drown.
And because he's like, oh, the water will be too cold, and I can't swim well enough.
So he lets her drown.
And then his whole life afterwards, he's got this problem in his head because he says, you know, if I ever that was wrong of me, that was so unethical, I should have tried to save that woman.
And so and he becomes a drunk and everything else.
And then at the end, he says, if it ever happens again, if I'm ever walking by the river, and there's somebody drowning, I will save them.
And then the end of this Camus book, the fall is, but the water is always going to be too cold, and I can't swim very well.
And that's a really great paradigm for these types of really horrible things where you're, you're basically, you know, Julian Assange and, and Daniel Hale, you know, this idea of martyring yourself, you know, most people will say you don't have to martyr yourself, you don't have to martyr your family in order to tell the truth.
But in these horrible situations of groupthink and obedience to authority, Milgram, and whatever, these terrible groupthink situations, the banality of evil is what it is.
Yes, you do.
Unfortunately, I think that's really the only thing is Assange, of course, is, has turned out to be a complete martyr on this.
And, and I, you know, you can hope and pray that something breaks loose on this.
But it's, this is the situation we find ourselves in when, when we're in these really shock doctrine, banality of evil type situations, and it's really, there's no good answers, no good answers.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you for spending time talking about this with us today.
I really do appreciate your perspective.
I know the audience will too.
Well, I appreciate your effort so much, and I, um, we all just have to keep muddling through and try to keep up as much, keep up as much energy as we can.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, I don't know, this has never really come up.
And I know you're too smart for this, but for you and or any of your buddies who were in your office or your ex buddies in your office back then, it really wasn't y'all's fault, right?
Like you really did try and DC just wouldn't let you.
So I don't know if you ever beat yourself over the head with that, like, Oh, I should've got on a plane to DC and yelled at them or, you know, some kind of thing like that.
But it doesn't, it sounds like you did everything that you could, right?
Well, I wasn't the main player, but the agents, these two agents actually did, they were just so on top of it.
You can't fault them at all.
Um, in fact, I was the day of nine 11, we were talking about this, you know, when we were walking over to the U S attorney's office and, and saying, Oh my gosh, you know, this, we, we knew it from the start that this could have been prevented.
And, uh, the agent didn't know how badly watered down that warning to the FAA had been, but he tried separately.
He tried separately to do a local warning.
I mean, they did everything.
I, I don't think they can really, uh, you know, it's these kinds of situations.
You can only do what you can do.
Um, in my case, you know, I, I was just the legal counsel.
Um, I, I think I tried to, to, uh, get the truth out afterwards and getting the truth out afterwards, uh, course was partially, partially successful, but even then it wasn't, you know, it didn't really change anything.
Yeah.
Well, you never know.
Uh, I think that's probably not true.
Um, but, um, well, I'm not going to say, Oh yeah, no, now the FBI and the CIA are great at their stupid jobs or what, you know, that's not my point, but, uh, I know you've done a lot of great writing and taught people a lot of stuff.
I've learned a lot from you over the years.
So that's a little something.
Yeah.
I think that mu that mutual education, um, is a factor.
So you just keep up doing what you can and then hoping that other people pick it up, you know, and, and, and, uh, the younger generation who knows, but we, we have to continue on.
Yep.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Colleen.
Really appreciate it.
Okay.
Good.
Good afternoon.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
