All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're on chaosradioaustin.org and at lrn.fm.
All right, our next guest is...
Our first guest on the show today is Colleen Rowley.
She's a former FBI lawyer, was up there in Minneapolis, of course, the famous Zacharias Moussaoui case and all of that, and she is now a peace and civil liberties activist.
And they've got some things going on at Quantico, apparently regarding the treatment of Bradley Manning.
I just got this email this morning.
I haven't really had time to look all the way through it here, but I saw Manning and I saw Martin Luther King, and I saw join us at Quantico.
Colleen, welcome to the show.
What's going on here?
Well, I'll describe it a little bit.
There's actually two separate events.
One is beginning at noon in front of the FBI headquarters, and it's actually a protest against this oppression, repression that's going on around the country, the infiltration of all of the anti-war and advocacy groups that's been going on.
Actually, it began after 9-11, but it's really reached an apex.
We even had a press conference here yesterday in the Twin Cities, if you're aware of that case of the 23 anti-war activists whose homes were raided and they were subpoenaed to a grand jury.
And it's found out now that there was an infiltrator, probably an FBI undercover, probably a policewoman.
I don't think it was an FBI agent, who was undercover in the anti-war committee and other peace groups here locally in the Twin Cities since before the Republican National Convention.
So, beginning in the spring of 2008.
Now, this actually harkens back, and this is why Martin Luther King Day is so significant, because this harkens back to that COINTELPRO era when the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover inserted people, inserted informants and whatever, into Martin Luther King's group, civil rights groups, even into feminist anti-war groups.
And it's all repeating.
Anyways, that protest is at noon in front of the FBI headquarters in Washington.
Then, after that's over around 1 p.m., there's going to be a convoy to Quantico, where Bradley Manning is being held.
And so there's going to be a second protest.
I suppose that will start more like 2 p.m., because it'll take a while to get there.
It's about an hour south of Washington.
And so it's actually two parts, and they're somewhat connected because of the solitary confinement conditions that Bradley Manning is being held in do approach what many psychiatrists will say is torture.
And actually, it's coming before he's even been judged.
There's been no judicial process, so he's being held pre-conviction in these very punishing situations that he's in with not being allowed to exercise and no sheets.
Bright lights are on him from 5 a.m. on.
It really sounds horrible, Orwellian-type situation.
Well, these two things really do go together, the treatment of Manning and the infiltration of all these peace groups.
In both cases, it's the government, by way of the FBI, treating, well, I guess in one case the FBI, the other the military, but still treating the American people as the enemy, as suspects at worst whose rights are to be protected.
I mean, if you go back, the whole theory of having a sheriff is he's here to prevent the town from just going ahead and lynching you.
He's here to protect your rights and keep you safe in a cage until you get a fair trial.
And that's who these people claim to be is our security force, and yet they sure seem, I don't know if it's just their guilty consciences or what makes them so frightened of us, but to see a bunch of hippie peace activists treated like terrorists, I mean, it's pretty incredible.
It's a knee-jerk, you know, and I suppose it's common human nature.
You know, the old show, of course, Barney Fife and this overreaction.
I don't know if you caught this, but recently, maybe within a couple, few weeks, Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano was being asked similar questions as what you just brought up, and she was being asked, you know, why is Homeland Security monitoring this?
I think they have cameras now in Walmart for Homeland Security and all part of this total information awareness.
So she was kind of being grilled.
And you know what her response was?
Someone said, well, aren't we fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here?
That was that old Bush justification.
And Janet Napolitano responded, oh, don't you know, that's passe.
We are fighting them here.
Right, because we're fighting them there, of course.
Now, so she just actually said that that no longer applies, that that old thing about fighting them over there.
And you're seeing this play out not only in the infiltration of all of the advocacy groups and anti-war groups, but you're also seeing it play out in that OMB memo.
I just wrote a Huffington Post, a long Huffington Post, with a couple of other former government employees, and it was entitled OMB Memo to All Government Agencies to basically, you know, they're being tasked now to find the insider threat in their own agencies by looking for grumpy employees.
If you can imagine, they're being told to use their psychology and sociology experts to look internally in the government to find who is grumpy, and that will be your insider threat.
Yeah, we read the Independent article about it on the show yesterday, and really this is exactly what Julian Assange was going for, right, is make them clamp down on themselves, and they make their own imperialism that much more ineffective.
Well, you know, when my Huffington Post, I said, can you imagine if you are, you know, a true blue Homeland Security, let's say you're an analyst or whatever, and the first time you're on your way home now when the bell rings, you find that they're searching your lunch pail.
You know what that's going to do internally to morale, when all of a sudden you realize that it's not us versus them, but you are the them?
Right.
And our Huffington Post actually had the quotes along, four or five paragraphs, from a former psychologist who testified in the early 80s.
His name is Dr. Don Soken, and he testified to Congress about the use of psychological testing.
They think that if psychological testing, they can somehow screen if you're going to be the disloyal employee.
And he said that's just bunk.
It's complete bunk.
First of all, there's no way they can find this out, and secondly, what they're doing is they're destroying, then, the people that they're doing this to, because when they're told they're not psychologically fit for duty in the government, of course that person is destroyed for life.
So back in 1984, Congress made these psychological testing screening procedures illegal.
In fact, it's a violation also for the psychologists of their own professional ethics.
So they're not supposed to be doing it, but now the OMB is saying that they're supposed to be doing it, so it's incredibly bad.
Yeah.
Well, it kind of makes you wonder why the people who employed Robert Hansen all those years would be in charge of protecting anybody from anything or investigating crimes at all.
I mean, what a joke.
Right.
And I actually, I don't know if you saw my Huffington Post, but I had actually put the smiling, the broadly smiling photo of Robert Hansen, this three-decade-long-spanning FBI official.
He wasn't a low guy.
He was a GS-15.
And so this nonsense about looking for unhappy, when in fact Robert Hansen was extremely happy.
Right.
He was the model employee, and he was extra doubly happy because he was the model employee for the Soviet Union too.
Right.
And he was making money.
And there's another component to this looking for happy, which is the thing they're doing in the military now, their screening.
They've already given the test to 800,000 soldiers, and one component is spiritual fitness, spiritual fitness.
And you have to believe in a higher power or a god to pass that component that they've already done this military screening.
Now, Robert Hansen would have aced the spiritual fitness because he was a member of this very secretive Catholic group called Opus Dei.
And so, of course, this is just the opposite of what they're trying to tell.
Martin Seligman, a psychologist, sold this bunk to the military for $135 million.
If you're a taxpayer, who knows?
I mean, can you imagine what the taxpayers are paying for this?
And he's saying that he can screen the military for disloyal military people or people that will have PTSD, et cetera.
Right.
And, you know, what's really funny about all this too is this is all a takeoff on Bradley Manning's heroism, which for anyone who's patient enough to spend, I don't know, 35 or 40 seconds reading the clips of the chat logs at Wired magazine, he explains that his entire goal here was to shed sunlight, to inform the American people so that they can do the right thing, the most pure, democratic, whistleblower motives of all.
And now they want to go on this whole rampage like the government is riddled with Russian spies, yeah?
Yeah, with the aid of Daniel Ellsberg.
Right.
All right, well, hold it right there, because we're going to talk more about Bradley Manning with Colleen Rowley right after this.
It's Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is Colleen Rowley, former FBI lawyer and now peace and civil liberties activist.
And she writes at the Huffington Post.
And, Colleen, what all groups are you a member of?
Because I know there's a bunch of different ones.
Every time I see your name, it's got different acronyms next to it.
Well, I'm really happy you mentioned the civil liberties, because that actually is where I started on this.
Even before I had retired from the FBI, within about a year after 9-11, you know, it took me a little while.
I would say I didn't immediately grasp what was going on in terms of the even when the Patriot Act passed the first month and they gave this broader authority to the FBI to get records and stuff, it took me a little while.
But about a year or so, some of these things started to become clear.
I would say, too, we didn't know in the FBI that this torture waterboarding was authorized.
I mean, I didn't know this at all even before I retired.
But as I saw it happening, I became internally, I started to speak out against what was going on.
Well, if I remember right, and it's been since, I guess, 2002, but I thought that either in your letter to the Senate or in statements you gave to the press shortly after that, you warned against invading Iraq and talked about how dangerous that would be for the real war against al-Qaeda.
Right, and that was part of it.
Actually, when I wrote my first memo about the failures of 9-11, and see, these things are tied together, because the true failures, this failure to connect the so-called failure to connect the dots, which was due to a lack of information sharing, not only between agencies and inside agencies, but with the public.
That's why this WikiLeaks and the lack of protection for whistleblowers is tied in.
9-11 occurred not because of a lack of clues or information, but because the agencies were incompetent and because there was this no sharing.
And, of course, if you don't understand that now, and the public doesn't, they've been misled through propaganda about all these other reasons, why we need to drop bombs on Iraq and Pakistan, and they've been misled by all these things.
We need to launch a massive data collection on our citizenry.
That's been sold to us as an answer to 9-11.
None of this is correct.
The true failures are certain things, but they have nothing to do with what the Bush and now Obama have suggested are the solutions.
Well, just a couple of years ago, Bin Laden put out a statement where he recommended that the American people read Michael Shoyer's book, Imperial Hubris, if they wanted to understand what this war was about.
Right.
I don't agree 100% with Michael Shoyer, but I do agree on a lot of what he says.
And he does point the finger at this group of neocons, and this group was very effective in their propagandizing and making the country believe that Saddam was behind 9-11, and it was absolute nonsense.
So I began to speak out, and one of the areas that I began to speak out internally was when I saw this massive data collection, when I saw the Attorney General guidelines being basically erased, and this is what we're talking about today, which is now that with no guidelines and no oversight, no guidelines and no oversight, what do you think 854,000 top secret analysts, agents, the contractors, consultants are going to do?
Mess with us all day long.
Right.
I mean, they all average about $100,000 salaries.
They actually have to prove on their performance evaluations.
They get performance evaluations.
They have to prove they're doing something.
And so they run out, they get statistics.
The way that it's evaluated is an agent gets statistics for having a search warrant executed for a subpoena.
They get little statistics for those things.
They get bigger statistics for arrests.
In the lead-up to the Republican National Convention here in the Twin Cities, all of these agents were collecting these statistics.
No one knew it, of course, but they were collecting them based on infiltrations into protest groups.
And, of course, this is happening around the country, and very few people understand.
So I've been, you know, I'm a peace activist because I think the war, the war in James Madison says no country can maintain its civil liberties in the midst of a continual war.
So these things are, the war is one of the biggest reasons why we're having this happen.
When they launched the war on terror, and I'll just plug myself again.
When I wrote the very first memo in May of 2002 about the failures of the FBI, I put war on terror in quotes.
I was, like, the first person to, like, say, I don't think this is a real war.
This is something that's, you know, specious.
And I put it in quotes.
Because this is the justification that allows all of our civil liberties to, and what people don't understand is that there's no tradeoff for security.
In fact, all of these things that they've done have made us less secure.
They've actually hurt law enforcement to a great extent.
The thing with, for instance, infiltrating into groups, can you imagine what this does now to a good police officer or a good FBI agent who wants to get solid, accurate information from an insider community?
How many Muslims want to call up the FBI when now they see that the FBI is targeting the Muslim community?
How many people in the peace community?
You know, I actually told them, I went to a peace event where they were saying, you know, saying the FBI is going after us.
We should never cooperate with them.
We should never, you know, willingly call the FBI.
And I raised my hand.
I said, but if there's a serial killer in town, we might have to call the FBI.
You know, it's that bad.
It's really going to hurt law enforcement's old community policing notions.
Yeah, well, depending on what part of town you're in, I think many Americans have considered their local police department to be basically nothing but an occupying army, soldiers quartered among us, as it says in the Declaration of Independence.
And you know what?
It's just now everybody's included in that, you know, police brutality no longer just for black people.
Right, it's exactly right.
There is a role for good police.
And, in fact, they have a hard job.
They absolutely have a hard job.
They have to constantly, you know, not play favorites or whatever, but they don't.
But what they're doing now is they've turned what should be policing into a war.
And they're now, they've got their enemies.
You know, anytime there's a big national special security event, everybody out there who's dissenting against whatever it is is going to be seen as the enemy.
And it's, of course, the war itself is furnishing that pretext.
The other really counterproductive thing for law enforcement is this massive data collection.
And I've said this many, many times, is adding hay to the haystack.
So when you had a Moussaoui in August of 2001 who was very singular and that information was able to rise all the way up to George Tenet within a few days, now that information, the chance of that information being bottlenecked is 100 times greater because now we have all of this massive data collection to clutter up the needle that is, you know, to be found in the haystack.
Right, and consolidated the chain of command as well.
Right.
Instead of decentralizing it and telling people on your level, all right, guys, get out there and do your worst, let's see what you come up with.
They try to direct it all from the top down, makes it more clumsy and ineffective.
And, of course, as we've seen, they've entrapped hundreds at least, at least dozens and dozens and dozens of innocent people on terrorism charges.
Right.
And we will also know that after the next attack takes place in this country that, wow, the FBI spent all this time entrapping innocent people instead of protecting the country.
I guess we ought to give them the rest of our Bill of Rights, whatever's left of it by then.
Right.
It's actually the libertarian, I'm really seeing so much good, solid, constructive advice coming from the libertarian side because you just mentioned this top down problem.
If a green light, let's go back to the COINTELPRO era, when the green light or this waterboarding, when the green light is given for something from the top down, waterboarding is a better example, all of a sudden you have hundreds and thousands of people following those orders.
Right.
They act like a couple of people were waterboarded at one time, and we know tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been tortured.
Can I keep you one more segment here, Colleen, please?
Sure.
Great.
Colleen Rowley, she used to be a federal cop.
Now she's good.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Talking with Colleen Rowley, civil liberties and peace activist.
And I'm sorry about saying that on the way out to the break there.
I'm sure you were a good person before you left the FBI.
I just like you better now.
Well, frankly, if they had let you do your job and prevent the 9-11 attack from happening, I would have liked you a whole lot then.
But it's not your fault that they wouldn't let you do your job.
Everybody knows that story.
But I still need an answer to my question.
What are the different groups that you're a member of?
Because I think that they're great.
And who knows, maybe a billionaire is listening and would like to turn your former cops against the police state group into the next American Enterprise Institute or something for us.
Well, I'll just preface by saying there are good people in the FBI.
The actual agent who was the case agent in the Moussaoui case, his name was Harry Samet.
And if you Google his name, you'll find this really honest testimony that he gave in the Moussaoui case that actually undercut his own prosecutors.
He told the truth and he called it criminal negligence.
So there are people.
Now, the other FBI agent who resigned from the FBI who kept it secret for seven years but now spoke out against torture was Ali Soufan.
And he was part of that whole thing when he was witnessing the CIA contractors and the waterboarding.
And he feels bad that he kept it secret for seven years.
But there are people like that who don't know what to do.
They're in the inside.
If they speak out, they'll be fired.
And they frankly don't want to lose their jobs.
But they're actually good people.
And I hope that there are people like that listening who, if we had anonymous ways, of course, of getting these disclosures out about illegality and serious public safety.
Wikileaks.ch.
That's right.
All you've got to do is click the upload button.
Right.
And they're, of course, threatening.
Can't stop the signal.
Yep.
I'm going to say I'm a member.
I don't think there are members of Wikileaks, but I certainly subscribe to the different Facebook Wikileaks.
There's also a group called Stop FBI Repression or Stop FBI Net, I think, if you Google those two groups.
I'm not really one of the organizers of Stop FBI Net, but I think it's a very valuable group.
I participated yesterday in this press conference that was organized by the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.
It sprung up locally here because of the 23 activists now who are being targeted.
So that's a good group.
I'm a member of.
I actually do pay dues to this group, and it's like a Code Pink, but it's an older group here in the Twin Cities called Women Against Military Madness.
It was founded by this 90-year-old lady now.
There were two 90-year-old ladies.
One has died.
And it's 28 years old.
It existed long before Code Pink did.
So it's called Women Against Military Madness.
Great.
And it's kind of a little bit of a feminist group, but we don't burn our bras or anything.
It's all anti-military stuff.
Right.
And I actually am a, I guess we'd call it an adjunct or honorary member of Veterans for Peace, which I myself was not a veteran, but I have military.
I have five members of my family who have either served in the military or my daughter is still in the Navy.
And the other great group is Military Families Speak Out.
I'm kind of a member of that too.
But I don't like meetings, and so I don't get involved so much on the heads of these groups.
I try to just participate on the lower level.
Well, I see you co-signing letters with different groups of former intelligence agents and police officials of different stripes, right?
Right.
We just co-signed our little, our group is a committee of WHAM called Tackling Torture at the Top.
And that little local group here is a committee of WHAM.
We signed the letter that went to the military officials protesting the solitary confinement conditions of Bradley Manning.
Right.
And now I hope we can finish up with that.
Glenn Greenwald has done original reporting on this.
Bradley Manning's lawyer has written lengthy blog entries.
And a man named David House, who has gone to visit Bradley Manning, has written extensively at Firedog Lake.
The lawyer, I guess, also was interviewed at the Daily Beast.
I'm sure you're familiar with all this journalism.
And I was wondering if you can comment on the legality of the treatment of Bradley Manning.
They're treating him like Ramzi Yousef or Ted Kaczynski convicted mass murderer terrorists locked in a supermax prison.
Right.
Some of the solitary confinement conditions, I think there are thousands of people now subject to these really draconian conditions.
But the distinction is, in most of the cases, they're post-conviction.
And if I had to pick out, there's a whole bunch of these draconian conditions that certainly solitary confinement itself is a form of sensory deprivation because you're not allowed to talk to other people.
You can't see windows or whatever.
So it's already got those problems that many psychologists will tell you are a form of torture because solitary confinement makes the person crazy.
They're having to drug and give him antidepressants.
Well, of course, no surprise.
Who wouldn't become depressed under those kinds of conditions?
And the difference is, in his case, Manning, it's pre-even going through the judicial process.
He has not even had his day in court.
He's had no due process.
And, in fact, many innocent people have been scooped up in this war on terror.
And if that is what applies, that you get to do this punishment even before you're convicted, I mean, we're really in trouble.
The whole notion of criminal justice has three or four valid goals of criminal justice.
One is deterrence.
One is rehabilitation.
That's controversial because people don't think it's possible to rehabilitate.
But then the one is punishment.
The main one people know the goal of criminal law enforcement or criminal justice system is punishment.
Churches don't like that part, whatever.
But it's true, it's punishment.
But it's punishment after conviction.
It's not punishment pre-conviction.
And the reason it's not punishment pre-conviction is because you don't even have the accuracy now of knowing whether the person is innocent or not.
Yeah, well, you know, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said, hey, the Eighth Amendment bars cruel and unusual punishment, not cruel and unusual interrogation or whatever else we want to call it.
As long as we say it's not part of the sentence, it's fine still.
That's what the Eighth Amendment means.
Scalia, I would question his, I used to actually quote him extensively on some of his decisions that I agreed with when I was teaching law enforcement.
He was completely correct on a couple of things.
However, when he went to Canada and told a group of Canadian jurists that we all ought to be a little more like Jack Bauer on 24, that was an actual quote from Scalia, he lost my respect.
Because Scalia doesn't even apparently understand that torture and producing an involuntary confession loses its accuracy.
And in a way, it's a fraud on the court.
The judges who would allow in a confession that was obtained through coercion and torture would actually themselves be being duped by it.
So it's completely dumb on his part to say we ought to be more like Jack Bauer.
I'll just quote one of the Scalia.
Very quickly.
Okay.
Scalia was the author of the Kylo case, where he said it would be an infraction of privacy for planes to peek into houses.
And now he's gone back from that too.
All right.
Now, where can people look up the tackling torture at the top?
Is that online?
Yes, you can find it.
Just Google it.
Okay.
Big rally on Martin Luther King Day for Bradley Manning and for the peace activists.
Thank you very much, Colleen.
Yes, thank you.
