BioColeen Rowley is a former FBI agent and whistleblower. Rowley jointly held the TIME "Person of the Year" award in 2002 with two other women credited as whistleblowers. Comments from Registered Members | (Register or log in to make your comment.) | AJ Smith 2009-10-31
Exactly, Art, and that's why I have a problem with Paul Jay's interview style here, as I've said in other comments. He doesn't press her on the obvious things he should have, IF he were really trying to dig out the underlying truth. So in that sense, the interview is no better than what one could find on any MSM network all these years. By allowing the issues to be framed this way, it perpetuates the lie that is the official gov't version. | Lavina 2009-10-29
Good Job! | Anatoli 2009-10-29
A small step into the right direction. Loosy communications of such scale do not happend by themselves. I believe what was happening in Administration was happening on purpose. Not a ground shaking purpose, but a ground breaking purpose. Follow the money: Where is the gold from WTC? Who has earned the most since 9/11? Why WTC#7 with case materials on Enron was busted? Why all what remained from the buildings was immidiately transferred to Taiwan? Answer is obvious to anybody willing to think and a very hard to accept. | Art 2009-10-24
Hi
I have a problem with this watered down explanation of this ex- FBI agent. It almost seems possible that or government new nothing. It was another pearl harbor. With its campaigning propaganda "your with us or against us",Its not if they will attack us its when they will attack us. Have you forgot the Orange, Amber,Red alerts.You are a Patriot. How about those country songs? The Patriots used FBI devices to read the other teams plays. They were caught.Are you a patriot? And George was reading books to children. How could he be involved? The Arabs offered a 10 million to rebuild. After all some of the people were responsible. With many more questions than answers,she makes it sound like a communication problem. This is beginning to sound like cable news.Please...........
Ill keep watching
Art | whatthehell 2009-10-24
Have you noticed that the stock market has doubled in the last 7 months?
Starbucks stock 3/5/09=8.66 10/23=20.23.
Google 3/5= 320.00. 10/23= 550.00.
Apple 3/5=88.00. 10/23= 205.00.
# of jobs lost since March = 3.5 million
The fix is in! | whatthehell 2009-10-24
This Real News presentation has been OK (IMO) . It certainly is better than having no pertinent information being put forth. The link that was provided on the part1 comments page (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3979568779414136481#) is a very good presentation. I watched it this morning and was glad to see so much information out there for public consumption. Yes, the media in this country is a disgrace. For all those who seem disinterested in the Jay's "softball" approach, I hear ya. However it's still so much better than FOX or MSNBC. This government is obviously of the Corporation, by the Corporation, for the Corporation, etc....
We need 911 truth, and the overturning of the Federal Reserve Act and the reversal of giving Corporations the same status as an individual and so much more. That's the problem! There's so many areas of our government and our laws that have turned against the people and favor the Corporation. Have you noticed that the stock market has double | neoconbuster 2009-10-24
Nice segment. It's not only painful but it takes courage and GUTS to openly speak about it. So far the other side is calling the shots by naming:Un American UnPatriotic and a Conspiracy Nut to all who dare to speak out.But There are still killers on the loose like Cheney and Rumsfield. | genefire 2009-10-24
Thank you Jay for bringing us up and our concerns about the official story on 911. It really showed who she really is protecting as well, while at the same time playing the concerned ex FBI agent. On the other hand "Jay" its almost like you let her dodge the question by going into some spew about something else. She speaks as if the 911 commission wanted to find the truth, and when she said that it should where she stands on this issue. We never get real answers by asking the one's who are themselves being mislead or she is purposely misleading us. I believe both but I don't know. | doyog 2009-10-24
Do we need a new investigation? Yes. We must if investigate that there were radio controlled bombs placed in the Twin Towers and Building 7. We must investigate why NORAD stood down that day? We must investigate the building of the Pentagon to show why no 575 hit that building? We must investigate the Shanksville, PA crash to show why they could not recover the engines of a 575 which cannot vaporize under any crash situation? We must investigate who told Giuliani that the buildings were coming down? We must investigate why the 911 commission did not even address the fall of building 7 and what information it had that it was destroyed? We must investigate why only $200 million in gold was recovered from the Twin Towers where there should have been about $160 billion in gold? If we find the answers to these questions and others then we can start the treason trials. |
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. We're talking to Coleen Rowley, who worked in the FBI office in Minneapolis which found a man who had gone to a flight school and plunked down a lot of cash learning how to—if I remember correctly—. Hello, Colleen. Let me say hello. If I remember correctly, didn't he just want to learn how to take off, and he wasn't all that interested in learning how to land? COLEEN ROWLEY, FORMER FBI AGENT AND WHISTLEBLOWER: Yeah. And, actually, he claimed, "I want to learn to fly as an ego-boosting reason." I mean, he said, "I just want to boost my ego." I mean, the flight instructors had a lot of reasons to be suspicious.JAY: So, as we left off in the first segment, we were talking about different elements of this that kind of just don't make any sense. And one of them you've said to me off camera just before we started was in fact George Tenet knew quite well about the Minneapolis investigation pre-9/11. So what's that story?ROWLEY: Well, the story is, on the day of 9/11, he's having breakfast with, I think, somebody else, and somebody runs in to tell him that a plane is flying into the World Trade Center. And the first thing out of George Tenet's mouth is, "I wonder if it's that guy in Minnesota." So that was a clue that he had been briefed. But nobody really asked him, and he didn't volunteer that he had been briefed about this until he was in front of the 9/11 Commission and asked point-blank: did he know about the [Zacarias] Moussaoui case? And he was briefed in a really short, two-frame PowerPoint on, I think, August 23 or 24, something entitled "Fundamentalist Learns to Fly". And then, of course, the 9/11 Commission asked him, "Why didn't you do anything with this?" And he says something about it's not my job, I assumed the FBI would handle it.JAY: This is all incredulous. It's just very—no normal rational person could look at any one of these things—even if there's a lot of intelligence coming in, it doesn't seem to explain it.ROWLEY: Well, after 911 they said this is the benefit of hindsight. And it was one of the things I actually wrote about in my memo, about hindsight, you know, that, sure, that's true, things are a lot clearer when you already know—.JAY: And let me just explain, 'cause I don't think we did in the first segment. So, after 9/11, you were very concerned about how the information generated had been buried, and you wrote a memo that was quite dramatic. So tell us a little bit about the memo.ROWLEY: Well, immediately after 9/11 we had all kinds of official denials. Condoleezza Rice said that no one would have had any clue that someone would fly a plane into a building. You know. Another denial was there's no probable cause to have investigated before 9/11. So this happened for about eight and a half months. There were leaks, finally, about the Moussaoui case that there was a terrorist suspect in custody before 9/11, and things began to leak out in May 2002. It took all that time. So I got a chance to tell what I knew to the joint intelligence committee inquiry, and when that happened, I thought, you know, this is unbelievable. Just like you said—how incredulous. So I couldn't sleep for a couple of nights and I wrote this. So it turned out to be about a 12-page memo of the various things that I just knew in the Minneapolis office, so that there was probable cause to have gotten this warrant, and that this is improper, for instance, to water down an affidavit, this should never have happened, you know, this should be fixed immediately. In fact, I was one of the very first people to put "war on terror" in quotes in that May 2002 memo, because I knew that that reaction, calling it a "war on terror" and launching that, was a very improper—if you knew why 9/11 had had the lapses in how it had happened, well, launching a war made no sense. It made no sense whatsoever.JAY: So now we're, you know, eight years later, almost nine years later, I guess, and looking back, reflecting on who you were then and how you see the world now, how has it changed the way you see the role of America in the world?ROWLEY: Well, you know, the cliché is 9/11 changed everything, and it did change everything. It shouldn't have, but it did. It was almost like internally in the FBI a pendulum swing like this, 180 degrees. I had been teaching FBI agents the Fourth Amendment law of search and seizure and Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, right to attorney. Those things over time just kind of went up in smoke, and to the point where, for instance, the law of interrogation, you've allowed something totally illegal, which is torture. So if you had spent 13 years of your life teaching the finer points of Miranda and then all of a sudden now see that the headquarters is allowing for people to be tortured and torture-lite and all these things [in the] course of interrogations, you can't just remain silent. And a lot of these overreactions were really the fault of not knowing why it had happened. The lack of truth, it created a vacuum for a good while. The first inquiries did not even get released for a couple of years. And even though they're maybe not incomplete [sic], at least there's something. But it was two years. So that vacuum of not knowing how and why this had occurred allowed for, then, people to fill the vacuum with, well, we've got to do this, we've got to launch the war, we've got to take the gloves off, we've got to go to the dark side, we have to collect more information on Americans through their credit records, their bank records. We have to maybe monitor all Americans' telephone calls and computer. All of those really improper remedies that were suggested after 9/11 were done because there was no truth known of why and how this had happened.JAY: Well, are you satisfied we have the truth now? Does the official version of events as the 9/11 Commission tells it—are you satisfied with that version?ROWLEY: Well, I think it's incomplete. Chapter 8 of the 9/11 Commission [Report] is "The System Was Blinking Red" or something like that, and it's not based on anything the 9/11 Commission did. They did no new investigation of the intelligence. They relied on the joint intelligence committee report, the inspector general report that I, my memo, gave rise to, and I think a little bit the judiciary committee's report. And for as far as it goes, I think it's pretty accurate. They did identify some of flaws and lapses. The FBI, for instance, failed to understand that the one Chechen group was a foreign power. The FBI legal unit had failed to read the affidavit. So as far as it went in identifying some lapses, it's pretty accurate, but it probably did not go far enough. And, again, because the 9/11 Commission—people forget they were under enormous time constraints and resource constraints.JAY: Well, even the fact there was a 9/11 commission was—the administration, the Bush administration, did kicking and screaming under the pressure of the families.ROWLEY: Right. And the only information, in some cases, that McCain and—was it [John] Lehman?—that they were able to get was through pressure. They had to put, actually, public pressure through the media to even get Bush and Cheney to come and testify. Eleanor Hill, who had led the staff of the joint intelligence committee, was unable to do so. She bitterly complained because she was never able to go to the highest levels. You know, she was—you know, at the bottom level, she could interview people like Coleen Rowley, but—.JAY: Now, you're aware that a lot of the people that are questioning 9/11—and everyone knows there's this big spectrum, from one end being, you know, this is a whole inside job theory and the buildings were pre-wired to explode and things, to the other end of the spectrum being, I guess, usually described as people who think that they knew it was coming and didn't do anything about it. One way or the other, there are millions of Americans, it seems, that do not believe the official version of events. To be personal about it, the point that I can't get past in believing the official version is starting at the very beginning. I don't understand how a cabinet-level Richard Clarke antiterrorism person, when all of your intelligence agencies are telling you how serious a threat this is, he gets demoted, and then you're telling us Ashcroft apparently tells the acting head of the FBI, "We're not very interested in terrorism now." And of course people that know the background of the questioning of this know this document called Project for New American Century, which you must know, where it says we need to project a new way of projecting US military power now that we're the single superpower, but of course we'll never get the American people onside without a Pearl Harbor event. So many people have connected that document, which Rumsfeld signs and Cheney signs—. Do you question in your own mind's eye, your own heart of heart, whether this was incompetence or kind of "We don't want to know because we have some agenda here"?ROWLEY: Well, I've signed a petition and actually lobbied a little bit for a fuller investigation on behalf of the families, on behalf of the first responders, who I think as victims are entitled to the full truth. And I actually testified to the judiciary that was my main reason for coming forth with that memo is because the victims of these crimes will never rest easy until they know the full truth. I think the murkiest areas that still remain, again, because the 9/11 Commission was under enormous constraints—. There's a new book out by one of the people that was on the 9/11 Commission, saying that this is very incomplete and we weren't given the truth. I think the murkiest areas are the NORAD callout, because the timeframes that people testified to do not mesh with each other. They're all in conflict. And I think the intelligence that was known ahead of time, which, of course, somebody in my position would not have been privy to—. I don't think the full truth has come out about the Saudi connection, of course, the blackout there. So, again, we've launched, the government has launched remedies to reduce terrorism, and under the Bush administration they were counterproductive and greatly increased terrorism. They did not serve the purpose whatsoever. It's very late in the game to be doing a new investigation of this, but better late than never. So I do think that we need more truth on what happened.JAY: The whole issue of accountability of the Bush administration, there's been a debate about whether there should be some kind of accountability on torture. Almost no debate, which to my mind is the most important issue is no accountability to launching a war on an illegal basis. Under any form of international law, if Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States, then invading it is the worst violation of international law there is. But there's been no discussion of accountability on that for Bush-Cheney, but not even a whisper of the issue of accountability on—even if it's negligence, it's the grossest negligence one could possibly imagine. And if it's not negligence—and I don't see how anyone at this point can actually answer that one way or the other. But the Democrats and the Obama administration, they don't even raise any of this, especially the 9/11 issue, even for conversation. Why, do you think?ROWLEY: Well, it's painful. My memo, I think, probably got attention because I was pointing out—I was one of the first people to point out some really painful, harsh truths. And, you know, it's always easier to go forward and not deal with something that's happened in the past. The problem with that, and I think Walter Mondale said something really—you know, he really encapsulated the problem well recently when he said torture is like a loaded pistol that's been put on the kitchen table for anyone down the road to come along, pick up, and pull the trigger. And the problem with not having accountability, even for launching a war of aggression, certainly for the use of torture, is that it set a precedent. And if the people are not—at least admit it was wrong and go on to have lucrative careers, everybody out there watches that. You know, Condoleezza Rice right now is invited to speak in the Twin Cities. They're selling a table at this event for $12,500. So what is the message that everybody that goes to listen to Condoleezza Rice now is getting? That her ordering or her role in ordering torture was something good, you know, because she's been reimbursed for it. She's got a—. You know. And I think, now, future, you think about a young person that's 22, 23, in college now, going through this, what is the lessons they're going to take out of this? That's the reason we have to have something at least like a new Church Committee. And you have got to find out the truth of the matter in order to get past it. You can't turn the page without having read it.JAY: There has to be an opening of the books of the Bush administration on every level.ROWLEY: Right.JAY: Okay. We'll talk more. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Coleen Rowley.DISCLAIMER:Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. |
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