LinkBlog: coleen+rowley

While some may criticize Rowley (as I have) for not publicly challenging the cover story about al Qaeda, Bin Laden and 19 hijackers, her demand for a new investigation is a necessary first step, and it stands as a strong statement on the record by one of America’s most famous 9/11 whistleblowers. As such it should be applauded.

In the absence of my being there in New York City to stand with the 9/11 families, first responders and survivors, I offer the following statement in support of your goal of a new investigation into the attacks of September 11th and the NYC CAN campaign to place it on the ballot for November.

Today, CREW has released its newest study, Those Who Dared: 30 Who Stood Up for Our Country, recognizing the brave individuals who have acted and spoken out against unethical and dishonorable conduct in the Bush administration. The full report can be found here.

The sense of pressing urgency conjured up by Bush administration folks to justify torture does not square with Coleen Rowley’s direct personal experience in the FBI. As some will remember, the FBI's joint terrorism task force in Minneapolis had detained Zacarias Moussaoui on Aug. 16, 2001. Flight school pilots acting as whistleblowers had notified the FBI, against the wishes of their airline employer, of detailed information making Moussaoui the most suspicious student they had ever encountered. French intelligence soon supplied further background confirming Moussaoui's fighting for a “foreign power” — Chechnyan rebels, whose leader was connected to al-Qaeda. By Aug. 23, the case was deemed so suspicious, it went all the way to the top of the intelligence community, to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, in a PowerPoint presentation entitled: "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” As Rowley revealed in her letter of May 21, 2002, to FBI Director Robert Mueller, there was considerable frustration in her FBI unit in Minneapolis over the inability of FBI headquarters to get its act together and present these facts pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain the secret FISA Court’s permission to search Moussaoui’s personal effects and laptop computer in the days before 9-11.

At Huffington Post, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley has written a piece titled, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed neocons can destroy the world (if we let them). While I recommend the entire editorial, here I will extract only this part: "On page 362 of the Epilogue of his insightful book Chain of Command, Seymour Hersh asked the question back in 2004 that I predict will become the major question all historians will have to answer: "How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?""