Friday, October 02, 2015

Sorrows of Empire

Coleen Rowley interviewed at a Des Moines, Iowa Air Guard Drone piloting base protest.

When Coleen Rowley was an FBI agent in Minneapolis, her office got a lead just three weeks before 9-11: A known Islamic extremist named Zacarias Moussaoui had paid $8000 in cash for lessons to fly a Boeing 747. Rowley's team arrested him and wanted a warrant to search his laptop computer but Rowley's superiors at FBI headquarters said "no."

After 9/11, when it became clear that more could have been done, Rowley wrote FBI Director Robert Mueller a letter pointing out that "no one will ever know" the impact the computer search would have had calling his defense of the agency a "rush to judgment to protect the FBI at all costs." She testified in a Senate hearing a few weeks later. She was chosen by TIME magazine as one of their Persons of the Year in 2002. 

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