Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/3/21 Coleen Rowley on the Many Ways 9/11 Could Have Been Prevented

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Scott speaks with FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley about the institutional failures that occurred before and after the 9/11 attacks. Rowley believes that there are many ways the attacks could have been prevented ranging from better information sharing between agencies to the locking of cockpit doors. After the attacks, Rowley says bureaucratic changes alone would have been enough to prevent similar attacks from occurring again and been a lot less costly than launching wars and spying on the world’s population. But both Scott and Rowley observe that instead the tragedy was seized upon by people with predefined agendas, something they both find just as morally reprehensible as prior knowledge of the attacks.  Discussed on the show: Pete Seeger: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright Press For Truth Movie Ray Nowosielski interview with Richard Clarke The Shadow Factory by James Bamford  Coleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller Her second letter to Mueller, right before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 The Fall by Camus  Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and lawyer who helped expose the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She was honored with TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2002. Find her on Twitter @ColeenRowley. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDfzIR5iy4k Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys on the line i've got coline raleigh she was times person of the year in 2002 because she was an fbi lawyer in minneapolis and her team had arrested Zacharias Masawi. And as Laura has it, and I think it's true, they had only been allowed to do their job and look at this guy's computer. It would have led them 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 wars 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 consortium news.com over the last 15 years since too welcome the show how are you doing oh very well

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 reminds me of the Pete Seeger song, Waste Deep in the Big Muddy. You know, it's like we're eyeball 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. terrible mistakes and fiascos. Some of them are 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, 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 Zellico, 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 their failure 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. On the eight months after 9-11, of course, I knew a lot about the Musawi fiasco where our headquarters had not allowed an emergency FISA request, even though those agents absolutely knew this from the start and they had it, they really had so prescient that they identified the same criminal statutes that Musawi ended up being convicted of. I mean, this was a day after they had taken

him into custody that they actually identified the criminal statutes that he later was convicted of. Well, 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 they're a 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, you know, 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. You know, 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. You know, there, you know, obviously everybody's like that. You know, 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, we have to get to the bottom of some of these mistakes. And, you know, as I've been saying, these were really simple mistakes to correct. When information is bottled up inside of agencies, you know, 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, you know, failure to connect the dots was a three-fold thing that there was failure to share information inside of agencies, I'm still learning things myself about some of these really debacles of lack of information sharing. For instance, Tenet was one of the rare occasions where he knew everything, he knew a lot about the Musawi case, probably because his own bin Laden counterterrorism unit had briefed him. And he was given a briefing on August, I think 23rd or 24. Of course, obviously, what, two, three weeks before 9-11, Islamic extremists learns to fly.

And 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. So 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 uh tenant 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 Musawi trial. But 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 assistance. And it was entitled, a Chechian terrorist leader Abu Qatab and Osama bin Laden are entwined and going to attack the United States. And then it had all the, you know, 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 Qatab, the Chechian terrorist leader. So the headquarters was arguing, well, the Chechians, you know, 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 Katab and bin Laden are buddies. They were working together during, you know, 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, Zabigno-Brasinski's big plan to push out the Soviet Union. So they were actually aligned with each other. So, I mean, there were so many different ways that 9-11 could have been prevented on a whole. It's not just one way. Obviously, when they find out that Musawi was being paid by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's right-hand man, as was Mohamed 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. And, you know, so for instance, Musawi 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 and calling the FBI. They called, 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, Mohamed Ada, 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. necessarily terrorism, but just due to drunk passengers or, you know, people that 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 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 is 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 straw man it. I'm trying to make it. 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 keep an open mind about this. And I also will caveat that I'm aware of a lot of, 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 Free was like this. Louis Free 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 the other ADICs, 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.

Okay, 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 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 his head of his bin Laden unit at the time, a guy named, I think it was BLE, 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 sometimes when some of these high-ranking officials think they have the green light. So they're not exactly rogues

because they actually think, oh, yeah, You gave me a wink there. So 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 principles from know, or the White House principles were trying to keep the president from knowing all of the

details about waterboarding and torture, et cetera. So that can happen. It obviously has happened before. And 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 most 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 tenant or etc? So again, 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 Inquirer, the information that came out linking Bandar, Bin Salton, and some of the other Saudis to the helping and supporting the hijackers when they came 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's also the possibility that there was a little bit worse agenda, 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 mid-east. 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's going to knock a tower down around here soon. 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, but bark only growled in one direction or something. Because some FBI agents talked to Greg Pallas in November 01. And they were mad as hell. And so we could have stopped this attack.

God dang it. But you know why we couldn't? It 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 Pinnak wanted an attack attack.

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 had 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-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 Sufhan. 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. And he was the 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 Al 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 Rosini. Exactly. Thank you so much. So it's Doug Miller and Mark Rosini and Ali Sufant 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. I mean, you can kind of, you could tell. These guys, that's not what they think happened. But Sufant 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 CIA station. And he goes in the back room and they open up a manila envelope

and they show them, as you mentioned, the Kuala Lampur, Malaysia meeting. And they have like a, I guess like a PowerPoint. point 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, geez, 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

shit 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's just never happens ever, ever that 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 mcdonalds 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 the rest of them all and kind of can piece it together. So I'll just sort of, inside the FBI or the CIA or anywhere, it's sort of floating around. But I don't know. Anyway, I don't want to oversimplified or let anybody off the hook either, but I'm just 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 and 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 and countries that had nothing to do with it in 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 a 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. It's pretty basic. That's a heck of a lot easier than spending trillions of dollars in 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, okay? That's just, that's for sure. You know, we're going to get things happen. And then the question is, can we, as Carl 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 seize guns after Katrina. Nobody blames them for causing the storm or for blowing a few blow them up for 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 rifle. That's the shock. You know, it's what is about the shock doctrine. When anything happens in people, we're seeing it now with COVID, actually. I hate to change the subject to this politically incorrect, but we're seeing the way fear can be used with anything to ramp up a completely wrong approach or whatever, you know, completely wrongheaded 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 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. you know, he did a lot of great investigative work of these earlier al-Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, the Cobar Towers, uh-huh. That's right. So once our ally, bin Laden and the other Saudi jihadists that were sent into Afghanistan to be our proxies and fight with the Mujahideen. So once that's over, and then we launched that first Gulf War, Bin Laden apparently wanted 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 Cobar 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 Free 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 Free made sure that 12 of these Shia-Iranian-connected people were indicted for this. really terrible terrorist attack in 1996.

And when you read Gareth Porter's, there is a lot of evidence that this was totally wrong. Then in hindsight, you also see Louis Free becoming one of the Mek, 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 six five years before nights uh before nine 11 right and we had a massive twisting of of facts well listen and and it was so important too because who was killed again 19 american airmen and it was bin laden and colleague shake mohaman 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 Abd al-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. 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 weren't 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 had 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-wingerers want us the hell off of They're soil, and maybe we should be. Can't we bomb Iraq from our ships in the Persian Gulf? Come on.

Yeah, I feel terrible about Cobar Towers because one of those Air Force young men, 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 Free 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 even also accompanied them to an in-person briefing at Quantico. All of the Cobart Tower families went to this direct briefing from Louis Free, and I went with them. And I'm thinking back to this, and of course, nobody, they don't know anything.

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 Free 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 Free 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. Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. First of all, we've published 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 Richmond. We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine, and What Social Animals Owe 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. fools 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 twenty nine 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 libertarian institute dot org slash books all right i want to go back to something you said about uh richard blee who i'm not exactly

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 uh or maybe that's her alias or I don't know what it has this thing but um I get all confused but I'll tell you this is uh Ray Noaleski and I have his book and I always say his name wrong sorry Ray I went out to dinner with the guy's 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 what? I can only find the Rich Bleed 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 Tenant 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 some thing 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 them 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 is just video and some humor.

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 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 an operation abroad that then comes into the U.S., that 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 one. 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-Lawki. All-Locki was a failed effort. They approached him. They tried to blackmail him through sexual incidents. and he says, no way, I'm getting out of here, and he went off to Yemen. But he was a failed attempt to flip somebody. And then, of course, you look at the operations of Whitey Bulger and Scarpa. In all of these cases, and actually, Bin Laden and Abu Qatab 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 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, et cetera? 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 in 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 truth. 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 and 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 advisor's job and the heads of and George Tenet's job as the DCI. You know, Michael Schoyer 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, 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 in, 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 Sawyer 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 it, you know, the so-called false flag. And in fact, many of them, you know, 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 to, 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 your exaggerating or you're amplifying or you're misattributing, which is what happened with the Gulf of Tonkin, with with Iraq, etc. 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, you know, 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, you know, when there's this terrible incentive, perverse incentive of billions and billions of dollars, I defy most human beings not to fall into this. You know, 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 think 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 darnest to wake people up and get them to think and, you know, be concerned for actual facts and truth as opposed to all of this narrative stuff

from on high that we shock 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 I 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? look like, do you think? How could we get them? 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 will give you all this euphemistic, where you're looking for the truth and everybody on the

panel is objective and doesn't have any conflict of interest, et cetera. So you always hear that, but I'm only aware of one official investigation that possibly is more of a model. And those were the investigations after the Challenger and the Columbia blew up. They did have, you know, certain NASA officials and some military officers. Sally Rye, the astronaut, was on one of these panels. I've read them. And, you know, they actually kind of aired the dirty long. laundry and they actually got into 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 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 Zellico, who's a close associate of Condi Rice, who has a, you can't have, going back to COVID, you can't have a Fauci, who is part of the patents 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 such kind of widespread corruption of conflict of interest. The talking heads, our mainstream media has Brennan and all these generals. There have 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 should we should stop the war in Afghanistan 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 recognized from the start that you can't. can't have a judge trying 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 relive 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 2002. 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 going to 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 um that where i really got more vocal about iraq was uh in february of 2003 just uh 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 this this notion was in my head that this this global war on terrorism they you know 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 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 they, 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, and I had just been on the cover of Time magazine and had narrowly survived, one of the very few whistleblowers who narrowly survived not being fired or whatever for a lot of reasons. One reason I survived was 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, and said, 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 this happened in earlier February. Then I wrote this letter to Mueller, because Mueller had told me anytime you see something wrong, 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 any time. So like March 6th or 7th, 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 I just tried to think of every reason I could think of that this was going to fail. But, of course, no one listens at that point. Everybody had war fever. And it's too late. By the time you're, by the time you're really see this happening, it's very difficult to stop because they own the media. And you, 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 Pinkas 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 Night 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, 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 say, 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 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 the Wayback Machine here, because no one else has it. I'll republish it at Scott Horton.org. I found the Wayback Machine, the memo here.

and I did a control F, and you're right. It doesn't say a rack in there anywhere. I was so sure. But anyway, I know that you warned about it 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 or whatever. Let's try that. War on terror.

Even then, people were 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 thousand words here. so I'm going to post it at scothorton.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, 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. And Scott, after the, you know, people said how stupid everybody, I mean, I even only had like one guy 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 who 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, the OPR, they started a misconduct investigation for having talked with the New York Times, not authorized to talk with the New York Times. And so that was hanging over me.

And they said, as long as I retired early and got the heck out of there, then it would end. 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 drowned 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 this. And then the end of this Kamu 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 basically, you know, Julian Assange 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 group think and obedience to authority, Milgram and whatever, these terrible group think situations, the banality of evil is what it is. Yes, you do. Unfortunately, I think that's really the only thing. Assange, of course, has turned out to be a complete martyr on this.

And I, you know, you can hope and pray that something breaks loose on this, but this is the situation we find ourselves in 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 well just have to keep muddling through and try to keep up as much as 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 have got on a plane to D.C. and yelled at them or, you know, some kind of thing like that. But 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. In fact, I was the day of 9-11, we were talking about this, you know, when we were walking over to the U.S. attorney's office and saying, oh, my gosh, you know, this. We knew it from the start. that this could have been prevented. And 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 don't think they can really, you know, it's these kinds of situations you can only do what you can do. In my case, you know, I was just the legal counsel. I think I tried to get the truth out afterwards. and getting the truth out afterwards, of course, was partially successful, but even then it wasn't, you know, it didn't really change anything. Yeah. Well, you never know. I think that's probably not true.

But, well, I'm not going to say, oh, yeah, no, now the FBI and the CIA are great at their stupid jobs or whatever. You know, that's not my point. but 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 mutual education is a factor. So you just keep up doing what you can and then hoping that other people pick it up, you know, and the younger generation, who knows. But we have to continue on.

Yep. Well, thank you so much for your time, Colleen. Really appreciate it. Okay. Good afternoon. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.