Guests include EX FBI agent Coleen Rowley, former CIA analyist Ray McGovern, Journalist Rashed Mian and more TBA

Coleen Rowley It takes courage to risk one’s career and reputation by becoming a whistleblower, defined as “a person who informs on someone engaged in an illicit activity.” For retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley, remaining quiet after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001was not an option. Time Magazine named her Person of the Year in 2002, along with fellow whistleblowers Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Sherron Watkins of Enron.

Rowley grew up and was educated in Iowa, with a degree in French from Wartburg College and a Juris Doctor from the University of Iowa. In 1981, Rowley became a Special Agent for the FBI and worked in several offices, including those in Nebraska, Mississippi, New York, France and Montreal. 

In 1990 she went to Minneapolis as Chief Division Council, and it was there that her office received word about suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. In a 2010 radio interview, Rowley described how in mid-August of 2001, her office was contacted by some flight instructors, concerned because Moussaoui had paid for flight lessons with large amounts of cash. Already deemed a potential terrorist threat, Moussauoi remained in custody due to a lapsed visa as Rowley´s team, collaborating with the French Intelligence Service, confirmed within days his connections to radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and to Osama bin Laden. Even with this knowledge, the FBI denied Rowley a warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer for information until the day of the attacks.

Rowley believed that a lack of cooperation between intelligence agencies tied her team’s hands when they tried to obtain a probable cause warrant for Moussaoui´s computer less than a month before the 9/11 attacks.

In 2002, Rowley wrote a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, detailing the mishandling of the intelligence her office had gathered, and later that year testified before the Senate.

In the memo to Mueller, she describes the inaction of the FBI: “To say, then, as has been iterated numerous times, that probable cause did not exist until after the disastrous event occurred, is really to acknowledge that the missing piece of probable cause was only the FBI’s failure to appreciate that such an event could occur. The probable cause did not otherwise improve or change….The problem with chalking this all up to a ´20-20 hindsight is perfect´ problem…is that this is not a case of everyone in the FBI failing to appreciate the potential consequences. It is obvious, from my firsthand knowledge of the events and the detailed documentation that exists, that the agents in Minneapolis who were closest to the action and in the best position to gauge the situation locally, did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed by Moussaoui and his possible co-conspirators even prior to September 11th.”

A year after testifying, Rowley went back to being a Special Agent, and retired in 2004. She made an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2006, and is now a public speaker, writer, and blogger on The Huffington Post, stressing the need to strike a balance between giving intelligence agencies the ability to conduct rigorous investigations of dangerous individuals, and protecting the civil liberties of the public. 

Ray McGovern leads the “Speaking Truth to Power” section of Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  A former co-director of the Servant Leadership School (1998-2004), he has been teaching there for more than 20 years.  His current course is: “On the Morality of Whistleblowing.”

Ray came to Washington from his native Bronx in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985. For more www.raymogovern.com

Rashed Mian is a multimedia journalist for the Long Island Press. Mian has covered such issues as Islamophobia, civil liberties, and politics for the Long Island Press since 2011. He’s won multiple local and state journalism awards and hopes to continue writing stories that go underreported by the mainstream media. 
 

Mr. Main's latest in LI Free Press

As President Barack Obama soared into office eight years ago, he promised, on his first day in the White House, to launch “a new era of open government.”

“The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears,” Obama said in a Jan. 21, 2009 memorandum.

Obama was urging the attorney general to issue new guidelines protecting The Freedom of Information Act. “In the face of doubt,” Obama proclaimed, “openness prevails.”

Notably, Obama’s transparency pledge came on the heels of President George W. Bush’s administration, which kept state-sponsored torture of alleged enemy combatants, a nascent drone assassination program, and covert eavesdropping of American citizens hidden from the eyes of the American public.

Aside from an economy teetering on the edge of collapse, Obama was inheriting two bloody and expensive wars, a bloated national security state that emerged from the “War on Terror,” and several controversial policies championed by his Republican predecessor.

Now it was the former Harvard University constitutional law professor’s turn to respond.

As our country takes stock of Obama’s tenure as commander-in-chief, the Press determined it appropriate to scrutinize his record on press freedoms and his ongoing and unprecedented federal crackdown of whistleblowers.

While countless Americans may judge Obama’s performance based on their own current economic standing or their ability to find affordable health insurance, some have grown so dissatisfied with the outgoing president’s handling of transparency that they think his legacy has been tarnished. Reviewing the two-term Democrat’s record on this issue is especially relevant now given President-elect Donald Trump’s hostile attacks on journalism during his recent presidential campaign. At the reality TV star’s rallies, reporters were on the receiving end of venomous jeers as he whipped his supporters into disparaging the “vicious” mainstream media. If Obama, as some press advocates have claimed, rivals Nixon in his use of secrecy and abuse of executive power, then what do the last eight years portend for the next four under Trump? The signs do not look good for the Fourth Estate or the nation’s intelligence community for that matter.

Even before his inauguration, Trump called on Congress to investigate press leaks regarding Russia’s alleged hacking of the Democratic and Republican national political committees as  as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta during the presidential campaign.

read full article  https://www.longislandpress.com/author/rashed-mian