Coleen Rowley / Huffington Post & AntiWar.com & Jill Stein’s Statement On 9/11 – 2016-09-15 12:24:58
Why This FBI Whistleblower Seconds Jill Stein’s Call For A New 9/11 Investigation
Why This FBI Whistleblower Seconds Jill Stein’s Call For A New 9/11 Investigation
Coleen Rowley / Huffington Post & AntiWar.com
(September 13, 2016) — After the events of September 11, 2001, as a longtime FBI agent and division legal counsel, I blew the whistle on the FBI’s failure to act on information provided by the Minneapolis field office that could have prevented the attacks.
On this sad 15th anniversary of 9/11, I am encouraged to see that Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein put out a statement calling for a new investigation not afflicted by all the limitations, partisan obstacles and other problems that adversely affected the 9/11 Commission.
It’s what so many of us have long called for, including me personally (see here and here) as someone with a front row seat to the FBI’s initial cover-ups.
The FBI was only one of the agencies and political entities which strived to cover up the truth of why and how they all ignored a “system blinking red” in the months before the attacks. So successful had this been that when I testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2002, I actually felt I had to explain why the truth was important. That we “owed it to the public, especially the victims of terrorism, to be completely honest” and “learning from our mistakes” were two of the reasons I came up with.
But the biggest mistake, the launching of the ruinous, counterproductive”war on terror,” had already broken out even before my testimony (and long before the 9/11 Commission was allowed to begin work), along with its attendant war crimes such as torture, which were secretly “legalized.” Not only had truth again become the first casualty, but Cicero’s adage was playing out: “in times of war, the law falls silent.”
As retired Major Todd Pierce recently said in an interview: “Everything that we have done since 9/11 is wrong.” And I think that is largely because people still don’t know the full truth about how 9/11 could have easily been prevented if only agencies and the Bush Administration had shared information internally, between agencies and with the public (see “Wikileaks and 9-11: What If?”).
I debated, early on, with a former CIA legal counsel who claimed war was the answer as opposed to investigating/prosecuting terrorism as plain crime, and later tried to explain more fully why “The War on Terror (Is) A False Promise for National Security,” published in the International Journal of Intelligence Ethics.
So much of the ease in perpetrating this type of deceit, described so well in David Swanson’s book “War Is A Lie”, comes back to Mark Twain’s classic adage that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
So it took a couple years after 9-11, after the first in the long series of Mideast wars had been launched, with US military occupations firmly installed for the duration (in what has now come to be called “perma-war”) before the 9/11 Commission and other official and congressional inquiries could get out even the tiniest bit of truth, revealing that 9/11 was enabled by the lack of sharing of pertinent intelligence information inside and between agencies as well as with the public, not any lack of massive, non-relevant metadata collection on innocent people.
We also learned that the countries we had launched war on, or had judged culpable for the attacks, Iraq and Iran, were not at all involved in 9-11. It’s jaw-dropping that it’s taken nearly 15 years to get the “28 pages” in the Joint Intelligence Committee’s Report finally released. The “28 pages” show no culpability on the part of either Iraq or Iran, just strong indications of Saudi funding and support of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Another retired intelligence officer who cares about integrity in intelligence, Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Near East, CIA and National Intelligence Council (ret.), also agrees with Jill Stein’s call:
I have long believed there needs to be a kind of 9/11 “Truth Commission” – completely independent and untainted by any political organization – in order for this country to be able to move forward in any meaningful way.
The sad fact is that many folks, for varying reasons, just don’t want to “go there” — i.e. the truth may be too painful for them. I don’t know exactly what happened on 9/11, but given my government’s record on Iraq and other issues, I have no reason to trust the official version.
I think that keeping the public in a fog regarding 9/11 is extremely destructive to the health of the nation. 9/11 is like an open running sore – let’s heal it, painful as it may be.
Despite Mark Twain’s adage and the difficulty for Americans to see through the fog of perma-war, it’s never too late to wise up. As Twain’s fellow humorist Will Rogers asked, “If stupidity got us into this mess, why can’t it get us out?”
In May of 2002, Coleen Rowley brought some of the FBI’s pre 9/11 lapses to light and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the endemic problems facing the FBI and the intelligence community.
Rowley’s memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller in connection with the Joint Intelligence Committee’s Inquiry led to a two-year long Department of Justice Inspector General investigation. She was one of three whistleblowers chosen as persons of the year by TIME magazine. She currently works with the Veterans for Peace chapter in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Reprinted from Huffington Post.
Jill Stein’s Statement On 9/11
On the 15th Anniversary, We Need to Learn the Full Story of 9/11 and
to End the Catastrophic Wars on Terror That Followed
Fifteen years ago the world reacted in horror as more than 3,000 individuals were murdered. We honor those victims, and the heroic first responders of that day.
The same day the Green Party issued a statement calling for this act of terrorism to be treated as a crime against humanity and for the culprits to be criminally prosecuted. We pleaded, “Do not turn our cries of grief into a cry for war.” Our national leaders and the corporate media ignored us.
The Stein/Baraka campaign stands for truth and transparency in politics. Since September 11 of 2001, secrecy and lies, endless war, torture, and a frightening “surveillance state” have become the new normal. On the 15th anniversary of 9/11, it is past time for sober reflection and public discourse about this tragedy.
We now know with absolute certainty that fraudulent claims of “weapons of mass destruction” and of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were used as pretexts to invade Iraq. That illegal and immoral war cost the lives of over 4,000 US soldiers and maimed and wounded almost a million more. In Iraq, another million people were killed.
Fifteen years later, American troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pretext of “humanitarian relief” was used to invade and devastate Libya. And the escalating violence has intensified the Syrian civil war into a disaster of the highest order.
The Obama administration has expanded a drone war into Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. Hundreds of thousands of people — many of them children — have died as a result of the invasions. Millions more have become refugees.
The September 11 attacks were used to launch a war against terrorism, yet terrorism has soared worldwide. This war has been used as an excuse to squash civil liberties and to scapegoat Muslims and other immigrants.
This year the Islamic celebration of Eid al-Adha coincides with the anniversary of the tragic events of September 11. We join with people of all faiths and beliefs in standing with our Muslim friends and neighbors and demand an end to Islamaphobia in public discourse.
It is time to end these failed wars and to heed the Green Party’s initial call to build a new world based on peace and justice.
The families and friends of those who were murdered on 9/11 deserve justice. They also deserve to know the truth.
Led by the families of those who died on 9/11, the American people wanted — and deserved — a comprehensive and independent inquiry into the attacks. The Bush administration initially said an inquiry was unnecessary, claiming that the perpetrators had been identified and their methods and motives were clear.
It is well known that the 9/11 Commission produced a report containing so many omissions and distortions that Harper’s Magazine described it as “whitewash as public service” — a document that “defrauds the nation.”
The co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission wrote a book just two years after the final commission report, saying, “We were set up to fail.” The 9/11 Commission was not given enough money, time, or access to relevant classified information.
The Stein/Baraka campaign believes a new inquiry is necessary.
Under our administration a new inquiry would have access to the considerable body of responsible independent research that has emerged over the last 15 years. We would create an independent 9/11 Commission, not one dominated by members with an interest in protecting the reputation and careers of foreign affairs and intelligence communities.
The US government has finally released the long-classified 28 pages from the 2002 Congressional Report, which have raised many questions about Saudi intelligence as well as other intelligence agencies and their relationship to 9/11.
It’s time for a full accounting of what happened, and an end to the misguided post-9/11 wars that are actually making us less safe, not more safe.
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