COLEEN ROWLEY, rowleyclan@earthlink.net, @ColeenRowley
A former FBI special agent and division counsel, Rowley famously wrote a May 2002 memo to then FBI Director Robert Mueller exposing some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 conduct. She was then named one of TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year.”
She said today: “Already on the day of September 11, 2001, some of us insiders knew some agonizing truth, that the horrible terrorist attacks of that day could have been easily prevented if FBIHQ had just read, shared and acted on the memos addressed to officials there. But I didn’t know the half of it that day, that other agencies like the CIA actually knew much more as their agents had been monitoring the meetings and developments of key Al Qaeda figures for a couple of years prior but were keeping that intelligence secret even from other counter-terrorism agencies. Most importantly the CIA hid the fact from the FBI until it was too late that they knew Al Qaeda terrorists (who would become 9-11 aircraft hijackers and suicide pilots) were already in the country. Along with all the prior info they kept secret, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet had been briefed with a ‘Fundamentalist Learns to Fly’ PowerPoint weeks before the attacks. (He later could not explain why as head of all U.S. national security intelligence, he still took no action.)
“Even worse, instead of coming to grips with this truth that would have enabled speedy solutions to these relatively easy-to-fix administrative problems/flubs that mostly involved lack of information sharing (what the 9-11 Commission termed ‘failure to connect the dots’), massive cover-ups ensued after 9-11. Nearly all U.S. political figures and other officials in Washington would bury the truth, fight accountability and even lie in order to institute their pre-determined agendas, long planned to commence after a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ pretext. So without dissent and no truth, the misbegotten, counter-productive ‘global war on terrorism’ was immediately launched that served as fig leaf for actual, successive wars on Mideastern countries beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq, bloody wars that would take the lives of millions but had no chance of reducing terrorism or spreading democracy, wars that would destabilize the entire region, vastly increase extremist massacres and sprout new terrorist groups like hydras but would fill the coffers of the military industrial complex’s war profiteers.”
Philip Shenon, who was a New York Times reporter for many years and wrote the bestseller The Commission recently stated of Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 commission: “I’d argue he was more influential than several of the 10 commissioners when it came to writing the final report. At the end of the investigation, many staffers felt their most important and controversial conclusions were not reflected in the report’s findings, especially when it came to demanding accountability in the Bush administration for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. That was also true about the evidence of possible Saudi government ties to the conspiracy. The choice of an executive director — to run the day-to-day investigation — is vital. … Zelikow was close to Condi Rice and had been on the Bush administration’s White House transition team in 2000, with responsibility for national-security issues. That still astonishes me.”
AP reported in June on calls for “a full-blown investigation” of the pandemic crisis “by a national commission like the one that looked into 9/11.” The article notes that a “privately sponsored team” is “already laying the groundwork for one.” Zelikow, now at the University of Virginia, is “leading the planning group.”
RICHARD SILVERSTEIN, 
