Time magazine has appropriately called FBI counsel Colleen Rowley’s memo to FBI director Robert Mueller “The Bombshell Memo”.
The most disturbing thing about the memo has to be that the higher ups that Rowley dealt with in the FBI were so dismissive of the Minneapolis field office’s views of the risk posed by Zacarias Moussaoui, that this continued into the post-9/11 period. In her memo, Rowley writes,
Just minutes after I saw the first news of the World Trade Center attack(s), I was standing outside the office of Minneapolis ASAC M. Chris Briesse waiting for him to finish with a phone call, when he received a call on another line from this S[upervisory] S[pecial] A[gent]. Since I figured I knew what the call may be about and wanted to ask, in light of the unfolding events and the apparent urgency of the situation, if we should now immediately attempt to obtain a criminal search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop and personal property, I took the call. I said something to the effect that, in light of what had just happened in New York, it would have to be the “hugest coincidence” at this point if Moussaoui was not involved with the terrorists. The SSA stated something to the effect that I had used the right term, “coincidence” and that this was probably all just a coincidence and we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got their (HQ’s) permission because we might “screw up” something else going on elsewhere in the country.
This from the same SSA that had previously dismissed French intelligence information about Moussaoui’s terrorist connections as worthless, and, according to Rowley, had acted to sabotage efforts to obtain a search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop.
Why would an FBI agent be this obtuse? Rowe cites disincentives within the Bureau to take risks, but ultimately those disincentives come back to the schizophrenic views that the American public has of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
You can see this depicted in films where the two popular genres of police-oriented movies are alternatively a) the super cop who kicks ass, saves the day, and rarely considers the constitutional rights of suspects and b) the corrupt cop who usually does all of the above but is condemned for it. It is as if Americans do not realize that the cops from Lethal Weapon and Training Day are almost identical (though, for some reason, the Lethal Weapon cops are cheered when they step outside the limits of the law while clearly audiences are not meant to cheer for Denzel Washington’s corrupt narcotics officer).
Within the FBI, this sort of dichotomy seems to have induced bureaucratic paralysis. On the one hand, the American public wants the FBI to catch the bad guys no matter what. On the other hand, when the risk taking leads to screw ups like Waco, Ruby Ridge or COINTELPRO, we are suddenly shocked that the FBI would so routinely sidestep constitutional protections.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Congress quickly passed and the President signed the Patriot Act. That act was decried by many civil libertarians, pundits and not a few politicians — many of whom are now wondering why the FBI did not search Moussauoi’s laptop sooner.
Similarly, on the one hand the political climate dictates that even in the post-9/11 era, airports cannot target Arab men for special treatment. On the other hand, much of the debate over a memo authored by an FBI agent in Phoenix center around why the FBI did not conduct a nationwide investigation of Arab men at flight training schools.
Is it really that surprising in this sort of environment that an FBI bureaucrat would decide to take a safe, easy choice rather than risk making national headlines?