View 1995 KFOR-TV BroadcastLet FBI and CIA agents talk about links to terrorism
Indianapolis Star Commentary
March 22, 2003
by James Patterson
The people of the United States, indeed the world, are sharply divided over the current war in Iraq. With this nation's mixed record in battling terrorism, it's no wonder.
Pre-war polls showed that Americans were about evenly split over whether the U.S. should go to war without the sanction of the United Nations. The public's support for military action -- more precisely, members of the armed forces -- got a boost when it became clear that an attack would be launched, with or without U.N. approval.
That hasn't stopped worldwide protests over the U.S. preoccupation with unseating a dictator in another land.
Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets Friday to express their disapproval of the Iraq war. In Yemen, at least three people died when police fired into a crowd of 30,000 who marched on the U.S. Embassy.
In Greece, ironically, the birthplace of democratic governance, 150,000 near the U.S. Embassy were turned away with tear gas. The protesters responded with rocks and gasoline bombs. Ditto for Indonesia, where demonstrators threw eggs at the British Embassy, besieged U.S. fast-food restaurants and banks, and stopped traffic.
Anti-war activity flared up in this country, too. In the most intense street protests since the Vietnam War, demonstrators shut down San Francisco's financial district two days in a row. In all, more than 1,800 people were arrested in several cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, East Lansing, Mich., Lincoln, Neb., Jackson, Miss., and Washington, D.C.
But not all domestic dissent centers on the process of war itself. For some, disillusionment comes from the federal government's questionable priority in attacking Iraq while mostly ignoring the spawning of terrorism cells right here in the U.S.
When Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley tried to get FBI headquarters interested in Zacarias Moussaoui, the man charged with six counts of conspiracy in the 9/11 terror plot, she was scolded by superiors, threatened and told not to bring up the subject again. This week, Rowley was reassigned after saying earlier this month that the FBI was not up to fighting the terrorism attacks likely to follow hostilities in Iraq.
In a seven-page letter, Rowley said the nation's "internal security posture" had been "weakened by the diversion of attention from al-Qaida to our government's plan to invade Iraq, a step that will, in all likelihood, bring an exponential increase in the terrorist threat to the U.S., both at home and abroad."
The incursion into Iraq must seem flippant to a host of other people who are fed up with the U.S. government's deception as well, including former Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police Capt. Douglas Haas, FBI agent Robert Wright, former CIA director James Woolsey, former CIA agent Larry Johnson and former FBI agent Dan Vogel, to name a few. All were frustrated by two successive U.S. administrations under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which dismissed glaring evidence that domestic terrorism cells were flourishing.
Haas, former chairman of a joint local, state and federal terrorism task force in Broward County, Fla., was stunned when an FBI agent refused to accept a task force report in the mid-1980s that uncovered a terrorist sleeper cell operating in South Florida, a state where 15 of the 9/11 hijackers had spent time.
Wright uncovered a money-laundering scheme that had run hundreds of thousands of dollars through five Chicago-area banks and the Quranic Literacy Institute of Oak Lawn, Ill. Nothing was done to the Literacy Institute.
Johnson, Woolsey and Vogel have tried to get the FBI and Congress to consider stark evidence that a former Iraqi soldier, who emigrated to the U.S. after the first Gulf War, was tied to a terrorist cell in Oklahoma City that was involved in the 1995 bombing there, but the FBI keeps telling them they are crazy.
Vogel is prepared to swear before Congress that he met with an Oklahoma City TV reporter, her husband and her lawyer on Jan. 28, 1999, at that city's FBI office and received documents implicating the Iraqi's involvement in the bombing, and that Vogel turned them over to his superiors, only to have those documents disappear.
If our government is serious about fighting terrorism, why won't it hear from its own FBI and CIA agents about terrorist acts in this country? What's wrong with letting them talk?
Patterson is a Star editorial writer. Contact him at 1-317-444-6174 or by e-mail at james.patterson@indystar.com.