Secrecy Kills

These two words sum up well the op-ed I co-wrote with Bogdan Dzakovic before last
year’s 9th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, a shortened version of which was
published later in the LA Times under the title: “ HYPERLINK "http://
articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/15/opinion/la-oe-rowley-wikileaks-20101015" \t "_blank"
WikiLeaks and 9-11: What If?”.

But there exist so many more reasons why and examples how secrecy hurts public
safety, that it’s hard to know where to start. Why secrecy, at best, should be considered
a “necessary evil”, why experts on security and democracy have long recognized that
secrecy must be circumscribed to the bare minimum. Secrecy can and should almost
always be limited in time. Even when approving a “sneak and peak” search, judges still
must carefully delineate the exact time period (usually in weeks) that secrecy is actually
required. The public safety component of effective governance is simply not possible
unless secrecy is kept to the bare minimum.

The truth about governmental secrecy is therefore precisely opposite of what the
propaganda has been these last years, especially since the advent of WikiLeaks and the
Bush/Obama Administrations’ renewed vigor in prosecuting government
whistleblowers as “leakers” of their secrets. As a result, citizens have been duped into
the Orwellian myth that governmental secrecy protects them.

Underlying Fundamental: Secrecy Enables Wrongdoing

The slide below that I use in my “ethical decision-making” PowerPoint is derived from
the FBI’s own “Law Enforcement Ethics” presentation that I and other Chief Division
Counsels first gave all over the country, in all of the FBI’s 56 Field Divisions the week
before 9-11. (Ironically, this law enforcement ethics presentation was mandated to
fulfill FBI Director Louis Freeh’s pledge to Congress that he would ensure the FBI got
ethics training as a result of an earlier scandal in late spring 2001. That particular FBI
scandal stemmed from a public disclosure that the FBI had failed to provide
government prosecutors and defense attorneys with all the documents the FBI had
collected pertaining to Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma bombing case, just weeks
before McVeigh’s scheduled execution. But I digress.)

The graphic depiction shows how the ethics line—defined as “doing right when there is
no one to make you do it but yourself”—is higher and above the criminal line where
real police, if they find out and catch you, will effectively intervene to stop your
criminal act. In showing this slide, I often explain, however that there are real costs,
including lost monetary profits, in some cases, to operating at the higher line. The
upshot is that many people, a majority of the competitive and profit-driven, will go
right down to the criminal line and even dip below it from time to time (shown by the
squiggly red line) when they think no one will find out and they can get away with it. If
they think they can evade or outfox law enforcement, or a drug test won’t detect their
cheating in a Tour de France or Olympic sporting event, people will be much more
inclined to dip below the criminal line—see the seminal book HYPERLINK "http://
www.cheatingculture.com/aboutdavidcallahanhtm/" \t "_blank" The Cheating Culture,
by David Callahan.) Of course it’s impossible to hire enough police and build enough
prisons when/if a society totally abandons the ethical “self-policing” line and bets
instead on “secrecy” to protect/enable their wrongdoing.

INCLUDEPICTURE "cid:image001.gif@01CC6E29.604D87B0" \*
MERGEFORMATINET

Transparency Counters Our Fatal Attraction to Secrecy: the “Grandma Ethics Test”

To counter this attraction to secrecy and better enable oneself to tell right from wrong in
dealing with hard ethical dilemmas, the easiest advice to young people is to suggest
they choose their course of action while imagining their grandma is looking over their
shoulder. An adult is well advised to make his or her hard decisions based on how such
actions would appear publicized on the front page of a local newspaper. In like fashion,
the best societies and governments require effective mechanisms for revealing and
sharing truth with their citizens. This was the reason for Edmund Burke’s realization of
the importance of the “4th Estate” of government over other branches.

It’s axiomatic that to counter the power of secrecy in the criminal world, law
enforcement agencies have long asked and relied on members of the public to use their
eyes and ears to report crimes they are aware of and to be on the look-out for fugitives
hiding out. Beyond soliciting public tips, law enforcement also recruits informants and
relies on insider cooperating witnesses and whistleblowers to pierce organized criminal
conspiracies, financial fraud schemes and to investigate corruption of public officials.
After 9-11, the various orange alerts and constant public fear-mongering, ensured
information (mostly on Islamic and Arab people and much of it non-specific and non-
relevant) poured in from hundreds of thousands of citizen-tipsters who never would
have otherwise picked up the phone and reported info to “Big Brother”. (Reporting on
garden variety crimes, however, took a back seat. Somehow suspicions voiced about
Bernie Madoff’s operating a $65 billion Ponzi scheme and other financial frauds went
and go ignored for years.)

Hypocrisy of Hypocrisy: Reducing Personal Privacy but Increasing Governmental

Secrecy

With over 3000 agencies and private contractors at work in “ HYPERLINK "http://
projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/" Top Secret America”, all focusing
on collecting massive amounts of data about individuals---the Washington Post article
reports that the NSA alone vacuums up 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other
communications every 24 hours—little individual secrecy (what we normally term
“privacy”) remains. However, since no threshold of suspicion or justification is
required for much of this massive governmental data collection, the billions of data now
safely stored in mega “Black Widow” type computers, largely lacks relevancy. It’s
important to not forget that Rumsfeld and other officials excused their many failures to
“connect the dots” before 9-11, by saying that “intelligence was gushing like a firehose
and you can’t get a sip from a firehose”. Well, if “intelligence” was a firehose before
9-11, it must now be Niagara Falls or maybe even a tsunami. Will someone draw a
cartoon of Rumsfeld’s replacement (Leon Panetta) trying to get his sip from the current
tsunami? I have yet to hear the NSA mathematicians explain how when you’re looking
for the “terrorist” needle in the haystack, it helps to add more hay.

The evidence is quite the opposite! No government agency connected the dots before
Fort Hood shooter HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting" \t
"_blank" Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 and wounded 30, flight passenger
HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab" \t "_blank"
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to ignite his "underwear bomb" in the air over
Detroit or HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_Shahzad" \t "_blank"
Faisal Shahzad planted his car bomb in Times Square. Yet all of these terrorist events
involved individuals in direct communication with the very HYPERLINK "http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki" \t "_blank" same Yemeni cleric who was also
connected to three of the 9-11 hijackers. In all three cases, people at the scene stopped
the terrorist. ( HYPERLINK "http://galleries.statesman.com/gallery/ben-
sargent-2010/102819/" \t "_hplink" This great cartoon drawn by Ben Sargent says it
all.) The utility is therefore highly questionable of continuing to grow the already
massive but irrelevant data bases in detecting the terrorists amongst us (see “
HYPERLINK "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/how-top-secret-america-
mi_b_811049.html" \t "_blank" How Top Secret America Misfires”).

By contrast with vastly diminished personal privacy accompanying all the glutted
government databases, it appears governmental secrecy is being expanded in a variety
of ways and on a variety of levels through over-classification, new walls curtailing
information sharing (see “ HYPERLINK "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-
rowley/omb-orders-government-age_b_806145.html" \t "_blank" OMB Orders
Government Agencies to Monitor Disgruntled Employees -- What's Next?”), more
and more use of “state secrets privilege” to shut down lawsuits, and the eruption of new
turf battles occasioned by the proliferation of national security agencies with redundant,
overlapping missions and which are in budget competition. Since the Sept. 11, 2001
attacks, the secretive dark force HYPERLINK "http://www.commondreams.org/
headline/2011/09/03-2" Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has grown
tenfold, conducting (once considered illegal) assassination missions around the world
“while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA managed”. WikiLeaks
seems to have spawned a certain hysteria amongst US political leaders making them
conflate whistleblowing with leaking and leaking with spying, leading to reversal of
many of the civilian government and military information-sharing reforms put into
place to fix the pre 9-11 problems.

The failure to pass, year after year, congressional session after congressional session,
any real whistle-blower protection for the analysts and agents laboring in the 16
intelligence agencies, (which failure, ironically, occurred last year after a Senate
“SECRET HOLD” was put on the legislation after unanimous floor votes), obviously
tends to reinforce a culture of silence and secrecy. High profile prosecutions of
government whistleblowers like Thomas Drake (even though Drake’s turned out to be
largely unsuccessful) will intimidate nearly all government employees from sharing
their first-hand, candid insights with (as well as reporting fraud, waste, abuse and
illegality to) superiors. The upshot is reinforcement of the rigid stove-pipes where
bottle-necks commonly block directives flowing down from managers sitting in
Washington DC’s ivory towers while key, relevant intelligence being gathered in the
field is regularly stopped on its way up.

Key 9-11 Bottlenecks Remain Unexplained a Decade Later

When I wrote my May 2002 “whistleblower” memo about the FBI’s failure in the
Moussaoui case, it led to a two year long investigation by the Department of Justice’s
Inspector General (DOJ IG). It’s important to understand that the 9-11 Commission did
little to nothing itself unraveling the key intelligence failures documented in their Report’s
“Chapter 8: The System Was Blinking Red” but instead relied on the work of the prior
official inquiries, the findings of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI), the
Senate Judiciary investigation and the DOJ IG investigation my memo gave rise to.
Nearly a decade after the attacks, reporters are still punching big holes in the
thoroughness of those investigations showing key documentary evidence and information
was either glossed over or deliberately withheld. HYPERLINK "http://
thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/12/294748/clarke-cia-withheld-intel-cover-up/"
Richard Clarke Alleges That Top CIA Officials Withheld Intel On 9/11 Hijackers In
Cover-Up Government agencies’ nearly incomprehensible failures to share information
with the official investigations are still being exposed that anger the heads of those prior
investigations: see “ HYPERLINK "http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/07/v-fullstory/
2395698/link-to-911-hijackers-found-in.html" \l "ixzz1XSdPkKA6" Link to 9/11
hijackers found in Sarasota: FBI found ties between hijackers and Saudis in Sarasota
but never revealed the findings.
.
Recall that the DOJ IG investigation looked into three separate FBI debacles: the failure
to share information and take action regarding the two Al Qaeda hijackers al-Mihdhar
and al-Hazmi who had long been under CIA surveillance and were tracked entering
California over a year before 9-11; the “Phoenix Memo” warning of terrorist suspects in
flight school; and the HQ-botched Moussaoui investigation. With respect to the first
debacle, allegations have persisted for some time that key FBI and CIA personnel were
forbidden from telling the full truth about why the CIA did not share its information in a
timely manner regarding the two terrorist suspects who entered California. In the last
few weeks, a 2009 interview has come out on this topic with HYPERLINK "http://
www.truth-out.org/former-counterterrorism-czar-accuses-tenet-other-cia-officials-cover/
1313071564" Richard Clarke, Bush’s head counter-terrorism official known for his
speaking out about Bush-Cheney’s singular focus on invading Iraq, a country that had no
Al Qaeda connections, a focus that began the day after 9-11. Clarke too, it seems, has
been puzzled all these years, opining that the CIA’s failure to share key information with
the FBI and with him and other White House officials is the most murky, surprising and
still unexplained item. Clarke speculates the CIA might have been covering up a botched
and improper (due to infringing on FBI domestic jurisdiction) attempt to “flip” the two
terrorist suspects in California but to this day he admits that no one knows why the CIA
kept this info secret even from the FBI and White House Security Officials like himself.
Clarke makes clear that sharing that key info would have clearly enabled officials to
prevent 9-11 or at least a major portion of 9-11.
Update: Newest “Terrible Missed Chance”Revelation Met With FBI Official’s Claim
(AGAIN) of Simple FAILURE TO READ!

The prior IG, JICI, and Senate Judiciary investigations identified at least two major
instances of FBI officials’ sole explanation being the jaw-dropping: “I didn’t read the
document.” Former FBI Section Chief David Frasca simply claimed he didn’t read the
multi-paged and well-documented “Phoenix Memo” addressed to his attention that
urgently and presciently requested he launch investigation of terrorist suspects in flight
schools. Former FBI National Security Law Unit Chief Marion “Spike” Bowman
eventually admitted he didn’t bother to read Minneapolis Agent Harry Samit’s ill-fated
draft declaration seeking a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) search of
Moussaoui’s belongings but instead relied on a quick verbal briefing. The sticking
point for FBI Headquarters behind their stated refusal to request a FISA search in the
Moussaoui case was lack of connection to a foreign terrorist organization. Bowman
finally admitted he did not read the facts in Samit’s draft declaration for himself even
though he was the FBI’s main legal official to render the final decision. That terribly
wrong decision went unchallenged by other FBI officials, even well after 9-11, and
became one of the key points in my memo of May, 2002. Bowman’s decision that there
was no probable cause for a FISA due to lack of connection to a foreign terrorist
organization was eventually found to be completely wrong by the IG and 9-11
Commission inasmuch as French intelligence incorporated into Agent Samit’s draft
declaration showed Moussaoui to be connected to a Chechen foreign terrorist group and
its leader Ibn Khattab.

Even standing on its own, the Chechen connection would satisfy the FISA standard.
But there’s more. A memo written in April 2001 to FBI Director Louis Freeh by an
assistant Director and copied to eight other high level FBI leaders was just unearthed
from the Moussaoui trial’s trove of court exhibits by Newsweek Reporter Philip Shenon
(author of the book, The Commission) entitled “Bin Laden/Ibn Khattab Threat
Reporting”. It shows the FBI itself circulated this warning FIVE MONTHS
BEFOREHAND underscoring the required connection for the requested Moussaoui
FISA search:

“The U.S. Government has received information indicating that serious operational
planning has been underway since late 2000, with an intended culmination in late
Spring 2001. These plans are being undertaken by Sunni extremists with links to Ibn al
Khattab, an extremist leader in Chechnya , and to Usama Bin Laden. There are several
planning channels, some with connections to Afghanistan , all within a large shared
mujahideen recruitment network…. All the players are heavily intertwined.”

It gets even worse. Shenon’s recent (Sept 4) article: “ HYPERLINK "http://

www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/04/the-terrible-missed-chance.html" The
Terrible Missed Chance” details how one of the eight senior officials at the FBI
copied on this April 2001 Memo was Michael Rolince who oversaw the work of Frasca
and another FBI supervisor who denied Minneapolis FBI’s request. Rolince blithely
dismissed any blame for botching the Moussaoui case explaining that he only received
a cursory 20 second briefing on the case before 9-11 even though he was an important
liaison with the White House on terrorist threats during the summer of 2001. Rolince
also claims he didn’t see the April 2001 memo with his name on it linking the Chechens
and their leader Ibn Khattab to Osama bin Laden. If he didn’t read it, Rolince naturally
didn’t forward the key memo down to the two HQ supervisors, a memo that would
probably have reversed their stances.
Dumb Questions about Potential Simple Fixes for Improving Information Sharing

Just looking at one agency, the FBI (and undoubtedly the failures in the CIA, NSA and
other intelligence agencies were probably far worse), one might therefore get the idea
that the fix after the attacks of 2001 to all the jaw-dropping failures to share and even
to read information could have been pretty simple. Instead of bankrupting ourselves
and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, by launching a pre-emptive “war
on terror” on countries all over the world, instead of doing away with the Geneva
Conventions to allow US covert agents to conduct extraordinary renditions, black sites
and torture (and increasingly now assassinations), instead of US citizens sacrificing
many of their constitutional rights in allowing the government to conduct warrantless
monitoring and other massive data collections on US citizens, why not simply
mandate these government officials to actually read the intelligence sent to them,
especially when their decisions or action is requested? We could avoid many of
these later claims by officials who say they did not see key documents by simply
requiring officials to initial off. (Ironically give old J. Edgar Hoover credit for his rule
about initialing off on communications!) How about stopping reliance on verbal hear-
say when written legal affidavits or draft declarations exist? How about, instead of
doubling or tripling the national security-surveillance bureaucracy to its present “Top
Secret America” massiveness, we reduce the links in the chains of command and
intelligence stove-pipes to improve accurate information sharing, thus reducing the
chance of what happens in the kindergarten “whisper” game where a message gets
distorted as it’s heard and repeated going around a circle? Shouldn’t we have at least
tried the simple fixes that addressed the actual failures first?

Increasing Governmental Secrecy = Decreasing Governmental Accountability

The reason why the simple potential solutions to so many of the pre 9-11 failures were
not tried comes back to governmental secrecy. Cover-ups ensued immediately after the
attacks. No one readily admitted his or her mistakes, especially those in the Bush-
Cheney Administration at the top of the debacle. The Bush Administration fought tooth
and nail against the creation and investigative actions (what little there were) of the
9-11 Commission at every juncture to the point the leaders of the Commission now say
“it was set up to fail”. Recall that Bush-Cheney et al had effectively removed
themselves from the scope of the JICI. They allowed agency directors to thumb their
nose at the 9-11 investigators and helped obfuscate the failures of intelligence officials,
especially of “Director of Central Intelligence” George Tenet (probably in exchange for
Tenet’s tacit promise to go along with Bush’s post 9-11 launching of war on Iraq and
Cheney’s directive to go to the “dark side” and torture). It took almost three years for
the 9-11 Commission Report to come out with its bit of truth about the security lapses
(found by the JICI, IG and Senate Judiciary) documented in “Chapter 8: The System
Was Blinking Red”. 10 years later, we learn the Commission either was not told of or
ignored key documents like the April 2001 FBI Memo to Freeh. None of the official
inquiries was ever able to learn why CIA officials told no one in a timely manner about
two terrorists they were tracking that entered California.

According to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in their recently published, seminal
book Top Secret America, “The government has still not engaged the American people
in an honest conversation about terrorism and the appropriate U.S. response to it.”

Sure it’s embarrassing to come clean and admit terrible failures like those leading up to
9-11 and to admit that it was used as a false pretext for launching illegal wars and war
crimes. But cover-ups are the natural result of the government’s grossly excessive
secrecy. From an ethical and pragmatic standpoint, however, cover-ups only magnify
the original problem or mistake. Just ask the Catholic hierarchy about how the priest-
pedophile scandal magnified many fold over the decades after the hierarchy first
decided in utilitarian manner, their priests’ wrongdoing must be covered-up.

"The Ethics of Excellence" by Price Pritchett contains this: “Everybody makes honest
mistakes, but there's no such thing as an honest cover-up…People commit an ethical
violation in an effort to cover their tracks. The result proves that ethical violations are
self-reproducing. They feed on themselves. The idea of hiding mistakes is seductive,
and the carrot of the cover-up dangles as an appealing solution. But the best approach
is to level with others, to go public with what was done wrong.”

Secrecy Indeed Kills

The ubiquitous question at the end of nearly every interview about the question of 9-11
is “are we safer now?” And I’ve yet to hear an answer from any talking head, at least
on US airwaves, that is nothing but subjective opinion pulled entirely from thin air.
Usually that airy expert opinion is provided for political reasons, to keep Americans
optimistic that the millions of people killed this last decade and 4 to 5 trillion dollars’
cost is working to keep Americans “safe”. Very few experts want to tell the harsh truth
that this last decade has seen a precipitous increase in the level of both terrorist attacks
worldwide and fatalities occurring from these attacks. What’s so amazing is that behind
the barrage of talking head propaganda, the hard statistics and figures showing
terrorism’s approximate 20 fold increase this last decade are well known and
quantified!

Remember in 2004 when Colin Powell’s State Department was caught (twice) putting
out wrong figures in its annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” Report after they held
press conferences falsely pointing to progress in reducing terrorist attacks? The State
Department Report had been legally mandated for many years to be presented in April
of each year to Congress but in 2004, terrorism scholars quickly spotted serious under-
reporting. The department was forced to withdraw the report and admit that its initial
version vastly understated the level of worldwide terrorism and that nearly double the
number of people had been killed in 2003 as originally reported. In the course of
compiling the following year’s report (terrorism attacks that occurred during 2004), the
HYPERLINK "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/30/
AR2005043000907.html" Washington Post reported that government analysts
determined that attacks had gone up once again -- three times more, in fact, to a high of
651 attacks that resulted in 1,907 deaths. Rather than publish that information, the State
Department decided to strip the annual terrorism report of the numbers and rename it
“Country Reports on Terrorism”. The more obfuscating and US-centric “Country
Reports” focuses on terrorism by region and how each country is cooperating with US
efforts. But faced with an outcry once the redacted statistics showing a surge in
terrorism in 2004 leaked out, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was forced
to release the figures, the highest ever in its 21 year history.

The Washington Post reported that “President Bush, quizzed on the apparent upsurge of
global terrorism at his prime-time news conference Thursday, attributed the increase to
aggressive U.S. action. "We've made the decision to defeat the terrorists abroad so we
don't have to face them here at home," he said. "And when you engage the terrorists
abroad, it causes activity and action."

A HYPERLINK "http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2010/170266.htm" statistical annex

prepared by the NCTC is now to be found near the end of each year’s “Country
Reports” that provides the all-important numbers. The Bush Administration frowned on
comparisons (and probably the Obama Administration does too) but these numbers are
relevant for purposes of comparison with pre 9-11 figures. From 1995 to 2000, the old
annual global terrorism report showed fluctuation between 273 and 440 terrorist acts
and between 165 and 741 people killed each year. (The 741 deaths occurred in 1998,
the year of the bombings of two US embassies in Africa.) By contrast, the most recent
“Country Reports” which came out in August 2011, reflecting figures for 2010, show
more than 11,500 terrorist attacks occurred in 72 countries resulting in more than
13,200 deaths. (The number of attacks in 2010 rose by 5% from the previous year, with
the only good news being that the number of deaths declined for a 3rd consecutive year.
From 2007 to 2010, attacks world wide fluctuated from about 11,000 to over
14,000, killing people in numbers ranging from last year’s 13,200 to nearly 23,000,
in 2007.)

These huge increases in the level of international terrorism world-wide, do not count
the “collateral damage” civilian casualties occurring in the US wars nor do they count
“domestic terrorism” incidents (like the mass shooting in Norway or the shooting of
Congresswoman Giffords and people next to her).

Beyond the 20-fold increase in attacks and deaths that provide a resounding “NO!” to the
question of “are we safer?”, there exist other very quantifiable measures, most
importantly those coming from University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape, head of the
“Chicago Project” and perhaps the world’s foremost expert on suicide terrorism. Pape’s
seminal and relatively undisputed findings (see HYPERLINK "http://carnegie.org/
fileadmin/Media/Publications/PDF/carnegie_results_fall09.pdf" The Truth Behind
Suicide Terrorism monograph) is that they don’t “hate us because of our freedom” but
that suicide terrorism is actually caused by the presence of US land armies. Professor
Pape also describes another loss, that of US economic power and economic security.
Pape’s research indicating suicide terrorism escalates in response to our invasions and
long-term occupations is augmented by his reflections on “America’s massive decline in
power” since 9-11:

“A nation’s relative power is based on its economic wealth compared to the rest of the
world. In 2000, the U.S. controlled 31 percent of the world economy; in 2008, that figure
had fallen to 23 percent and, according to the International Monetary Fund, the projection
for 2013 is 21 percent. In the past eight years, the United States has lost one-third of its
economic wealth or, put another way, since 2000, the U.S. has lost nearly a third of its
relative power in international politics while China’s has doubled and Russia’s has
tripled. This decline represents the largest drop in the history books, Pape says. Our
international decline was well under way before the economic downturn of 2008, which
is likely to further weaken our influence. The Iraq war, growing government debt and
myriad unwise decisions resulting in economic weakness have cost the U.S. real power in
today’s world. “If present trends continue, we will look back at the previous
administration's term as the death knell of American domination,” he predicts.”

For all of the above reasons and more, it’s clear that secrecy kills. Thanks, if you’ve
gotten this far, for letting me update the points that Bogdan Dzakovic and I made last
year at this time:

HYPERLINK "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/could-wikileaks-have-
help_b_772479.html" \t "_blank" Could WikiLeaks Have Helped Thwart 9/11?

"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that
does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity." ~ Lord Acton

Bogdan Dzakovic and I co-wrote an op-ed " HYPERLINK "http://www.latimes.com/

news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rowley-wikileaks-20101015%2c0%2c5616717.story"
\t "_blank" WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if?" for the Los Angeles Times that was published
one week ago and that got a number of people thinking about the issue of governmental
secrecy. We had originally written a much longer, more complete version in connection
with the 9/11 anniversary. There's hardly room in newsprint, however, for the number of
words it takes to clearly explain a situation or argument sufficiently, especially when
the idea seems counterintuitive. Our longer version would have answered many of the
questions and criticisms that got posted about our op-ed so I thought it would be good
to publish the original version.

The discussion about secrecy is quite relevant given HYPERLINK "http://

www.democracynow.org/2010/10/22/wikileaks_prepares_largest_intel_leak_in" \t
"_blank" huge breaking news about WikiLeaks, both good and bad, including that its
online fundraising mechanisms have been cut off, that the site may soon post 400,000
of Iraq War intelligence reports, that WL founder Julian Assange has recently been
HYPERLINK "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/18/wikileaks-founder-julian-
_n_766594.html" \t "_blank" denied a residence permit in Sweden and that the
Pentagon's team of 120 analysts has thus far been unable to identify any actual physical
harm that has befallen any Afghan civilians or US troops as a result of WL's making
public the Afghanistan War documents. This, despite Defense Secretary Gates' and
Admiral Mullen's harsh warnings -- see " HYPERLINK "http://www.salon.com/news/
opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/17/wikileaks/index.html" \t "_blank" How
propaganda is disseminated: WikiLeaks Edition."

Anyway, this is for those who had further questions after reading our shorter
HYPERLINK "http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rowley-
wikileaks-20101015%2c0%2c5616717.story" \t "_blank" "What If?" op-ed:
Could WikiLeaks Have Helped Thwart 9/11?
By Bogdan Dzakovic and Coleen Rowley

After more than nine years since the 9/11 attacks, there is an important new question:
Could the website WikiLeaks, which enables whistleblowers to post sensitive
information anonymously, help prevent another 9/11-type catastrophe? Does the world
need this kind of alternative for those who learn sensitive information that becomes
bottled up in bureaucracy, but could save lives if made publicly available?

One way to seek answers to such key questions would be to start with a retrospective
look at who knew what before 9/11. What might have happened -- or not happened --
had WikiLeaks been available to make public the burgeoning evidence of our increased
vulnerability to an imminent terrorist attack from the air? We speak from the following
two experiences.

The Case of Zacarias Moussaoui

As special agent/legal counsel at the FBI's Minneapolis Division, Coleen Rowley was
privileged to work with a number of tenacious field agents. Harry Samit, an especially
astute agent, working with an INS agent, identified Zacarias Moussaoui as a terrorist
suspect in mid-August 2001. Samit immediately sent FBI Headquarters a multi-page
report on the facts of the case, and asked for authority to perform an emergency search
of Moussaoui's laptop computer and other personal effects. Headquarters said no.

The FBI's joint terrorism task force in Minneapolis detained Moussaoui on Aug. 16,
2001. Flight school pilots acting as whistleblowers had given the FBI, against the
wishes of their airline employer, detailed information making Moussaoui the most
suspicious student they had ever encountered.

French intelligence quickly supplied further background, confirming Moussaoui's

fighting for a "foreign power" -- Chechnyan rebels, whose leader was reportedly
connected to al Qaeda. By Aug. 23, the case was deemed so suspicious that it was
briefed in detail to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, with a PowerPoint
slide titled: " HYPERLINK "http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/
exhibits/defense/660.pdf" \t "_blank" Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."

FBI Special Agent Samit would later testify at Moussaoui's trial that he believed the
actions of his FBI superiors in Washington constituted "criminal negligence." I was
close enough to this case to be able to agree with Samit.
What if Samit had decided that it was his higher duty as a public servant to do all
possible to protect his fellow citizens, and that, thwarted as he was by careerists in
Washington , he could only accomplish this by going public. Samit had routinely given
the report on Moussaoui a SECRET classification. But he would need to excerpt only
enough to dislodge the airlines, the Federal Aviation Agency, and oblivious Americans
from their collective stupor.

This, of course, was the pre-WikiLeaks era, and I doubt that the option of going public
would have even occurred to Samit -- or to his immediate supervisor in Minneapolis ,
even though the latter pulled out all the stops in pleading with FBI Headquarters for
permission to move against Moussaoui. The supervisor went so far as to warn
Washington that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into
the World Trade Center ." (Yes, he was that prescient and specific.)

The 9/11 Commission concluded that Moussaoui was most likely being primed as a
Sept. 11 replacement pilot and HYPERLINK "http://uniset.ca/terr/news/
wp_moussaouitrial.html" \t "_blank" that the hijackers probably would have postponed
their strike if his arrest had been announced. Nine years later, these two FBI officials
should be asked how they feel now about having strictly obeyed all the classification
rules and remained mum on the alarming information they had on Moussaoui.

The Tombstone Agency

There are several other examples of conscientious -- but unheeded and thus unsung --
security officials who did their jobs prior to 9/11, but were repeatedly frustrated by
careerist risk-avoiders at more senior levels. Suffice it to adduce just one more example.

In the months before 9/11, Federal Air Marshal HYPERLINK "http://www.

9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing2/witness_dzakovic.htm" \t "_blank" Bogdan
Dzakovic led a Federal Aviation Administration's "Red Team" tasked with determining
how easy it would be to penetrate airport security for hijackings. The team succeeded
90 percent of the time in uncovering weaknesses in airport and airline security that
could enable hijackers to smuggle weapons aboard and seize control of airplanes. But
his HYPERLINK "http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/09/11/911-whistleblowers-
ignored-retaliated-against/" \t "_blank" team's reports were ignored and suppressed.
And right after 9/11, the FAA Red Team was shut down.

"FAA had the moniker 'Tombstone Agency,' and the reason they had that moniker is
they never did anything until people got killed," Dzakovic later explained.
• "We went through official FAA channels, but because we were rocking the boat and
didn't support the tombstone mentality, we were ostracized; the higher-ups didn't do
anything.
• "We appealed to the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Transportation;
they didn't do anything.
• "We then went to the General Accounting Office, to its aviation section; they didn't do
anything.
• "We started going to members of Congress on the various committees that oversaw
the FAA and the aviation industry; they didn't do anything."

Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, Dzakovic summed up his experience:

The Red Team was extraordinarily successful in killing large numbers of innocent
people in the simulated attacks... [and yet] we were ordered not to write up our reports
and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities...
Finally, the FAA started providing advance notification of when we would be
conducting our "undercover" tests and what we would be checking.

Dzakovic later expressed undisguised "contempt... for the bureaucrats and politicians
who could have prevented 9/11 but didn't." Adding further bureaucratic insult to injury,
the 9/11 Commission did not see fit to include any of his testimony in its report.

In February of 2003 the United States Office of Special Counsel (which investigates
federal government whistleblower allegations) concluded in response to Dzakovic's
case that the FAA executed its aviation security mission in a manner that, "... was a
substantial and specific danger to public safety..." This critical fact was also omitted
from the 9/11 Commission's final report.

Dzakovic recently answered THE question: "If WikiLeaks were open for business prior
to 9/11, would you have considered asking it to make public your findings regarding the
likelihood that terrorists might easily succeed in mounting a major operation involving
airplanes?" He answered: “After having all the official doors slammed in my face in
the lead-up to 9/11, yes indeed, I would have gone to WikiLeaks as a last resort. I would
have highlighted not only the vulnerabilities in airline and airport security, but also
what I recognized from my own study as the rising tide of terrorism that required
immediate security improvements. I do believe there is a chance that the history of
these last nine years may well have been quite different, had I done so.”

From what is now known about the brick walls Dzakovic and his Red Team ran into,
the disbanding of the Red Team itself, AND the subsequent 9/11 Commission
whitewash -- not to mention the Moussaoui case -- the questions posed in our first
paragraph seem to answer themselves. In our view, it is a no-brainer that ALL of us
would have been better served if FAA and FBI officials had decided to take advantage
of a site like WikiLeaks to warn their fellow citizens, rather than continue to try to
move a moribund federal bureaucracy and lethargic Congress to act.

As for now and the future, to the degree WikiLeaks can establish a reputation for
confidentiality and efficiency, and can dodge retaliatory measures by the Pentagon and
other cyber warriors, the more likely it will be that, next time, patriots like Dzakovic
and Samit will be inclined to resort to the ether as the most accessible and expeditious
way to issue warnings for the public at large, in hopes of heading off needless loss of
life.
Getting the Information Out
When Rowley wrote her memo of May 21, 2002, to the FBI Director, exposing some of
the FBI's internal roadblocks and failures to share information and showing that the
attacks on 9/11 might have been prevented or minimized, she did not intend it to
become public. In retrospect, it was better that it did leak (apparently from Congress).
She's grateful to Senators Charles Grassley, Patrick Leahy and Paul Wellstone for
making sure the FBI director did not fire her over the affair when it hit the media.

Although the Rowley memo was 13-pages long, it merely touched the tip of an iceberg
of miscues. Even more egregious failures to share information within the FBI were
subsequently identified by the Department of Justice's Inspector General (who launched
a comprehensive two year investigation because of the HYPERLINK "http://
www.time.com/time/covers/1101020603/memo.html" \t "_blank" memo).
The nearly 400-page IG Report ("A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence
Information Related to the September 11 Attacks, November 2004)," released in full
publicly in June 2006, focused on three major professional lapses: the Moussaoui affair;
a July 2001 FBI report from its office in Phoenix, identifying terrorist suspects in flight
schools there; and the arrival in California of two of the al Qaeda hijackers -- Al
Mihdhar and Al Hazmi. The CIA was tracking the two, but was HYPERLINK "http://
www.commondreams.org/views05/1226-24.htm" \t "_blank" derelict in notifying the
FBI of all it knew.

The IG report identified missteps by several FBI components, while attributing the
overall failure mostly to widespread HYPERLINK "http://www.schneier.com/blog/
archives/2009/11/fbiciansa_infor.html" \t "_blank" misinterpretations regarding "the
wall" -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wall created in 1978 to
separate intelligence from criminal matters. After the IG report, it was discovered that
relevant information was deliberately withheld from such post 9/11 official inquiries
and that other debilitating problems included intra- and inter-agency turf battles and
friction between personalities (see " HYPERLINK "http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/
features/2004/11/path-to-9-11-200411" \t "_blank" The Path to 9/11: Lost Warnings and
Fatal Errors".) Many officials knew all this -- chapter and verse; their continuing silence
facilitated covering up some of the earlier cover-ups. Several received promotions.

As for pre-9/11, hundreds were aware of the misfeasance/malfeasance/ineptitude, yet no

one took steps to make the consequent dangers known to the American people. The
conclusion that 9/11 could and should have been prevented grew stronger after the
many internal-agency problems and those failures to share information among the
various agencies, aviation industries, and the general public eventually became known.

What Little Was Needed

Most troubling to us in the case of 9/11 is the realization of how little information-
sharing with the public and the airlines it would have taken to sound the alarm --
perhaps with a headline atop a brief news story or a notice on TV. Such might have
heightened vigilance and prompted action, for example, by airline ticket agents and
airport security officers who encountered hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers
on the morning of 9/11. Nine of the 19 hijackers aroused suspicions during airport
screening.

But airport personnel had not been given the alert information available to senior
officials, and the media had not been expressing much concern at the time over a
possible terrorist attack.

Too bad. A ticket agent said later that Atta had aroused his suspicions to the extent that
the ticket agent later sought therapy for not having stopped the terrorist. Additional
warning information might have resulted in stopping other hijackers before they
emplaned.

This points up one major difference between enabling terrorists, as on 9/11, and
thwarting them, as in the case of Ahmed Ressam, the so-called "Millennium Bomber."
In December 1999, warnings of terrorist activity were widely publicized, engendering
heightened watchfulness among citizens and officials alike. Such was the case with
U.S. customs inspector Diana Dean, who on the cold evening of Dec. 14, 1999, insisted
on a "secondary Customs search" and caught Ressam trying to enter Washington state
by ferry from Canada with a trunk full of explosives.

On Dec. 13, Ressam rented a Chrysler sedan, and hid explosives and related
components in the wheel well in the trunk. The next day he successfully passed through
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service checks in Victoria , Canada , and drove
onto the last ferry to Port Angeles , Washington .

When the ferry docked in Port Angeles that evening, Ressam saw to it that his car
would be the last one to disembark. Inspector Dean thought he was acting a bit strange;
she insisted on another search of Ressam's car. Explosive experts later concluded that
the material in his trunk would have been enough to produce a blast 40x that of the
average car bomb. It was ultimately determined that Ressam intended to detonate the
explosives at the Los Angeles International Airport to celebrate the millennium.

The main point of including this history is this: Inspector Dean had seen no classified
intelligence reports suggesting a heightened threat of terrorism. Rather, she had been
sensitized by the widespread public airing of warnings about what terrorists might be
planning to mark the new millennium.

By way of contrast, before 9/11, neither the American people nor the airlines were privy
to the same level of public information. So, again, the question: How much publicity
would it have taken to induce these airlines to take seriously the copious classified
warnings they blithely ignored about the lack of on-board security? Might they have
decided it would be in their own interest to make an investment of the few hundred
dollars required to secure the cockpit door on airliners, as the Israeli airline El Al had
already done?

9/11 Commission Observations

Although the 9/11 Commission report left a lot to be desired, it does repeatedly
conclude, correctly in our opinion, that undue secrecy, the failures to share information
within and between government agencies and, more important, the failures to share
more information with the media and the public were factors at least as important as
the "failure to connect the dots" within the bureaucracy.

You can connect your own dots by reading some of the Commission report excerpts
below as to how things might have been very different if WikiLeaks had been around in
2001 providing an outlet to release more information to the public -- especially
embarrassing information like that uncovered by the FAA Red Team. The Commission
found that:

Between May 2001 and September 11, there was very little in newspapers or on
television to heighten anyone's concern about terrorism. Front-page stories touching on
the subject dealt with the windup of trials dealing with the East Africa embassy
bombings and Ressam. All this reportage looked backward, describing problems
satisfactorily resolved. Back-page notices told of tightened security at embassies and
military installations abroad and government cautions against travel to the Arabian
Peninsula . All the rest was secret. (See other HYPERLINK "http://www.
911independentcommission.org/keypassageschpt11.html" \t "_blank" key passages
from HYPERLINK "http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch11.htm" \t
"_blank" 9-11 Commission Report )

From " HYPERLINK "http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/moussaoui/

zmaccount.html" \t "_blank" The Trial of Zacarias Moussaoui: An Account by Douglas
O. Linder," 2006: Perhaps the most effective defense evidence came in the form of a
videotape played for the [Moussaoui] jury showing Thomas J. Pickens [sic; actual last
name is Pickard)], acting director of the F.B.I. at the time of the attack. Asked whether
9/11 would have been prevented if he knew that: (1) Moussaoui was taking flying
lessons; (2) Two Al Qaeda terrorists were loose in the country; and (3) Substantial
numbers of Middle Eastern men were enrolling in American flight schools and might be
part of a hijacking plot, "Pickens" hesitated. "I don't know," the acting director testified,
"with all the information that the F.B.I. collects, whether we would have had the ability
to hone in specifically on those three items."
If you can get beyond the initial shock at Picken's/Pickard's "I-don't-know" response, a
very instructive insight awaits. It has to do with the self-defeating, growing problem
that we'll call burying-the-needle-by-pouring-more-hay-on-the-stack. The haystack
keeps increasing exponentially. Thus, odd as Pickard's answer might seem, it veers on
the credible that under the deluge of hay, intelligence analysts might be unable to ferret
out those three otherwise obvious needles and put them together.

And yet, making public just one of the three pieces of information might have prompted
the 9/11 terrorists to postpone or cancel the attack.

Finding the Needles

The haystack problem keeps getting worse. HYPERLINK "http://

galleries.statesman.com/gallery/ben-sargent-2010/102819/" \t "_blank" This cartoon
(drawn by Ben Sargent, Austin American-Statesman and Universal Press Syndicate) is
only funny to those who don't appreciate how it reflects the current reality.
An extensively-researched, three-part series " HYPERLINK "http://
projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/" \t "_blank" Top Secret America" co-
written by Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Dana Priest and William
Arkin recently exposed how the intelligence community metastasized in the years after
9/11 into a massive but confused "Security-Surveillance Complex" -- little brother to
the more familiar Military Industrial Complex. Adding more and more private
contractors, the new complex now comprises 854,000 intelligence analysts and
operatives, private contractors and consultants holding TOP SECRET clearances with
little if any central direction.

Never mind the already daunting find-needle-in-haystack challenge, it's easier for those
in "Top Secret America" to simply add to the collected clutter. The money is good, and
nifty names can be imagined to disguise the reality of what is most often the case --
more hay being added. Acronyms like "NIMD: Novel Intelligence from Massive Data"
win budget dollars by promising the impossible, all the while vacuuming up and storing
non-relevant personal data into hundreds of burgeoning intelligence databanks --
electronic haystacks with few or no findable needles.

Positioning acronyms onto elaborate TOP SECRET organizational charts and giving
contracting officers threat information and analysis to adorn their computer document
files and bookshelves are not likely to help much to identify real "terrorists." And
compartmentalizing all this classified data into exclusive, "need to know" categories
engenders turf battles and other competition among the multitudinous security- and
intelligence-related agencies and contractors for taxpayer money -- and builds still new
walls, to boot.
Can You Handle the Truth?

Because information is power, there will always be those desperately trying to control it
for their own purposes. Equally unfortunate, the secrecy compulsion dovetails with the
common (but foolish and lazy) tendency among Americans to decide that what they
don't know can't hurt them.

But average people ARE actually the ones with a "need to know" about heightened
threats to security, since they are usually the first to spot suspicious activity. Consider
that alert flight attendants and passengers stopped both the shoe and underpant
bombers, and it was an inquisitive street vendor who alerted police to the " Times
Square bomb." AND average people are the ones who do get hurt.

If it is true that the 9/11 attacks succeeded because of a lack of information sharing, as
the 9/11 Commission and security experts have repeatedly argued, then what the
national security community has done since 9/11 is to compound the problem.
Overclassification, redundancy, and a new maze of turf walls, as unveiled by the
Washington Post, define the massive security-surveillance system in which 854,000
TOP SECRET officials and contractors now operate.

Can we avoid the conclusion that we should be thankful that WikiLeaks has come on
the scene?

Bogdan Dzakovic began his career in 1987 working as a Special Agent for the Security
Division of the Federal Aviation Administration. He's a former Team Leader of the
Federal Air Marshal Service as well as the FAA Red Team who filed a formal
whistleblower disclosure against the FAA for ignoring the terrorist threat and the
aviation security vulnerabilities that the Red Team documented. For the past nine years
he has been relegated to doing entry level staff work for the TSA.

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI
Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She wrote a "whistleblower" memo in
May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI's pre 9-11 failures. She
retired at the end of 2004, and now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and
balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.
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