Rowley Speaks about Patriot Act, War on Terror

Coleen Rowley, a former Minneapolis FBI agent who criticized the government's pre-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts, said that while the Patriot Act is useful, it needs a system to combat infringements on civil liberties.

Rowley, former chief counsel for the FBI's Minneapolis office, spoke Monday at an event sponsored by the Willmar League of Women Voters.

Rowley was hailed as a hero in 2002 when she wrote a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller accusing bureau headquarters of blowing a chance to unravel the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking plot.

She charged that FBI supervisors in Washington blundered when they blocked requests from Minneapolis agents to further investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been learning to fly airplanes an Eagan flight school. Moussaoui is now the only figure facing U.S. trial in connection with the attacks. He has acknowledged his loyalty to al-Qaida, though he claims he was never part of the hijacking plot.

For her whistleblowing, Time Magazine named Rowley one of its Persons of the Year in 2002. She retired last year and has applied for a position on the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was created to ensure that government actions in the war on terror do not infringe on people's rights.

Rowley told the crowd gathered Monday that in August 2001, an agent in Minneapolis was on the phone with officials in Washington, saying that Moussaoui was capable of flying a plane into the World Trade Center. The man on the other side of the line said it would never happen.

Rowley also compared today's fear of terrorism to the 1950s "Red Scare," or fear of communism. She said that back then, the FBI and government abused their powers and collected massive files on people. She said there were obvious abuses of civil liberties.

The situation improved with the 1978 creation of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, which set up a court to decide whether to permit certain FBI electronic information gathering tools, such as phone taps, she said.

But in an effort to stop abuse of its authority, the court began to separate its authority from criminal courts, creating what became known as the "FISA wall," Rowley said.

But terrorists could be classified as spies, because they act to benefit a foreign group or country, and as criminals. And the wall stopped some intelligence from being shared between agencies, she said.

She said taking down the wall improved the flow of information between agencies, but left authorities without a tool to keep the criminal and intelligence cases separate.

Rowley said there are some proposed bills on Capitol Hill that would address these issues in the Patriot Act. One of them, the SAFE act, would put limits on searches done by intelligence agencies. The Civil Liberties Restoration Act would restore due process for those jailed by the government and make limits on secret surveillance.

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