FBI Whistle-Blower to Testify at Senate Hearing

June 6, 2002
By Deborah Charles

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Coleen Rowley, the FBI whistle-blower who accused the bureau of mishandling warning signs before Sept. 11, on Thursday faces her first public grilling at a Senate hearing on U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

Rowley shocked the FBI last month by sending a 13-page letter to Director Robert Mueller questioning his handling of information and accusing him and other top FBI officials of "skewing the facts" when commenting on how much the FBI knew before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The Minneapolis-based agent will be making her first public statements since sending her letter when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee's oversight hearing focusing on the Justice Department's counterterrorism efforts.

Rowley, who was interviewed at FBI headquarters on Wednesday by Congressional staffers from the Senate and House intelligence committees, will likely face questions on her concerns over the FBI's practices and attitudes and her views on FBI changes announced over the past few weeks.

She is one of three witnesses expected to testify at the hearing, which is taking place as the intelligence committees of the House and Senate conduct a joint probe of the failure of U.S. intelligence to stop the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mueller -- who has acknowledged that the FBI had mishandled possible clues before the Sept. 11 attacks -- will appear in the morning session along with Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine. The morning session begins at 9:30 a.m. EDT, and Rowley is scheduled to appear in the second session.

"This hearing is part of the FBI oversight series begun by the committee nearly a year ago," said David Carle, spokesman for Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy.

"The Judiciary Committee's focus is not theoretical or an exercise in finger-pointing. These hearings intersect with Sept. 11 to the extent that decisions made before and after that show continuing problems that need to be fixed."

Senators are expected to raise issues like the FBI's reorganization, controversial new guidelines issued by Attorney General John Ashcroft which give FBI agents more freedom to conduct domestic surveillance and Ashcroft's new plan to start fingerprinting and registering about 100,000 foreign visitors a year as part of the anti-terrorist effort.

Mueller will also likely be asked about some of the concerns Rowley raised in her May 21 letter. In that letter she complained that FBI headquarters should have approved a request from its Minneapolis office for a search warrant involving Zacarias Moussaoui, who was being held in August after arousing suspicions at a Minnesota flight school.

Moussaoui was in custody in Minnesota when the September attacks occurred, but was charged in December with conspiring to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks. Authorities suspect he intended to join the 19 men who hijacked four planes that day, but agents never received a search warrant before Sept. 11.

Mueller will also likely be asked why the FBI failed to act after one of its agents sent a memo two months before the Sept. 11 attacks warning that Middle Eastern men were taking flight lessons and urging an investigation.

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