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Whistle-blower says FBI altered warrants
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
and JOHN
SOLOMON, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON -- An FBI whistle-blower alleges FBI headquarters rewrote
Minnesota agents' pre-Sept. 11 request for surveillance and search
warrants for terrorism defendant Zacarias Moussaoui and removed important
information before rejecting them, government officials said yesterday.
Agent Coleen Rowley wrote that the Minnesota agents became so frustrated
by roadblocks erected by terrorism supervisors in Washington that they
began to joke that FBI headquarters was becoming an "unwitting accomplice"
to Osama bin Laden's efforts to attack the United States, the officials
said.
As new details emerged about the letter Rowley wrote to FBI Director
Robert Mueller, key members of Congress sought to extend her
whistle-blower protections and encouraged more agents to come forward.
And a joint panel of House and Senate members set the first hearings to
examine what the government knew before Sept. 11 about terrorist threats
and what mistakes it made.
"This (Rowley) letter documents exactly what headquarters knew and when,
and how mid-level officials sabotaged the Moussaoui case before the
attacks," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said yesterday.
Officials familiar with Rowley's memo said she alleged FBI headquarters
terrorism supervisors rewrote the Minnesota office's warrant applications
and affidavit and removed intelligence about Moussaoui before sending them
to a legal office that then rejected them as insufficient.
She alleged that some of the revisions "downplayed" the significance of
some intelligence linking Moussaoui to Islamic extremists, and blamed the
changes on a flawed communication process.
The Minnesota office was concerned after arresting Moussaoui at a
Minnesota flight school in August that he was seeking to hurt Americans
and wanted to gather more information through national security and search
warrants, including getting information off his computer.
Some of that information came from an associate of Moussaoui who told the
FBI the flight student held extreme anti-American views. Other
intelligence came from France linking Moussaoui to radical Islamic
extremists in the region although not directly to al-Qaida, officials
said.
The officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Rowley
identified the warrant revision process as flawed, particularly
complaining that Minnesota was never consulted about the changes that were
made before the warrant applications were forwarded to the offices that
rejected them.
This story appeared on Page A2 of The
Standard-Times on May 25, 2002.
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