http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/exclusive-wikileaks-benefits-public-intelligence-officers/

By Nathan Diebenow
Thursday, December 9th, 2010

A Time Magazine 'Person of the Year' argues WikiLeaks serves the public good

A member of a group of former intelligence professionals that has rallied behind WikiLeaks suggested in a recent interview with Raw Story that the world would be a different and better place had the online secrets outlet come into existence years sooner.

“If there had been a mechanism like Wikileaks, 9/11 could have been prevented,” Coleen Rowley, a former special agent/legal counsel at the FBI's Minneapolis division, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview.

Washington's Blog
Tuesday, March 16, 2010

FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley says in a new interview that she was "minded" during her testimony to the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation of 9/11. Specifically, she said that "FBI minders" listened to her every word, to trail her and make sure that she didn't tell government personnel with top secret clearance even higher than her own anything which the FBI did not want to be told.

While this might sound fantastic, it is nothing new.

Rowley said the same had happened to Daniel Ellsberg went to members of Congress with the Pentagon papers.

As I wrote a year ago:

9/11 Commission chair Thomas Kean points out that if "minders" had been present during the Commission's investigation, that would have been intimidation, which would have stemmed the flow of testimony from the witnesses:

Unbalanced coverage of this past weekend’s 'Treason in America' conference in Valley Forge. Note the specific placement of pejorative keywords to condition the viewer. Many clues are given as to techniques used to marginalize open discussion of the subject.

Definitely a huge step forward in the right direction. By engaging the mainstream media with factually clear, rationale dialogue when the opportunities arise, we win the hearts and minds of more critically thinking Americans every day, all of whom have the potential to stand for the Justice and Accountability due us all.

http://www.wearechange.org/2010/03/abc-airs-hit-piece-of-pa-conference.html

Source: The Real News Network
Date: October 23, 2009
Url: http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4363&updaterx=2009-10-23+09%3A36%3A36

Former FBI agent Colleen Rowley discusses still unanswered questions about the lead up to 9/11. Coleen Rowley is a former FBI agent and whistleblower. Rowley jointly held the TIME "Person of the Year" award in 2002 with two other women credited as whistleblowers.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnLMAzUIb5M&feature=player_embedded

by Justin Martell
9/8/08

Three government whistle blowers addressed a crowd of four hundred at Peace Island’s Hope in a Time of Crisis conference last week in Saint Paul, Minnesota

The two-day conference was held at Concordia University. Throughout the two days speakers covering a broad range of subjects addressed the four hundred attendees. The conference’s proximity to the Republican National Convention was no coincidence, “It was planned specifically that way,” said conference organizer Dick Bernard, “It was our thought that we would have a lot of people gathered here from the protest community, so it would be somewhat easier to get speakers, and we also thought we’d get more publicity out of it.”

'Justifying' Torture: Two Big Lies

By Coleen Rowley and Ray McGovern
July 19, 2008

One can assume that former Attorney General John Ashcroft didn’t mean it to be funny, but his testimony on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee might strike one as hilarious, were it not for the issue at hand — torture.

Ashcroft is the Attorney General who approved torture before he disapproved it, but committee members spared him accusations of flip-flopping.

He explained that he initially blessed the infamous torture memoranda drafted by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and others in mid-2002 because he (Ashcroft) believed it imperative to afford the President “the benefit of genuine doubt” regarding how to protect American lives in the “war on terror.”

But Ashcroft added that, despite this, when concerns about that earlier guidance for interrogations were brought to his attention, changing his mind “was not a hard decision for me.” A very flexible Attorney General.

If Matt Taibbi had even one percent of Gore Vidal's intellectual grasp of American history, perhaps then it would make reading his presumed 'leftist' opinion about 9/11 a little easier to stomach. (I presume that Taibbi pitches from the left, because his screed is published at Alternet.org and AfterDowningStreet.org.) Fortunately, we don't need him. Gore Vidal is still among us, and it is his image and voice in the new Italian documentary 'Zero: an investigation into 9/11', that expresses a critical perspective of 9/11 that will ring true to the ears of those who will hear, and will help to free the prisoners currently living out the Allegory of the Cave, mesmerized by shadows of terror, cast upon the wall by the likes of yellow journalists like Taibbi.