weenies or moles?
Charles Johnson
Fri May 31, 2002 at 8:15 am PDT • Views: 147
A provocative column from Peggy Noonan today about the Colleen Rowley memo alleging cover-ups at the FBI. Noonan focuses on a chilling detail from the memo:
In the early aftermath of Sept. 11, whenever she told the story of the Moussaoui investigation to FBI personnel, “almost everyone’s first question was: ‘Why? Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?’” She adds that “jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen [actually Hanssen], who were actually working for Osama bin Laden.”
This is no laughing matter. When an FBI field operative who is the chief legal counsel of her office tells the head of the FBI in Washington that they’ve been wondering, out in the field, if spies or moles made the fateful decisions, she is saying something huge. She is saying she thinks it is possible that spies within the FBI thwarted attempts to stop or diminish the attacks of Sept. 11. And she wants the FBI director to know this. She uses the word joke, but she knows what she’s doing. She’s saying: This may be true. When she put this information in a memo that she knows she herself will soon hand-deliver to the Senate Intelligence Committee, she is telling Congress, the press and the people to consider the possibility that spies or moles had some part in the attack on America.
I have considered this possibility, but never wrote about it because it seemed paranoid. Now I’m not so sure.
Frank says: