The Truthtellers: Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack, Ann Wright

On August 5th, 2005, I was fortunate enough to sit down for a quick interview with three bona fide patriots; Ann Wright, Coleen Rowley, and Jesselyn Radack. They were in town for the Veterans for Peace National Convention.

The
trio had previously come together for the ‘National Security
Whistleblowers Coalition’ event in April, 2005. Ann Wright proposed
that they all meet again for the VFP Convention, where they held a
workshop for conventioneers called ‘Speaking Truth to Power’, and
shared their experiences as ‘Truthtellers’.

In Jesselyn Radack’s
case, she might still be working at the Department of Justice if it
wasn’t for the ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh;

Jesselyn Radack (JR):
…I was under criminal investigation for a year and a half, so I was
muzzled during that time and under the advice of counsel not to speak
with reporters… I worked in the Ethics Office at the DOJ, where I’d
been an attorney for seven years… the Criminal Division called wanting
to interrogate him (Lindh), in Afghanistan. Based on the ethics rules I
said not to do that for a variety of reasons. They came back two days
later and said, ‘we did it anyway, what should we do now?’

I
advised that the interview might have to be sealed and only used for
national security or intelligence gathering purposes, not for criminal
prosecution. Which as we all know, is how they ended up using it.

But…
that’s not my main complaint. My main complaint is that shortly
thereafter I was basically blackmailed with a terrible performance
evaluation that was out of the blue, unsigned, and told to find another
job, or else it would be put in my permanent file.

And then,
here’s where it gets worse, the prosecutor which was prosecuting John
Walker Lindh contacted me directly and said, ‘as you know there is a
Court Discovery order for all department correspondence related to his
interrogation. I have two of your emails… I wanted to make sure I had
everything.’

I said, ‘no, not aware of the Court Order, and no, I wrote a lot more than two emails.’

And
so when I went to find the emails to comply with the Court Order, they
were gone. So I resurrected the emails from my computer archives, I
resigned, and when it appeared to me that the emails still had not
reached the court, I sent them over to Newsweek.

So after that,
they were obviously mad, I didn’t know how mad they would get, but they
got me fired from my private sector job, and put me under criminal
investigation. For what, I cannot tell you, because they never told me.
That went on for about a year and a half, and as soon as that was over
they referred me to the Maryland and D.C. Bars where I am licensed as
an attorney, and during that time period, I was also put on the ‘No-fly
List’…

…Every time I flew, I had to undergo secondary screening
procedures… like 19 times. After 19 times I quit collecting the little
‘TSA’ things they put in your bags every time. I called the TSA
Ombudsperson, and they would neither confirm nor deny that I was on the
list. One airline told me that I was on the list.

Then, I
reported to the ACLU, which had filed a lawsuit and was keeping track
of the issue. As far as I know, there is no official way to find out if
you’re on the list, or to get off of it. It’s just that the probability
of being stopped 19 times out of the 19 times that you fly is like, one
in 3 billion or something, my husband the economist calculated this for
me.

And also, when I found out some of the other people who were
on the list, people from the ACLU, anti-war protestors, people who
seemed to be in some ways political enemies of the administration, it
made a little more sense to me. Plus, senior administration officials
called me a traitor and a turncoat and a terrorist sympathizer in the
New York Times so, in a way it’s not that surprising that I would end
up on a ‘watch-list’, I guess.

That was under John Ashcroft’s DOJ. I asked Ann Wright if she was on the no-fly list…

Ann Wright (AW):
…I thought I was, under the lead-up to the Presidential election I was
doing a lot of flying, a lot of speaking out, not for the Kerry
campaign, but speaking about the role of dissent in a democracy, and
that citizens need to watch carefully what any administration tells
them, particularly this administration. And I don’t know if it was a
combination of doing a lot of short notice flights, and sometimes one
way flights, and then picking up to go to another place, but during
that period I would say at least 90% of the time, I was undergoing
secondary searches.

But it gave me a great opportunity to recruit among the TSA agents, I’d say, “No, not a problem, that happens every time.”

They’d say, “What do you mean it happens every time?”

I’d
say, “Well I’m on - - something’s happening, and maybe it’s because of
the talks I’m giving. And the flyers, the brochures for my future talks
are in the case that you’ll be going through so please just look at
them and see...”

And they’d go, “You’re against the war? Well, I’m against the war! You shouldn’t be stopped for this sort of stuff.”

So I’m not sure if I was on a list, or if it was because I was taking a lot short-notice flights…

You might recognize Ann from her appearance in ‘Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War’
or more recently; John Conyers’ Downing Street Memo Hearing back on
June 16th. She turned in her testimony at the very end of the Hearing
and added this spoken statement to the record;

“As a 35
year Federal employee, 29 years in the military, and 16 years in the
State Dept. Having re-opened our US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in
December of 2001… the Charges in Sierra Leone when all the trouble
happened, in Somalia, in Grenada, in Nicaragua… I’ve had a lot of
experience with the US government, and the trials and tribulations that
we’ve had.

And I would just like to say that this Downing Street
Memo is one of the most important documents that I’ve seen about all of
the things that have happened here about Iraq.

To me, two
things in particular; the illegality of the war - - and in fact, I came
back specifically for your hearing, I was in Africa in Sierra Leone,
(first time in 8 years since I left there), and going through London to
talk with the Deputy Legal Counsel of the Foreign Office. A woman who,
like myself, resigned from her long years, 30 years, with the British
government.

She resigned because Tony Blair refused to accept
the very standard analysis by all the government from the year 2002,
that a war based on regime change was illegal.

She resigned over that.

The
Attorney General of the UK switched his opinion 7 days before the start
of the war. The illegality of going to war in the manner that we did is
just crushing to me.

The second part, is the provocation that
the United States did in Iraq is an aggressive, criminal act, and we
need to impeach the President of the United States, and we need to hold
in criminal contempt the senior leadership of the Department of
Defense, the Department of State, the National Security Council, and
the Department of Justice, and the CIA.

And other than that, I think we’re just doing fine.”

Ann is not one to mince words.

By
the way, the Downing St. Memo is officially not dead. Ann, Rep.
Conyers, Cindy Sheehan, and others are going to Britain in the near
future to rekindle the awareness that the memo originally sparked.

AW:
…and we’re calling for US government employees to search in their files
for the equivalent memos that record the conversations between our
officials and UK officials. They are there. They do exist. In the State
Dept., the DOD, the National Security Council, and we’re hoping that
just one very patriotic person will say, this is really important for
the citizens of America, and I’m gonna leak this thing.”

But don’t call them ‘whistleblowers’.

CR: ‘Conscience Follower’ – ‘Truthteller’ – let’s get away from these pejorative connotations.

JR: Yeah, you’re stereotyped as a ‘troublemaker’, or a ‘disgruntled employee’ or ‘unstable’…

CR:
‘Conscientious Objector’ – ‘Dissenter’ – I mean really, it’s just
patriotic things that we’re trying to do - - Daniel Ellsberg calls it
the ‘Truthelling Coalition’. It’s not as good as ‘whistleblower’
because ‘whistleblower’ has this certain extra connotation that the
other labels seem to miss… and you settle for it, because there’s not
another decent word out there that means exactly the same.

JR:
And you’re labeled that, but most ‘whistleblowers’… I don’t know anyone
that went out in search of that moniker. You were just doing your job
and then somehow you’re labeled ‘whistleblower’, and the first time
that happened, I’m like, “No I’m not!”

But then it happens over and over, ‘Your Name’ and ‘Whistleblower’…

CR:
… if I was Lakoff, he always says you connote certain visual images
with certain words. What do you connote with ‘whistleblower’?

Remember
‘Bewitched’? The nosy neighbor who used to peek in the window and when
she saw Samantha doing witchcraft she actually blew a whistle?

Mrs. Kravitz! That’s it! The nosy neighbor. Obnoxious.

JR: A tattletale!

CR:
“I see her! Abner, come here!” That’s the image that ‘whistleblower’
connotes. My neural pathways immediately connect to Mrs. Kravitz.

Ok, so it’s like; ‘Truthtellers of Conscience Who Are Bringing to Light True Concerns, Issues or Illegalities!’

JR:
And for me before I came here, when Ann invited me I complained to my
husband, “Well, I’m against the war, but I don’t know if I can really
link my truthtelling to the war…” and he was like, “Of course you can!
It’s so obvious. You’re telling the truth in an age of lies, and
they’ve lied and lied and lied…”

And when I heard that they had
a workshop on dissenters and conscientious objectors, it was like
listening to my own story, but it took place in the military… it was
very similar, you get involved in something, you think you’re doing
your job, you think you’re doing the right thing, and then suddenly
either quickly or slowly you realize that this is really wrong. So you
do the logical thing and start complaining up the chain of command, and
when that doesn’t work… it just sort of snowballs.

Coleen
Rowley is a Truthteller because of events before and after 9/11. Her
experience with the FBI gave her a unique and personal perspective on
what happened that day...

CR:
Preceding September 11th, I blame myself for being ONE of the thousands
of people who did not do enough. And the main thing I did not do was
call up to headquarters to find out what this logjam was.

And of
course people say, well it wouldn’t have achieved anything. In all
probability it may not have changed history if I had called. But at the
very least I would have learned some critical things. You never know
what you can achieve unless you try them. My motto has become ‘Always
Try’, and I have dissected not only my own experience, but the
Challenger, the Columbia, I’ve gone through incident after incident
where people did not do what they should or could have done, because of
a lot of reasons, a lot of rationalizations, a lot of excuse making,
and then later found out if they had just tried, maybe it wouldn’t have
completely reversed things but it would have made that first step, and
maybe with another step, some luck, it could have changed things.

And
now after September 11th, there is a secondary effect; which is this
kind of cover-up. In my letter I said, well I’m not gonna call it a
‘cover-up’, that’s too strong, however, I will call it puff, shade,
skew, firm-up, massage, because there’s a strong impetus after
something bad has happened not to tell anybody what you did, not to
unravel the mistake.

And what I did was, I think, I put the
first good dent in the blanket defense that for 8 and a half, 9 months,
was holding - that 9/11 could not have been prevented.

It was
not true. The 9/11 Commission ultimately found that, but for 9 months
you did not hear anybody say that 9/11 could have been prevented
because it protected the thousands of people who made some tiny little
mistakes, some egregious… Tenet, who knew all these dots, Ashcroft, who
ranked terrorism his lowest priority in August of 2001, some of them
are pretty egregious mistakes…

And we weren’t unraveling ANY of
it, we were all settling for, ‘9/11 could not have been prevented’, it
was ‘hindsight’. Condi Rice, “Well, no one could have ever imagined
that someone would fly…” and of course, when she says that, she’s
disregarding a whole bunch of things. People are letting her get away
with it. She’s disregarding the fact of two or three prior incidents of
people trying to fly planes into buildings, attempted takeovers of
cockpits… we’re also ignoring the fact that in Minneapolis, the acting
supervisor, arguing with headquarters said, ‘This is a guy that could
fly a plane into the World Trade Center’ on August 22nd!

And
what I wanted is to start unraveling mistakes, because, how are you
going to fix them and do better, in a very constructive way… if you
don’t you just get mired and continue down the same stupid path…

And for citizens and allies of the United States, the ‘same stupid path’ has led us into the quagmire of Iraq.

What
these Truthtellers tell me is that it’s time for the citizens of the US
to reassert control of their lives, and the destiny of this country.
It’s time to come to grips with the reality of terrorism, and stop
letting the Bush administration, (and subsequent administrations), play
on our fears.

It’s time for our leaders to take a lesson from FDR; “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”

CR:
…We’re not going to be able to prevent terrorism, so we better
recognize that it’s here, and that we’ve got to do logical, judicious,
ways of minimizing the threat, instead of letting the Barney Fife’s of
the world lead us into even further chaos, and higher threats.

We can reverse it. It’s possible to reverse, but it’s not through listening to Karl Rove.

AW:
And the greatest frustration that people have is over their seeming
inability to do anything. Well, the greatest way to get rid of that
frustration is to do something… and it may not be the perfect thing,
and it may not ultimately amount to a hill of beans on one level, but
it does amount to something in that person’s individual psyche and
their ability to take back control of they feel about things.

We
were talking to these men who went to prison, because they refused to
go to war, and they said, when they went to prison, they felt the most
free. That freed them.

Before I resigned, I was sent down from
Mongolia where I was assigned, to Singapore, because they thought I was
having a heart attack. I was suffering all the physical symptoms of a
heart attack…

…the day I resigned, all the symptoms left. The physical manifestations of internal trauma…

CR:
You know who had a big, bad case of that internal trauma? The Security
Moms! The component that voted for Bush last time, the big changeover
vote, they gave a bad case of this to the Security Moms.

They
won’t admit it, but that’s what they did. And it brings out the worst
in people’s mindsets, and also in their ability to be judicious.

JR: I concur.

I concur.