Former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley Calls For Congress To Begin "Church Committee"-type Hearings

Coleen Rowley, one of the “persons of the year” 2002

In anticipation of President Obama’s State of the Union Address, representatives of both parties have reached out to each other and made special arrangements to sit together while the President delivers his speech. The symbolic gesture is seen as a sign that both parties have learned an important lesson about civility after the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona earlier this month. Perhaps, the sight of Democrats and Republicans intermingling on television rather than sitting across from each other as they did in previous State of the Union addresses will emphasize in most viewers minds a more negative thought than the representatives expect – that both parties share co-responsibility for the high unpopularity of the Congress.

One way to improve their image with the American people and the global public would be to finally begin serious hearings into the abuses of the Bush administration, and put pressure on the Obama Justice Department to investigate torture, and other crimes. By failing to restore the rule of law, and instead, embracing political theater and the insincere rhetoric about civility, leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as President Obama, essentially open themselves up for public ridicule, and public anger. The message about “civility” is dead on arrival. How can uncivilized men, who support criminal wars, mass spying of citizens, and torture, preach about civility? Words must match deeds, and so far, that has not happened in post-Bush Washington.

Last year, Glenn Greenwald wrote in an article called, The crime of not “Looking Backward,” about how President Obama and the rest of the political establishment immediately embraced the “grotesque immorality of the “Look Forward, Not Backwards” consensus,” soon after President Bush was out of office. Greenwald said:

During the Bush years, the United States government committed some of the most egregious crimes a government can commit. They plainly violated domestic law, international law, and multiple treaties to which the U.S. has long been a party. Despite that, not only has President Obama insisted that these crimes not be prosecuted, and not only has his Justice Department made clear that — at most — they will pursue a handful of low-level scapegoats, but far worse, the Obama administration has used every weapon it possesses to keep these crimes concealed, prevent any accountability for them, and even venerated them as important “state secrets,” thus actively preserving the architecture of lawlessness and torture that gave rise to these crimes in the first place.

Every Obama-justifying excuse for Looking Forward, Not Backwards has been exposed as a sham (recall, for instance, the claim that we couldn’t prosecute Bush war crimes because it would ruin bipartisanship and Republicans wouldn’t support health care reform). But even if those excuses had been factually accurate, it wouldn’t have mattered. There are no legitimate excuses for averting one’s eyes from crimes of this magnitude and permitting them to go unexamined and unpunished. The real reason why “Looking Forward, Not Backwards” is so attractive to our political and media elites is precisely because they don’t want to face what they enabled and supported.

Everything that the American people looked forward to on the night that Barack Obama was elected President has not transpired in the two years that Obama has been in the White House. The illegal wars in the Middle East are continuing, the complete takeover of the government by Wall Street is accelerating, the spying infrastructure is expanding, and lawlessness at the very top shows no sign of stopping.

Very few in the U.S. government have left their post in the face of such abuses, and assaults on the freedoms and dignity of the American people. But those that either resigned or retired remain vocal and determined to hold their political leaders accountable for breaking the law, and acting against the public good. One of those individuals is former FBI agent and government whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who was picked to be one of three Time’s Persons of the Year in 2002. In her latest article called, “How Top Secret America Misfires,” Rowley writes that “those who value constitutional rights and civil liberties must ask Congress to initiate “Church Committee”-type hearings.” Rowley is concerned about the FBI’s unlawful surveillance of political activists and other anti-establishment groups in the name of fighting terrorism and keeping people safe, saying that the government’s post-9/11 policies “attack our basic constitutional right to dissent without making us safer.”

A 2010 report by Heidi Boghosian of the National Lawyers Guild called, “The Policing of Political Speech: Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S.” backs up the claim that the U.S. government’s post-9/11 policies amount to a war on dissent and freedom of speech. The report states:

Constraints on speech are incompatible with a democracy. The Guild’s experiences and documentation at mass demonstrations clearly indicate that domestic anti-terrorism laws and policies and aggressive police practices have had a chilling effect on First Amendment protected speech. Would-be protesters or communities frequently targeted by the police, some of whom might be thinking about publicly exercising their First Amendment rights for the ﬁrst time, may decide that it is not worth the risk of encountering police violence and possible arrest.

The report identified several anti-free speech practices taken by the U.S. government, which include:

1) Falsely labeling protest rhetoric and political hyperbole as “true threats” to justify aggressive policing and prosecution
2) Using grand juries to harass political activists by imprisoning them, without speciﬁc criminal charges, for noncooperation with government investigations
3) Prosecuting leaders and those providing support to activists, often before or during events
4) Labeling, and stigmatizing, activists as “domestic terrorists
5) False statements by police, and laws prohibiting the photographing of police
6) Preemptive actions by police in the absence of illegal activity
7) Repression based on “evidence” fabricated by the police
8) Police-initiated violence and abusive use of less-lethal munitions against civilians
9) Negative media coverage

These police-state tricks are being applied to all kinds of political activists, from liberals to conservatives and libertarians.

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