U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft promised Sunday that FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, who charged headquarters with bungling an investigation of a terrorist suspect before Sept. 11, would not lose her job as a result.
“She is not to be fired,” Ashcroft said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “We use that kind of information to help build a stronger FBI, to do a better job of preventing terrorism.”
Federal law protects government whistle-blowers from being fired, but it is the Bush administration’s policy that those who leak classified or sensitive material may be subject to dismissal.
Ashcroft also defended last week’s expansion of the FBI’s domestic spying powers as constitutional and necessary.
“We are at war,” he said on the “Fox News Sunday” program. “We have very serious challenges to address. To leave us with agents who have their hands tied in the field so that they can’t get the information that they need to get, I think, is foolhardy.”
Rowley, a veteran Minneapolis agent, complained in a letter May 21 to FBI Director Robert Mueller that bureau officials in Washington repeatedly frustrated efforts to obtain search warrants to probe the computer files of suspect Zacarias Moussaoui before the Sept. 11 attacks.
She accused officials of having a “circle the wagons” attitude that placed bureaucratic survival ahead of national interest.
Her revelations and charges that FBI headquarters failed to act on reports from an agent in Phoenix that men with possible links to Al Qaeda were in the United States for flight training prompted congressional hearings on the bureau’s performance.
In its Monday edition, The Washington Post reported that the FBI director now will personally review all applications for search warrants in counterterrorism cases.
Under the change, search warrants sought under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will be routed to Dale Watson, the FBI’s chief of counterterrorism and counterintelligence, and to Mueller if the application is rejected by a midlevel supervisor. The director already reviews FISA applications that have been approved at a lower level, according to the newspaper.
The Post said the policy change was put into effect weeks ago in response to the furor over the Moussaoui case, but before Rowley sent her letter to headquarters.
Rowley is scheduled to testify this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees will be holding closed-door sessions to determine why neither the FBI nor the CIA was able to warn of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Sending a letter like this will not be the occasion of anybody’s dismissal,” Ashcroft said. “She will not be fired for doing this. It’s just that simple.”
Following Ashcroft on “This Week,” Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a longtime critic of the FBI, complained that Ashcroft’s promise did not suffice.
“Most whistle-blowers are not dismissed,” Grassley said. “Most whistle-blowers are herded professionally, put off in the corner, their work taken away from them. And they go nuts, and they resign. So I want to hear from the attorney general that [Rowley] won’t suffer economically or professionally as a result of blowing whistles, not just that she won’t be dismissed.”
Justifying the FBI’s new authority to monitor Internet chat rooms, consumer databases, religious services and political rallies, Ashcroft complained that domestic surveillance regulations the FBI had been operating under were established 25 years ago when the nation was coping with the Cold War and not domestic terrorism.
“We have got to do a better job,” he said. “We can’t have 25-year-old performance. We’ve got to protect against terrorism. That’s our job. That’s what the American people want us to do. That’s what we must do.”
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mueller said the Justice Department would take care to preserve personal liberties.
“We have to be very careful to balance against incursion of the freedoms that we enjoy and that we are trying to protect,” he said.
