FBI Pushing to Label Orlando Shooting 'Terrorism' for Funding, Whistleblower Says

By Ken Klippenstein, Reader Supported News

23 June 16

ays after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FBI Director James Comey said there “are strong indications of radicalization by this killer, and a potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations.” Former FBI agent Coleen Rowley disagrees; RSN got in touch with her to find out why.

Rowley made headlines in 2002 when she blew the whistle and exposed critical FBI lapses regarding 9/11. (TIME magazine would later name her “Person of the Year” for 2002.) Rowley also published an open letter to Robert Mueller, warning him that invading Iraq would lead to an increase in terrorist attacks. Her warning proved prophetic: as Rowley told me, “terrorism is increasing—by some accounts it’s increased by 6,000%”, even as “our own generals tell us we’re radicalizing more people and making more enemies.”

The terror attacks mostly occur in foreign countries. Here in the US, the violence takes a different form: mass shootings. As Rowley pointed out to me, “There’s been nearly 1,000 mass shootings since Sandy Hook…most of those are employee workplace things, hate crimes like Dylann Roof.”

How many of these shootings could be characterized as jihadi terrorism? “Very few,” Rowley says; most of these she calls “senseless shootings” that were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals lacking any coherent motive — much less a political one typical of jihadi terror attacks.

Asked why she disagrees with Comey’s rhetoric about the Orlando killer’s “radicalization”, Rowley doesn’t mince words: “When Comey came on and gave his speech today he said, ‘Oh, we’re trying to find the motive’ — they didn’t say that about the Aurora theater [killing]—these are senseless shootings and they don’t make much sense to normal people with rational minds.”

After the shooting, the media were quick to publicize allegations that the shooter, Omar Mateen, professed allegiance to jihadi groups. Rowley dismisses this, explaining, “he said he was Hezbollah but then he says he’s pledging allegiance to ISIS. None of that makes any sense.” (Indeed, Hezbollah and ISIS are hated enemies, suggesting Mateen had no comprehension of the groups to which he claimed allegiance.) Therefore, Rowley considers it “simplistic” to classify the Orlando shooting as terrorism.

Yet Mateen’s incoherent pronouncements coupled with the overwhelming frequency of non-jihadi mass shootings in the US evidently did nothing to stop Comey from using the word “terrorist.” Why? As Rowley put it to me, “to the extent that they turn this into terrorism that’s political—for funding.”

“Many of the cases, many of these prosecutions are just tangentially related to terrorism. There’s visa frauds and things. They’re grasping to try to make this [about terror]. When they send in their statistics of prosecutions and they can claim it’s related to terrorism their office funding and their office manpower goes up. I think the Minnesota office [Minnesota has a large Muslim population] for instance has vastly increased…A lot of pressure on the office to categorize things as terrorism that normally could fall into other crimes”.

“Certainly [Comey] does have an incentive to call it terrorism.”

Setting aside what to label the attack, I asked Rowley what she made of the fact that the FBI had investigated Mateen but failed to stop him. What might have went wrong?

“This was the whole rational for vacuuming up trillions of pieces of data: that it would somehow tell us who the terrorists were so we could prevent terrorism. That’s a colossal failure; it’s always been a colossal failure.”

She has a point: researchers found the NSA’s entire dragnet surveillance program only led to one single case, in which a cab driver was convicted of sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia. Alternatively, a member of the White House review panel on NSA’s bulk collection program said that it stopped no terror attacks whatsoever.

Far from assisting law enforcement, according to Rowley, in response to NSA’s ‘collect-it-all’ program, “some FBI agents actually muttered under their breath, ‘They’re going on wild goose chases’ because this all amounted to nothing.”

“How do you make sense of the data when you have all of this coming in?”

Ken Klippenstein is an American journalist who can be reached on twitter @kenklippenstein or via email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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