Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

Don’t miss our weekly recap of the craziest moments in corporate media:Watch this week’s Monday Mourning here:Help us beat corporate media This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.comTo support our work and go ad-free, click here. Watch the free version here:Subscribers get Katie and Aaron’s weekly recap of the craziest moments in corporate media, the Friday Free-for-All:This week we’re speaking with former Time Person of the Year Coleen Rowley, the FBI special agent who tried to sound the alarm about 9/11 based on FBI intel about the attackers received BEFORE the attacks.Coleen Rowley: I found myself in a very weird position. The life and death type thing that people don’t expect they’ll ever be in. But after 9/11, we realized that in the Minnesota office, the agents had been working on the most suspicious flight student that had ever crossed their paths: Zacarias Moussaoui.They were called by flight instructors separately from a flight school. And this guy had said, ‘I just want to learn how to fly for a joy ride.’ There were pages detailing suspicion of him. The agents then sought emergency, not just the normal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act request to search his belongings. They actually identified that he could fly into the World Trade Center from the start. Here’s where I come in. After 9/11, FBI Director Mueller went before the cameras and said, ‘We didn’t know any of this. We could have maybe prevented 9/11 if we’d had any intelligence.’ I actually got on the phone and said, ‘That’s not a good thing to say because there was a lot of intelligence.’ Dick Cheney had fought tooth and nail against any accountability. But in the spring of 2002, I get this call: ‘Well, Colleen, you’re going to be one of the people called to talk to the investigators of the Joint Intelligence Committee.’ And when I got the call, I went, ‘oh my gosh, there’s been a cover up.’ Now you can’t say that. Cover up is a verboten word. You can’t say cover up. But you know what? That’s what it was. After 9/11, no one would admit that they had all this information.Watch our full interview with Coleen to hear how she risked her job, and possibly even her life, to break the information out of the FBI.If you like interviews like this, please consider subscribing to support our work and keep us going! You’ll also get ad-free versions of our interviews as well as our weekly recap of the craziest moments in corporate media, the Friday Free-for-All.And check out Ground News, an awesome tool we found that helps us sift through the news and compare headlines to expose media bias. For an example, watch our comparison of two stories about Ireland boycotting Eurovision in today’s episode. Go to https://groundnews.com/useful to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on the stories shaping our world.Catch the ad-free interview here: