Ethics and the Rowley Case

Colleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and Chief Division Counsel in the Minneapolis, Minnesota FBI Field Office, created a furor when she accused the FBI and headquarters staff of having blocked actions proposed by the Minneapolis field office that had the potential to prevent the 9/11 terrorist airplane hijackings. According to Amanda Ripley and Maggie Sieger (34), Rowley sent a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller in which she detailed her charges and criticized Mueller for several inaccurate statements after September 11th. Rowley also detailed the failure of the FBI headquarters to take seriously the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan who spoke poor English and who had signed up to learn to fly a 747 in a Minneapolis flight school. Rowley became what Ripley and Sieger (34) call the "FBI's public conscience," functioning as a whistleblower determined to make it clear not only to the FBI, but to the American public that the country's primary domestic intelligence and law enforcement agency had failed to achieve its mission (Ratnesar and Weisskopf, 24).

Rowley literally risked her 21-year career with the FBI in the May 21, 2002 memo to her FBI superior (Smolowe, 73). The memo was a 13-page single-spaced indictment of the FBI, accusing the agency of ignoring important intelligence prior to September 11th and then deliberately hiding those oversights after the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Her document alleged that i

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to prevent or at least minimize the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Whistleblowers may receive "good press" as did Rowley, but organizations that employ whistleblowers are rarely so positive toward a staff member that they feel has been guilty of official disobedience. Gutmann and Thompson (141) contend that officials who have not been elected are bound to carry out the orders of others and yet they should not act contrary to their own moral convictions. Officials who hold appointed office must be accountable to their organizations and to the public. Administrators, according to Gutmann and Thompson (141), often take the view that subordinates in a public organization should either follow organizational directives or design. Loyalty to the organization is seen as key in maintaining the integrity of that organization. However, official disobedience is often necessary, particularly for attorneys like Rowley, whose Canon of Ethics commands that the attorney "obey his own conscience" (Greenberg, 145). It is clear that Rowley was motivated by a deeply held conviction that the organization for which she worked and which she loved had erred seriously in the days and weeks before September 11, 2001

Category: Government - E