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 in August 2001, "bureaucrats at agency headquarters hampered attempts by Rowley's own office to launch an aggressive investigation" of Moussaoui who emerged as the so-called "20th hijacker" (Smolowe, 73). Additionally, Rowley accused Mueller of overseeing a delicate and subtle shading or skewing of facts immediately after 9/11 and in the months that followed. She charged Mueller with having ignored field information that could have potentially uncovered one or two of the terrorists in flig...