FBI's opposition to releasing Leonard Peltier driven by vendetta, says ex-agent

[Jilly_in_VA]

The FBI’s repeated opposition to the release of Leonard Peltier is driven by vindictiveness and misplaced loyalties, according to a former senior agent close to the case who is the first agency insider to call for clemency for the Indigenous rights activist who has been held in US maximum security prisons for almost five decades.

Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent whose career included 14 years as legal counsel in the Minneapolis division where she worked with prosecutors and agents directly involved in the Peltier case, has written to Joe Biden making a case for Peltier’s release.

“Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason for continuing what looks from the outside to have become an emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta,” said Rowley in the letter sent to the US president in December and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Rowley added: “The focus of my two cents leading to my joining the call for clemency is based on Peltier’s inordinately long prison sentence and an ever more compelling need for simple mercy due to his advanced age and deteriorating health.

“Enough is enough. Leonard Peltier should now be allowed to go home.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/18/leonard-peltier-clemency-fbi-agent-coleen-rowley

I've thought for years that this was the case. Free Leonard!

[GreenWave]

1. Yet the sniper on the bridge during Bundy, walks free.

[2naSalit]

2. He needs to be set free immediately.

[lastlib]

3. FREE LEONARD NOW!

[geardaddy]

4. +1 million

[MagickMuffin]

5. I certainly hope President Biden heeds her alarm

50 years!


Also Coleen Rowley sounded the alarm about the September 11 terrorists wanting to learn how to fly planes before they flew them into buildings.


From wiki

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Rowley wrote a paper for FBI Director Robert Mueller documenting how FBI HQ personnel in Washington, D.C., had mishandled and failed to take action on information provided by the Minneapolis, Minnesota, Field Office regarding its investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui had been suspected of being involved in preparations for a suicide-hijacking similar to the December 1994 "Eiffel Tower" hijacking of Air France 8969. Failures identified by Rowley may have left the U.S. vulnerable to the September 11, 2001, attacks. Rowley was one of many agents frustrated by the events that led up to the attacks, writing:

During the early aftermath of September 11th, when I happened to be recounting the pre–September 11th events concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone's first question was "Why?—Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?" (I know I shouldn't be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBI HQ personnel had to be spies or moles like Robert Hanssen who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis's effort.)[5][6][7]

[Hestia]

6. Really good book about Peltier & AIM of the time "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse"