WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — At the end of 2004, Rowley retired from the FBI after serving for 24 years. In 2002, she shared The Time magazine Person of the Year award with two other women whistleblowers — Sherron Watkins from Enron and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom.
"All these mass shootings, 'active shooters,' hate crimes and acts of terror, which frankly all blur together, are not only blowback from, but the natural result of a war culture that glorifies war and war violence in the form of violent movies, video games and military culture."
Rowley recalled that while still an FBI agent more than 13 years ago, she warned then-Bureau Director John Mueller the invasion of Iraq planned by the George W. Bush administration would set off an unstoppable epidemic of domestic US terror.
"I warned the FBI Director in February 2003 that this would happen, and that he and the FBI would be helpless to stop it, if the United States went ahead and launched a war on Iraq."
Escalating US military operations in the Middle East in response to the Orlando attack would not deter future ones, but make them more likely, Rowley explained.
"Now, both [presumptive US presidential candidates Donald] Trump and [Hillary] Clinton claim that military actions are the solutions to our problems, but a serious assessment of these various attacks shows the opposite."
Most Americans still did not recognize the background to the increasing violence occurring domestically, Rowley maintained.
"The shooting in Orlando is certainly related to the so-called ‘War on Terror.’"
However, the relationship was not simply a case of Daesh, recruiting potential attackers: It also involved Muslim anger at aggressive US policies in the Middle East, and the long-term impact of the US cultural obsession with and glorification of violence, Rowley noted.
February 2003, Rowley wrote an open letter to Mueller, in which she warned her superiors that the FBI was not prepared to deal with new terrorist strikes that she and many of her colleagues feared would result from a US war with Iraq.
