Ex-FBI Agent breaks the silence on Leonard Peltier and COINTELPRO w/ Coleen Rowley
The Red Nation Podcast
The Red Nation
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2023
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The first FBI agent close to the Leonard Peltier case is calling for his freedom. Coleen Rowley recounts, in this wide-ranging and exclusive interview, her time as an agent in the Minneapolis field office. For nearly 50 years, the FBI has indoctrinated its agents on a specific version of events that led to Leonard Peltier's arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. The mentality then, Rowley argues, is little different than the mentality today. That's why she decided to break the silence and is calling on President Joe Biden to grant Leonard Peltier executive clemency.
Rowley gives us an insider's view of the FBI and how the dark and violent history of COINTELPRO, which targeted civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and social movements like the Black Panthers and AIM, didn't end in 1971. It morphed and evolved over the years and continued well into the U.S. war on terror. Despite attempts at reform and accountability, the FBI continues its ongoing persecution of political prisoners like Leonard Peltier and the unarmed Water Protectors at Standing Rock.
This is a preview of a longer conversation. Watch the entirety through the video edition on The Red Nation Podcast YouTube channel or subscribe to Patreon for as little as $1 to listen to the audio.
Find out more: whoisleonardpeltier.info
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings everyone. This is Nick Estes with Red Nation podcast. We are excited to present an |
| 0:07.8 | exclusive interview with Colleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent. |
| 0:13.8 | Colleen is the first FBI agent close |
| 0:17.6 | to the Leonard Peltier case to come forward |
| 0:20.4 | in support of Leonard Peltier's clemency. |
| 0:23.0 | And Leonard Peltier is the longest serving indigenous political prisoner in the United States right now. |
| 0:29.0 | This coming February, February 6th, to be exact, |
| 0:33.6 | Leonard Peltier will have spent 48 years in prison |
| 0:37.7 | behind bars and incarcerated. |
| 0:40.9 | This is an exclusive interview, and we are proud to present it to you. |
| 0:45.0 | Our discussion ranges from Leonard Peltier's case in trial all the way to the present and |
| 0:50.5 | the implications that the coercive, unconstitutional, unjust tactics of the FBI and the |
| 0:59.3 | Quontel Pro era are very much alive and well today. The interview that Colleen and I conducted was one of the most wide-ranging and |
| 1:10.0 | eye-opening interviews I've conducted over my career as a reporter, as somebody who's |
| 1:15.1 | hosted this podcast, but also somebody who's been deeply involved and researched the |
| 1:22.1 | Leonard Peltier case. I can't think of an FBI agent or |
| 1:27.1 | somebody who's close to his case in terms of an investigative or a federal |
| 1:30.9 | policing role that has come out with this kind of explosive insider view of the FBI. |
| 1:38.1 | This interview is part of a series of interviews that we've done on the FBI's case against the |
| 1:44.3 | Lenner Palterier as well as the American Indian movement and their resistance to |
| 1:49.7 | not only the surveillance systems of the United States and the political repression that they |
| 1:55.1 | experience on behalf of the FBI, but also the attempts to tell a correct history of this time period. |
... |
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