IN pin drop silence, flinty-eyed senators hear her lecture down to them. Madam-like, she sits in the middle surrounded by a classroom style assemblage of aging white men, agog with her presence. Agent Coleen Rowley is telling them that FBI bureaucracy and the supervisors there stink. The world too, is watching (on TV) the humbling of an icon feared for its fierce ways and ruthless secret service men, as the Senate judiciary committee hears her testimony.

Whistle-blower Rowley has been an FBI agent for 21 years. Now she’s blown the whistle and turned an informant on her superiors. As a field agent in Minneapolis, months before 9/11, she and her colleagues smelt a rat. Zacarias Moussaoui — the would-be 20th hijacker was taking flight lessons on how to fly a passenger jet but not interested in learning how to land it (no rocket science: he wanted to crash into a high-rise). But for FBI dummies dawdling in DC, unable to second guess, forbid Minneapolis agents to examine Moussaoui’s laptop computer, testified Rowley. A search and seizure, if granted, would have given FBI a heads-up, revealing data on cockpit layout of a large commercial jet along with some phone numbers of people known to Mohammed Atta, the mastermind and pilot of the WTC crash. Had FBI not given the kibosh and instead connected the dots with the Phoenix memo, written by another agent in Arizona urging his bosses to investigate the Arab swarm around flight schools whizzing around as wannabe pilots — September 11 may never have happened.

How Rowley sprang into the driver’s seat and became a star overnight is through writing a stinging 13-page brain-buster to her big boss Robert Mueller recently, badmouthing him along with the others. The 47-year-old and a mother of four knew she was inviting trouble: “I know in the FBI you don’t venture close to criticizing a superior without really running some risk.”

With status of a whistle-blower, she’s not only safe, but has seized the hearts of some soulless senators — oftentimes curmudgeonly with lesser beings (e.g. Pakistanis) — apoplectic in their paeans of the woman with an Alice-band around her mousy hair, big attorney glasses and an unshapely jacket with brown and cream checks, drone for hours. She was giving them lessons on how to run an agency like the FBI and they were ever so grateful for her instructions.

With her new-found lustre, life for Rowley as an ordinary agent can never be the same. The beast of capitalism and materialism will pull her into different directions: writing the great American novel; lecturing to the top Fortune 500 on asses as bosses; morphing into a corporate management guru; signing for a movie — ah! the possibilities appear endless. Champagne life? Another woman whistle-blower is hitting it to the full. Rowley-like, her nasty memo to her equally nasty boss, the czar of Enron, Ken Lay, landed Sherron Watkins, bang in the middle of the Congressional committee investigating the collapse into one of the world’s biggest corporate empire. As vice-president of Enron, Watkins, 42, and a mother of a two-year-old warned Lay about the firm’s accounting practices, making her an instant celebrity. Lay and his equally pretentious predecessor, the snob Jeff Skilling, had their reputation blown to smithereens by Watkins, who luxuriated in becoming the darling of the Congressmen awash in adulation, while she answered their rambling, ill-prepared and often naive questions on why and how Enron fell.

Immediately after her ‘stellar’ performance, she took off on a lecture circuit sponsored by media billionaires like Steve Forbes et al. Watkins has signed a $500,000 book contract with Doubleday. The rest, as we call it, is history.

The third whistle-blower, now of course biting the dust, but once the most-talked about woman is Linda Tripp. Remember her? The bloated-bespectacled blonde who befriended Monica Lewinksy — a kid half her age — and secretly tape-recorded the phone conversations the two women trawled through over a period of six months on Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes. Memos that made Rowley and Watkins famous, also made Lewinsky/Tripp (in)famous when Americans discovered the presence of a memo that Lewinsky handed to Tripp as ‘talking points’ for her testimony in the Paula Jones (another Clinton nemesis) sexual misconduct case against Clinton.

Ken Starr (remember him?) was the chief investigator of Clinton’s sexual relationship with the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He alleged that the memo had been written by none other than President Clinton himself who personally handed it over to his current lover, Lewinsky, to pass on to her best friend Tripp to save Clinton’s neck! The sleaze gets sleazier, doesn’t it?

Tripp, who worked for the Pentagon for many years, was a harridan and a publicity scavenger. Her burning ambition was to down a president of the United States. She tried it with George Bush senior, saying that the incumbent president had a mistress named Jennifer. Bush didn’t even bother responding and Americans knew he was not the sexy type. With Clinton, Tripp was 100 per cent successful in netting the touchy-feelly-gropy guy and almost getting him impeached!

The two current whistle-blowers then, were inches away from blowing off the present President Bush’s cover! When Watkins opened the Enron can of vermin, one worm in the shape of Vice President Dick Cheney crawled out. Americans are aware of Bush and Cheney ingesting mega-sums doled out by Enron to the Republican Party. Also royally entertained by Ken Lay, ex-Enron chief. Democrats in the Congress called for the duo’s blood declaring that their hands were soiled with tainted money. Bush took the presidential immunity and refused Cheney to open his skewed-up lips to the Congress. The case is closed for the moment.

Rowley’s roiling of FBI was hilarious in a way. Bush and Robert Mueller of FBI, alongside their wise men, scrambled into action to beat Rowley in the race to getting to the Capitol Hill first! The fact that the President’s decision to set up a new cabinet-level agency was hastily announced on the same day as the Senate heard Rowley’s sententious advice on the tempest-tossed FBI, shows his nervousness and is the tone and tenor of most women who openly talk about how women are less likely to be part of the inner circle and, therefore, more likely to be the ones who stand up and say: “Something’s wrong.”

In today’s America, women play a subservient role in policy-making with the majority of moms and singles struggling to live by slogging in low-paid, low-esteem service industries while their male counterparts are often promoted despite their ludicrous mediocrity. “I am a junior partner in my law firm, the only woman, and find it extremely irritating to be bypassed by men of all seniority, who treat me as if I was invisible,” cribs an attorney from an Ivy League law school with brilliant credentials.

Maybe, smart women with superior genes and gimlet eyes — like Rowley and Watkins — who often get spiked, have now hit a new shortcut to thrash through the male infested jungle by sidling up with the Congress and furiously blowing on the whistle! If others around are deaf, for sure, the white old men in the world’s most powerful Congress will cheer them. It would be music to their ears while life for the whistler would fly from thereon.

Wanted urgently: women whistle-blowers in Pakistan!