Bush and Ashcroft are in office NOW and they failed America greatly by their inept leadership against terrorism (there was none before 9/11). Time to kick them out and elect John Kerrry president so that he can PROPERLY sweep out the F.B.I. and C.I.A. and lead not react to the world.

April 14, 2004 NY TIMES EDITORIAL

The Failed F.B.I.

The 9/11 investigation commission has provided a chilling, and sadly believable, account of two presidents' failures to come to grips with the catastrophic intelligence problems that preceded the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Clinton and Bush administrations failed in different ways, but they shared one central flaw: an inability to manage the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The myriad endemic shortcomings of the agency are at the center of what went wrong with American intelligence. The critical challenge for the commission, and the Bush administration, is to figure out what to do about it.

Under Bill Clinton, the F.B.I. became politically untouchable, and the president was eventually so weakened by scandal that he was incapable of even directing the F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh. Mr. Freeh was hostile to the president, but he appeared to be equally hostile to efficient computerization — a vital step to update an agency in which none of the parts appeared to communicate with one another.

After President Bush came into office, the commission staff found, Attorney General John Ashcroft lowered the priority of the entire counterterrorism issue in his strategic planning. Mr. Ashcroft, who came before the panel defensive and ready for a fight, did not concede the slightest failing on the part of the Bush administration. But the acting F.B.I. director in 2001, Thomas Pickard, testified that he had never seen the famous presidential briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, which talked about a domestic threat from Al Qaeda and dozens of F.B.I. investigations of potential domestic terrorists that were reported to be under way. Communication on the subject seemed nonexistent. In that summer of sky-high terrorist threats, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency did not even consult the F.B.I. to determine whether Osama bin Laden wanted to attack the United States.

The attorney general argued that a "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence gathering had kept officials at the F.B.I. from communicating with one another, and with the C.I.A., and had led to both agencies' missing the 9/11 plot. Mr. Ashcroft was eager to blame the previous administration for those failures, and he offered up a newly declassified 1995 Justice Department memo that he said made the wall even larger and more impenetrable. After months in which the administration has refused to make other documents and testimony available, Mr. Ashcroft's eagerness to put this one bit of classified material on the record seemed more than a little self-serving — especially since Mr. Ashcroft affirmed that policy in August 2001.

Mr. Ashcroft was also intent on claiming credit for moving the policy on Osama bin Laden to "kill" instead of "capture," until some of the commissioners suggested that papers held by the White House until just recently contradicted that account.

The "wall," which reaches back to concerns over domestic spying in the Nixon administration, had indeed become a problem before 9/11, in part because F.B.I. agents were eager to use it as an excuse not to pursue cases. It was certainly not the culprit when the F.B.I.'s own offices failed to share information about terrorism suspects going to flight schools. Information about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minneapolis never made it up the F.B.I.'s degraded reporting chain to Washington — although somehow the head of the C.I.A. knew about it.

Something must be done about the F.B.I. The chairman of the 9/11 commission, Thomas Kean, has already suggested that the government take away its responsibility for counterterrorism investigations. The F.B.I. has been politically out of control, poorly organized and ineffective for a long time, and some critics may ask whether, with all the mounting evidence of its incapacity, it should be allowed to continue in its present form at all.

The ragged history of the Department of Homeland Security is a clear caution about moving huge chunks of the government from the supervision of one set of bureaucrats to another. Reform certainly needs to proceed cautiously, but it's distressing to realize that two and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, no real work has been done on getting to the core of the agency's problems. The most that President Bush could say about it at his press conference last night was that he was "open for suggestions."




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