Leash the FBI

The FBI has come under harsh criticism in recent weeks for its failure to act on information that might have enabled it to thwart the September 11 attacks. Rather than deny the criticism, FBI Director Robert Mueller has embraced it (easy for him to do, since he didn't start on the job until September 4) and then exploited it to argue that the bureau needs more power, more resources and fewer restrictions.

Both the criticism and the remedy are misguided. The dots that everyone now says should have been connected consist of a few leads spread over a three-year period: a 1998 memo from an FBI agent in Oklahoma suspicious about some Middle Eastern men taking flying lessons; a July 2001 memo from a Phoenix agent speculating that Osama bin Laden could be sending terrorists to flight schools here; and the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui for acting suspiciously in flight school. Viewed in hindsight, each points inexorably to September 11. But there is a world of difference, as any gambler, stock trader or palm reader will tell you, between perceiving the connections after and before the fact. On September 10 these three bits of information competed for the FBI's attention with thousands of other memos, leads and suspicious events pointing in thousands of other directions. We are engaged in a nationwide session of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

The remedy is worse. Shifting resources to fighting terrorist threats makes sense, but freeing the FBI from the minimal restrictions it has operated under in the past does not. The guidelines governing the FBI's domestic criminal investigations, which do not even apply to international terrorism investigations, had nothing to do with the FBI missing the September 11 plot. And it is likely that the changes in the guidelines announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft will actually reduce the FBI's effectiveness in fighting terrorism.

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