Word: fbi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...FBI BE SAVED...
Whether Bush and Congress, which would have to approve any major reforms, can truly transform the FBI and the CIA is anyone's guess. Neither political party is overflowing with will--or goodwill--at the moment, and big changes have not been the capital's forte for a decade or more. Washington has not been sitting on its hands since 9/11, but the repairs it has made in the way the feds gather and share intelligence have come mostly at the margins, little fixes to huge federal bureaucracies--in the words of Tenet, evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. That's partly...
Perhaps because it was the most dysfunctional agency of all, the FBI has done the most to try to heal itself since 9/11. It is practically impossible to adequately describe how unfit the FBI has become over the past 25 years. The bureau had a long string of abysmal failures that included the botched standoff at Ruby Ridge and the betrayal by Robert Hanssen, who spied for the Russians for years while working inside the FBI. And many of the things that went "according to the book" inside the FBI made no sense at all. For years agents were barred...
Some things have changed. Under Director Robert Mueller, who took over the FBI a week before 9/11, the bureau has made counterterrorism one of its top three priorities and tried to get its 11,881 agents to do something they were for years warned against: work proactively. Meanwhile, the bureau has increased the number of counterterrorism agents from 1,344 to 2,835, counterterrorism analysts from 218 to 406 and linguists from 555 to 1,204. Mueller has made a priority of finding people who don't want to wear a badge or a gun and are simply good thinkers...
...Other FBI experts echoed this, saying Mueller has the right idea but adding that the layers of agents and bureaucracy beneath him are reluctant to follow his direction. The bureau has been slow to recruit sources in Islamic circles in the U.S., and a top FBI official told the 9/11 panel that while the FBI knows "10 times" more about Islamic militants in the U.S. than it did before 9/11, "its knowledge is at about 20 on a scale of 1 to 100." Despite its recent hiring boom, the bureau still lacks sufficient Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and Pashto linguists...