Word: mueller
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After sustaining months of withering criticism from the Justice Department, Congress and its own disgruntled agents, the FBI is ready for its grand makeover. Wednesday afternoon, Director Robert Mueller appeared before a small group of reporters and unveiled the second and most far-reaching phase in the agency's overhaul...
...described by Mueller, will shift its focus to "prevention above all else." The emphasis will move from law enforcement to intelligence and counter-terrorism, and agents will be reassigned from domestic units (where the emphasis is on drug-related and white-collar crime) to ones dealing in terror prevention. The director also wants to add 900 new employees, 500 of whom would work as analysts. This is a sea change for the embattled agency - and an answer to critics who maintain it has wasted its manpower on following up traditional crime rather than preventing new waves of terror. But will...
...struggling to simultaneously introduce reform and hold its ground against potential terrorists. That determination is evident in the agency's new top priorities: protecting the United States from terrorist attack and against foreign intelligence operations and espionage. "The FBI can't act as traffic cop any longer," Mueller said, "we must develop the capability to anticipate and prevent future attacks." That capability depends on upgrades in many areas, including training staff to perform more incisive analyses, hiring agents with needed language skills, developing more sophisticated intelligence gathering methods and empowering field agents to act more independently from headquarters. Mueller also...
...reorganization effort comes hard on the heels of pointed allegations by longtime agent Coleen Rowley, who wrote a letter to Mueller accusing her superior agents of ignoring her repeated attempts to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, widely identified as the would-be 20th hijacker in the September 11th attacks. The memo, dated May 21st, goes on to angrily suggest that the agency's leadership is involved in "a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts?." and is making "a rush to judgment to protect the FBI at all costs." She also charged that critical information from the Phoenix bureau, raising a red flag...
...have worked closely to investigate al-Qaeda materials recovered by the military in Afghanistan for clues to possible terror plots. Bush now receives reports from both agencies in a single daily briefing. But the intelligence community is still struggling to get up to speed. Last week FBI Director Robert Mueller announced plans to create a "supersquad" of Washington-based agents to handle terrorism investigations. It will require the bureau to hire almost 2,000 new agents in the next 18 months...