Word: mueller
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Rowley's memo ripped into FBI chief Robert Mueller just as he was changing the way the bureau hunts terrorists in the U.S.--nine months after he first made that very same promise. Mueller announced Wednesday that he was retargeting more agents at the terrorists, empowering local field agents to seize the initiative, centralizing information in Washington so that every agent would know what every other agent was doing and creating a special branch of analysts to think through every unimaginable possibility. Mueller cited Rowley's memo and an e-mail written last summer by agent Kenneth Williams in Phoenix...
That was probably further than the White House wanted Mueller to go; such mea culpas invite talk of a never-ending blue-ribbon commission--something the Bush team dreads. But there are few signs that the White House is, in fact, dissatisfied with Mueller. Even before last week, he quietly replaced more than a third of the FBI's senior executives, hoping to break open the culture of caution that so stymied agents in the field. Sources tell TIME that Mueller is actually policing top agents' efficiency by insisting that each document be marked to indicate how long the author...
...Mueller, like his predecessors, is walking a narrow line. "The reason the folks at FBI headquarters are paralyzed is they have to undergo a Senate inquisition every time they act," says a former Clinton Justice Department official. "If they investigate Wen Ho Lee, it's profiling. If they don't investigate, they're attacked for letting the China stuff go by. They can't win. They are paralyzed because the Senators who are jumping up and down today about the FBI being paralyzed will be jumping up and down tomorrow when they...
...Both Mueller and whistle-blower Rowley will be pressed hard about the FBI's many problems and the wisdom of the new rules when they testify on Capitol Hill this week. Bureau veterans are the first to say that little in last fall's antiterrorism bill or last week's new rules would have helped stop the hijackers as they went about planning their strike. The problem was not just that clues pointing to the 19 terrorists weren't discovered; it was also that wispy evidence and agents' observations about the possibility of hijackings weren't being analyzed, evaluated...
...Bush's thermostat has barely fluttered. Instead, he mildly conceded that "the FBI was an organization full of fine people that loved America" but "it needed to change." Even in private, advisers say, Bush has kept his cool amid revelations that have led some to call for Director Robert Mueller's head. As Bob Dole used to wonder, "Where's the outrage...