Word: rowley
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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...
...with it, an agency that hates embarrassment above all things. So it was extraordinary to see last week what it takes to bring an agency like the FBI to its knees, make it admit defeat and promise--yet again--to mend its ways. Minneapolis, Minn., agent Coleen Rowley's blistering 13-page memo, first published by TIME, detailed some warnings that had been ignored and the opportunities that were missed even when the FBI agents working on the strange case of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui implored headquarters to act before something really bad happened...
...committees. In fact, he says he is "happy" to face the scrutiny of congressional investigators, a pronouncement that jibes nicely with his live television appearance last week, during which he outlined plans to restructure the FBI. He also offered a simple and direct mea culpa, referring specifically to Coleen Rowley's now-famously scathing letter, which criticized Mueller specifically and the FBI culture in general...
...take a moment to thank Agent Rowley for her letter," he said. "It is critically important that I hear criticisms of the organization, including criticisms of me, in order to improve the organization. Because our focus is on preventing terrorist attacks, more so than in the past we must be open to new ideas, to criticism from within and without, and to admitting and learning from our mistakes. I certainly do not have a monopoly on the right answers...
...will ever know what impact, if any, the FBI's following up of these requests might have had," Rowley writes. In a way, she's right--for every American, what might have been will be maddeningly, eternally unknowable. But Rowley has at least forced the FBI and the Administration to confront their failures directly and publicly, rather than sweep them under a self-stitched rug of wartime immunity. The congressional investigations may yet get bogged down in finger pointing and political grandstanding, but for now they represent the main opportunity to learn the lessons that could help guard against...