The clean-up and recovery effort at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan ended nearly nine months after suicide hijackers crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The terrorist attacks stunned America and the rest of the world, killing almost 2,800 people in New York City and hundreds more at the Pentagon and aboard a downed airplane in rural Pennsylvania. Such an orchestrated terrorist assault on U.S. soil seemed impossible less than a year ago. Now most Americans wonder if it served as an ominous clue that foreshadows what’s still to come. Intelligence officials tell us it's not a matter of "if" but "when" more attacks occur.
So how does the federal government go about preventing imminent threats to our national security and protecting the public’s safety? What will it take to "connect the dots" necessary to piece together obscure clues and pursue leads to prevent another September 11 from devastating America all over again?
Finger-pointing won’t erase the tragic events from last September. But there is a need for aggressive congressional oversight, stiff accountability standards, better coordination and properly allocated resources to help address shortcomings within U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities. We already know now that critical clues regarding Islamic terrorist plots involving hijacked aircraft failed to grab the attention of higher-ups at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A memo written last July by a Phoenix FBI field agent in Arizona spelled out concerns regarding Middle Eastern men with possible ties to Osama bin Laden who were enrolled in domestic aviation classes. He suggested the FBI pursue a national check on all U.S. flight instruction courses. For as yet unclear reasons, his memo didn’t receive the attention it deserved at FBI headquarters in Washington.
Shortly after the Phoenix memo surfaced publicly in May, a veteran FBI agent and native Iowan from the Minneapolis field office issued a scathing 13-page memo to the FBI director outlining her frustration with the way the bureau handled her office’s request last summer for a search warrant on Zacarias Moussaoui. He is the alleged "20th hijacker" who was arrested last August in Minnesota on immigration violations. Showing a tremendous amount of courage considering the potential risk to her career, Coleen Rowley blew the whistle on what she called "a subtle shading/skewing of the facts" by top FBI brass regarding what was known by the bureau that may have thwarted the attacks of Sept. 11.
It goes without saying the FBI has come under intense pressure to improve its domestic counter terrorism capabilities. For most of the last decade, I have led the charge in Congress to demand higher standards of accountability within the bureaucracy and change the cultural flaws within the FBI that puts image over substance. For decades, the bureau has fixated on solving crimes, winning prosecutions and putting bank robbers, mafia ring leaders, drug dealers and white-collar criminals behind bars. But the FBI must change gears to reflect the threats facing 21st century America. It must shift its mission from solving crimes to preventing terrorism Prevention may not be as glamorous as nabbing the "10 Most Wanted in America", but I’m going to make sure the FBI fully understands that as the nation’s top crime-fighting agency, preventing and thwarting terrorist activity is its number one priority in the 21st century.
Federal bureaucracies tend to get in trouble when they assume an "us vs. them" mentality. It happened with the IRS. And it’s happening with the FBI. Instead of circling the wagons, the FBI ought to embrace changes that will chart its course in the new century as the premiere domestic intelligence agency in America. I credit the new FBI director for his efforts to revamp the beleaguered agency. As a senior Republican lawmaker on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has oversight authority over the FBI, I’ll see to it the reforms are more than skin deep. Our national security and public safety depend upon it.