How Far Do We Want The FBI To Go?

Back in the dark, scary days of autumn, top law-and-order men like John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge pinned little silver sheriff's stars to every American chest and told us to be vigilant, form neighborhood watch groups and report anything suspicious. The 911 lines promptly jammed, local cops chased flocks of wild geese, and no one felt much safer.

Too much information, it turns out, is sometimes not much better than too little — especially if the information ends up in the hands of a federal agency that doesn't know what to do 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.

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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, Ariz., as proof that the bureau was broken and needed repairs. "We have to develop the capability to anticipate attacks," he said. "We have to develop the capability of looking around corners."

Nobody was arguing with that, but not everyone was applauding Thursday when Attorney General Ashcroft announced that he was rewriting the rules that govern the way FBI agents launch and conduct probes of suspected terrorists here at home. The new rules, Ashcroft said, would help the feds prevent terrorist strikes rather than deal with them after they happen. But lawmakers of both parties complained that Ashcroft had cast off a 26-year-old policy without giving them any notice. Civil libertarians cried that the FBI was trampling on privacy in the name of security. And even George W. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, was irked that the White House had been left out of the loop.

The new rules were presented as dramatic reforms to protect us, and yet for many people the truly shocking discovery was that the FBI had not been doing these things all along: surfing the Web, sifting through commercial databases, lurking in chat rooms, monitoring public activities. Under the old rules, Ashcroft said, FBI agents were proscribed from doing what any local cop or reporter or concerned citizen would do. An Ashcroft staff member recalls the tortured investigation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik convicted after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. "Here was a guy you knew had ties to a terrorist organization," he says. "You knew he was meeting with his followers in the mosque. The agents couldn't go in. They had to stop at the door because no crime had been committed yet. You look at that and say, 'You've gotta be kidding me.'"

The old guidelines were designed in response to the ugly days when dossiers were built, surveillance kept and blackmail threats held over the heads of people whose only crime was to criticize the U.S. government. But over the years of scandals and lawsuits and congressional inquiries, the rules became as encrusted with legal debris as the tax code. The FBI tried to amend them from time to time, including after the Oklahoma City bombing. But the Clinton Justice Department fought back with hand-to-hand combat and eventually convinced Director Louis Freeh that he had more than enough authority to do what he needed. Said a Republican official familiar with the fight: "The great irony is that most of these limits have been self-imposed. While everyone worries that our civil liberties are being trampled by the CIA and FBI, they've been hamstringing themselves."

Ashcroft and Mueller hope the new guidelines will change all that. Agents can now watch websites where bad guys trade explosives recipes and stolen credit-card numbers. Field agents will have the power to launch preliminary "terrorism enterprise investigations" without prior approval from headquarters, and they can last as long as a year instead of the previous 90 days. Memos like the one released last week, in which an Oklahoma City agent warned back in 1998 of "large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months," will in theory no longer get buried on supervisors' desks.

Taken together, the exposure of the Phoenix, Minneapolis and Oklahoma City memos forced Mueller to back down from the position he had publicly taken in September, when he declared that there had been "no warning signs" that an attack might be in the works. Last week he came closer than anyone else has yet to accepting responsibility for what happened — despite the fact that he took office the week before the Sept. 11 attacks. "I cannot say for sure that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers," he said.