Word: memos
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Like no other document to emerge from the current firestorm over the mistakes and missed signals that led to Sept. 11, the Rowley memo casts a searing light into the depths of government ineptitude. In Washington, where the FBI and CIA may be criticized but are allowed to clean up their own messes as they see fit, the memo sent shudders through the establishment for a simple reason: it came from within. If Rowley's account is accurate--and colleagues say she's not one for shading the truth--her letter amounts to a colossal indictment of our chief...
...vague, the terror alerts were a political godsend for an Administration trying to fend off a bruising bipartisan inquiry into its handling of the terrorist chatter last summer. After the wave of warnings, the Democratic clamor for an investigation into the government's mistakes subsided, but Rowley's memo had members of both parties turning up the heat again. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle seized on the document as reason to appoint an independent commission to examine intelligence failures prior to Sept. 11, an idea the White House intensely opposes. Daschle says he will bring a bill to the floor...
Rowley and her colleagues continued to plead their case. Her memo rails against but doesn't name a handful of midlevel officials who "almost inexplicably" blocked "Minneapolis' by now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant... HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause." One supervisor complained that there might be plenty of men named Zacarias Moussaoui in France; how did the agents know this was the same man? (The agents checked the Paris phone books and found but one Moussaoui.) At another point the field office tried to bypass their...
...Qaeda operative in Malaysia and a notebook that contained an alias eventually traced to the roommate of hijacker Mohamed Atta.) According to Rowley, the supervisor has since been promoted. FBI officials refused to comment on the tampering charge last week; Mueller also demurred, passing the contents of the memo to the Justice Department's inspector general...
Rowley admits that she is outspoken--"those who know me would probably describe me as, by nature, overly opinionated and sometimes not as discreet as I should be"--but her memo is bound to strike a nerve with other FBI agents, who have long complained about the careerist, risk-averse approach of the desk jockeys in the Hoover Building. It's hard not to conclude after reading her account that the FBI's sprawling bureaucracy is hopeless. "Career enhancement," she writes, supersedes law-enforcement concerns at the headquarters, which is staffed by agents with little field expertise serving short...