FBI and 9/11: The picture fills in

But on Tuesday Louis Freeh, FBI director from 1993 to 2001, rejected this implicit criticism of his tenure and the agency he once led. He said that the FBI did all it could to counter terrorism, despite constraints on resources and the fact that the terror threat was simply not a national issue at the time.

It's easy to forget today that terrorism as an issue was virtually absent from the 2000 presidential campaign, said Mr. Freeh, even though Al Qaeda operatives had attacked the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000.

"We need to keep in perspective what the reality was before 9/11," Freeh told the 9/11 commission in his public testimony.

Everyone also seems to be able to find plenty of fault with others. Freeh asserted, for instance, that the FBI had a "very effective" counterterrorism program in place before 9/11 given "the resources that we had." He noted that the commission's own report found that inadequate resources and legal restrictions were key ingredients in the agency's failings. That seemed a reference to Congress, which approves funding, and former Attorney General Janet Reno, who issued guidelines meant to strengthen civil liberties protections by keeping the fruits of intelligence separate from criminal prosecution.

But Ms. Reno was quoted in the report as saying that while the FBI never seemed to have sufficient resources, "Director Freeh seemed unwilling to shift resources to terrorism from other areas such as violent crime." More broadly, Reno said the FBI faced huge challenges in learning how to use all the information it collected on intelligence and criminal matters. "The FBI didn't know what it had. The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing," she said.

To remedy matters, one idea current in Washington policy circles is to establish a US version of Britain's MI5 - a domestic intelligence counterpart to the CIA.

It may be true that the FBI did not put all the pieces of the puzzle together prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. But charging another agency with that task might be risky, given that there is little leeway for a new bureaucracy to get up to speed on the matter, say some analysts.

Furthermore, given the FBI's law enforcement mission, it would still be a key part of any antiterror action.

On the other hand, it might also be risky to push the FBI too far toward becoming only an antiterror agency. To do so would be to ignore the vast range of other crimes that FBI agents would probably still have to handle.

"Terrorism isn't the only threat, and we need the investigative skills of the FBI," says William Rosenau, a political scientist at the RAND Corp. in Washington.

To some analysts, the bottom line is this: Despite all the faults and errors that occurred prior to Sept. 11 in all the agencies of government, there is one place that is supposed to check them and set priorities for the nation as a whole, and its address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"The White House did not rise to the occasion," says Ms. Kayyem.

• Associated Press material was used in this report.

Page: 1 | 2