Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 16:25:42 -0400 From: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor) Subject: FBI falters by doing too much By David Burnham and Susan B. Long To: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 13:49:38 -0400 (EDT) From: TRAC <trac@MailBox.Syr.Edu> To: freematt@coil.com Subject: FBI Problems
Greetings -- The FBI problems seem to keep coming. Analyzing Justice Department data, TRAC's co-directors -- Susan Long and David Burnham -- sought to identify an underlying cause in the Forum column of the May 15 edition of USA Today -- http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-05-15-ncguest1.htm
David Burnham, Susan Long
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse Syracuse University 488 Newhouse II Syracuse, NY 13244-2100 315-443-3563 trac@syr.edu http://trac.syr.edu
05/15/2001 - Updated 07:12 AM ET
FBI falters by doing too much
By David Burnham and Susan B. Long
Once again, the investigators are under investigation.
This time, the Justice Department's inspector general has been ordered to find out how the FBI could possibly have failed to provide Timothy McVeigh's lawyers thousands of pages of interview reports and other documents that they were entitled to receive before his trial.
Even a truncated list of previous investigations of the FBI makes for dismal reading. In the 1970s, Senate and House committees finally uncovered the FBI's long-lived and unlawful program to investigate and harass tens of thousands of civil-rghts activists and anti-war demonstrators.
More recently, investigators have documented the profound failures of the FBI Crime Lab, the flawed tactics of Waco, the long-term corrupt links between the FBI and high-level organized-crime figures in Boston, the error-ridden investigations of Richard Jewell and Wen Ho Lee, and, just this spring, the alleged traitorous operations of turncoat FBI agent Robert Hanssen.
The current foul-up regarding what in many ways must be counted one of the FBI's most important federal prosecutions since World War II forced Attorney General John Ashcroft to drastic action: the postponement of this week's scheduled execution of McVeigh for the 1995 bombing that took the lives of 168 innocent people. And it certainly further undermined the agency's already shaky standing as a competent and trustworthy agency.
At this point, of course, the exact reasons for this serious failure are not known. Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who has firsthand knowledge of the agency's various shortcomings, offered this broad judgment to The Washington Post: "I just see poor management and bad databases and, unfortunately, an element of incompetence," he said.
But our analysis of Justice Department data documenting the day-to-day activities of the FBI suggests a broader problem. For many years, the FBI has invested a large share of its investigative resources in going after criminals who mostly could have been left to local police and other federal agencies. This focus, of course, meant that the agency devoted fewer resources to its key responsibilities: national security and big-time white-collar crime.
In 1998, for example, more than half of the agency's 12,730 convictions involved drugs, old-fashioned bank robberies and fraud against banks, mostly with credit cards. By contrast, there were only 37 FBI convictions that the Justice Department classified as involving terrorism and 165 concerning medical fraud.
In addition to raising questions about the agency's basic priorities, our study of Justice Department data highlighted a second kind of problem, one going to the actual quality of the FBI's national security cases. From 1992 to 1996, federal prosecutors in one way or another processed 182 matters that they classified as involving internal security or terrorism. Only 22% of the total resulted in a conviction.
In addition, among all such cases that Justice Department lawyers refused to prosecute, 65% were tossed out on the grounds that the evidence was weak or otherwise legally flawed. This finding about what must be the most important kind of case for the FBI s baffling.
It seems clear, however, that the top levels of the FBI saw the problem. In a little-noticed strategic plan sent to Congress several years ago, the agency concluded that foreign intelligence, terrorism and criminal activities that directly threaten national or economic security - such as medical fraud - were so important "that they must receive priority attention."
This may not sound particularly radical. But for the FBI to officially admit that it was unable to handle all of the nation's crime problems was, in fact, groundbreaking.
As the Justice Department data suggest, however, it's a great deal easier for the skipper of a supertanker to decide he is going to change direction than to get the massive vessel turned onto a new heading.
As indirectly acknowledged in the agency's own master plan, there are many reasons turning the hidebound FBI onto a new course is so difficult. One basic obstacle to change is the strong belief within the agency that the sky will fall if the FBI does not continue to try to handle every crime that concerns the American people.
The new priorities, the agency's strategic plan said somewhat defensively, "do not imply an abandonment of FBI responsibility in personal and violent crimes, but, rather, an acknowledgment that, as a national organization, the FBI must first address those issues which are national in scope and those crimes which threaten the security of the nation."
Interestingly, the Senate Appropriations Committee picked up on our analysis of the Justice Department data and called on the FBI to stop trying to cover all of the bases at the same time.
In a September report, the committee ordered the FBI to inform it about what areas of crime it can hand back to other agencies, "so it can focus on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cybercrime, organized crime and other truly FBI responsibilities."
The time for genuine reform of this important agency has come.
David Burnham and Susan B. Long are co-directors of TRAC, a data-gathering and research organization associated with Syracuse University. ###
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