Break up the FBI

investmenttool.com Opinion

In the age of bank robbers and mob crime, the FBI came into its own. It was a closed, mostly male, mostly white institution that was ideally suited for the tasks given to it by director J. Edgar Hoover. In the years since his death, the FBI has struggled to transform itself, to make itself over into a modern organization. These efforts have been confounded for decades by the bureaucracy and institutional inertia. The chances of this organization transforming itself into an effective terror fighting force are nil. It is time to slash and burn, time to eliminate this agency and shake things up in Washington D.C. The nation can not wait for it to transform itself. Its past failures cost the nation thousands of lives on September 11, 2001. The next failure could cost us millions.

We have waited twenty five years since the death of J. Edgar Hoover for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to outgrow its history. It has become more diverse, it looks more like the nation it is supposed to be a part of. What was proven in the weeks prior to September 11 was stark and clear. This agency does not reward initiative, it stamps on it, crushing it and discouraging its employees from speaking out.

The members of the Minnesota field office who bypassed the agency bureaucracy and reported their findings about the twentieth suicide bomber were not rewarded for initiative. Nay, they still sit in fear for their jobs, cowering under the threat of intimidation from their bureaucratic overlords who were embarrassed by the incident.

That's right, FBI management was embarrassed that their agents went outside of the system of management to report potentially dangerous information to the CIA. Information that clearly indicated in August that many Islamic extremists were training to fly large aircraft. Not interested in takeoff or landing, these pilots wanted to fly. They paid particular attention to simulations that involved flying to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington D.C.

It is outrageous that FBI management was embarrassed by employees breaking the chain of command. What should have embarrassed management was the 19 hijackers that slipped right between their fingers. What should have embarrassed management was the 3,000 deaths that could have been prevented had they taken the fears of the Arizona and Minnesota field offices seriously.

The failures of the FBI to detect two decades of spying by Hansen only point out how this organization cries out for a complete zero start restructuring.

The FBI's anti crime divisions are feared by organized crime, and should be preserved and enhanced. Certainly there is room for improvement there. The agents devoted to the domestic defense against terror must be removed from the organization and built into a lean organization that responds quickly to threats.

To cover the government more broadly, if the INS is to be broken up, maybe we need to look at the FBI, INS, CIA, NSA, Secret Service and the border patrol. The mere fact that so many agencies have a hand in the domestic defense against terror leads to turf battles, a lack of coordination and duplicated efforts.

Larry Ellison's offer to help develop an interagency, secure database (running on his software), is a good one that should be accepted immediately by the government.

All of the aforementioned departments need to be broken up and their components consolidated under the homeland defense portfolio. That would require an act of Congress, and its about time someone in Washington proposed some serious changes in the status quo.

If we leave the FBI in tact, we will be inviting the terrorists to come back and try again, perhaps with weapons of mass destruction. All they need to do to plan the attack is look at the organization chart of our government.

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Shmuel Protter
investmenttool.com

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