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FBI Changing Review Policy as Congress to Question Bureau
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| FBI
director Robert Mueller announces a policy change as Bureau to
be questioned by Congress over failures
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WASHINGTON,
June 4 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller announced a policy change
designed to change Bureau practices that hindered the probe into
Zacarias Moussaoui.
Mueller
and will now personally review applications for search warrants
related to what has been labeled “terrorism” investigations,
U.S.
daily newspaper, the Washington Post reported Monday, June 3.
The
unannounced policy change was put into effect a few weeks ago in
response to the furor over obstacles facing agents investigating
Moussaoui, the alleged “the 20th hijacker” in the September 11
attacks, according to the newspaper.
Search
warrants sought under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
now will be quickly routed to the FBI’s chief of counter-terrorism
and counterintelligence, Dale Watson, and to Mueller if a mid-level
supervisor rejects the application, the Post reported.
In
the past, the director reviewed FISA applications only if they had
been approved at a lower level. And previously, the FBI director did
not review applications rejected inside headquarters.
Veteran
FBI agent Coleen Rowley complained in a letter May 21 to Mueller that
a mid-level manager had stymied her
Minneapolis
,
Minn.
, division’s efforts in the Moussaoui investigation.
News
agencies report that Congress is setting out this week to learn why,
despite domestic and international intelligence reports, both the FBI
and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not do more to anticipate
and prevent the September 11 attacks.
Rowley
is to testify Thursday, June 6, along with Mueller, before the Senate
Judiciary Committee’s hearing on problems at the FBI, as it attempts
to ratchet up its efforts against terrorism.
Rowley’s
letter harshly criticizes Mueller, who said Sunday he was glad to get
a letter from her and had no problem with any testimony she might give
to Congress. “I welcome the letter,” he said on NBC’s “Meet
the Press.” “I may not agree with all that’s in that letter, but
I welcome the suggestions.”
The
FBI has come under sharp criticism for not seeing a link between the
Minneapolis
case and the warnings of a field agent in
Phoenix
,
Ariz.
, that Middle Eastern men were training at flight schools in the
U.S.
Mueller
said on “Meet the Press” that the FBI’s inspector general is
looking into the
Minneapolis
and
Phoenix
cases but that “there was nothing specific in either of those
instances that had a direct relationship to September 11.”
The
House and Senate intelligence panels will hold joint closed-door
meetings Tuesday to begin analyzing the intelligence agencies
preparedness for September 11 and future threats.
A
key California Senate Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a member of the
Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees, predicted Sunday that
congressional inquiries into intelligence failures would reveal “a
pattern” of investigators failing to share key information, reports
CNN.
“There
were a number of bits and pieces, and they weren’t put
together," she said. “There were several things that could have
been investigated, had investigation been looked at as a way to go,
which it wasn’t,” Feinstein said on CNN’s “Late
Edition.”
In
her memo to Mueller, Rowley wrote that
Minneapolis
agents tried desperately to gain a warrant to search Moussaoui’s
laptop computer and personal belongings but were undermined by
headquarters officials, who declined to seek FISA or criminal search
warrants.
Moussaoui,
a French national of Moroccan birth, has been charged with conspiring
in the September 11 attacks on
New York
and the Pentagon. He faces the death penalty if convicted.
The
lack of follow-up on information from the Minneapolis and Phoenix
cases was compounded by the Newsweek report that the CIA tracked two
of the September 11 hijackers when they attended an Al-Qaeda meeting
in Malaysia in January 2000 and afterward, but did not inform the FBI
or the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), departments that
could have arrested and/or deported the suspects.
Mueller
and Attorney General John Ashcroft, appearing separately on several
Sunday news programs, agreed the agencies needed to improve how they
gather and share information, but added that better coordination still
probably would not have stopped the September 11 attacks, news
agencies reported.
The
congressional inquiries into the agencies follow after Mueller
announced last week major changes in the FBI intended to better
collect and analyze information about threats and place more emphasis
on prevention.
U.S.
President George W. Bush’s administration also decided last week to
issue new surveillance guidelines allowing the FBI to monitor internet
sites, libraries, churches and other places open to the public to help
prevent domestic terrorism, news agencies reported.
Responding
to criticism that the new measures infringe on civil liberties,
Mueller said the FBI was aware it must not return to the “bad old
days” when the agency was spying on Martin Luther King and other
prominent Americans.
Preventing
terrorism has to be carefully balanced against “incursion on the
freedoms that we enjoy and that we’re trying to protect,” he said.
Congressional
lawmakers said concerns about civil liberties would be taken up at the
hearings. “We are going to have a national debate about privacy and
your rights as an American citizen,” Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla.,
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told NBC.
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