Back in the dark, scary days of autumn, top law-and-order men like John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge pinned little silver sheriff's stars to every American chest and told us to be vigilant, form neighborhood watch groups and report anything suspicious. The 911 lines promptly jammed, local cops chased flocks of wild geese, and no one felt much safer.
Too much information, it turns out, is sometimes not much better than too little--especially if the information ends up in the hands of a federal agency that doesn't know what to do with it, an agency that hates embarrassment above all things. So it was extraordinary to see last week what it takes to bring an agency like the FBI to its knees, make it admit defeat and promise--yet again--to mend its ways. Minneapolis, Minn., agent Coleen Rowley's blistering 13-page memo, first published by TIME, detailed some warnings that had been ignored and the opportunities that were missed even when the FBI agents working on the strange case of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui implored headquarters to act before something really bad happened.
Rowley's memo ripped into FBI chief Robert Mueller just as he was changing the way the bureau hunts terrorists in the U.S.--nine months after he first made that very same promise. Mueller announced Wednesday that he was retargeting more agents at the terrorists, empowering local field agents to seize the initiative, centralizing information in Washington so that every agent would know what every other agent was doing and creating a special branch of analysts to think through every unimaginable possibility. Mueller cited Rowley's memo and an e-mail written last summer by agent Kenneth Williams in Phoenix, Ariz., as proof that the bureau was broken and needed repairs. "We have to develop the capability to anticipate attacks," he said. "We have to develop the capability of looking around corners."
Nobody was arguing with that, but not everyone was applauding Thursday when Attorney General Ashcroft announced that he was rewriting the rules that govern the way FBI agents launch and conduct probes of suspected terrorists here at home. The new rules, Ashcroft said, would help the feds prevent terrorist strikes rather than deal with them after they happen. But lawmakers of both parties complained that Ashcroft had cast off a 26-year-old policy without giving them any notice. Civil libertarians cried that the FBI was trampling on privacy in the name of security. And even George W. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, was irked that the White House had been left out of the loop.