FBI REMODELING TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

The reorganization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced this
week by FBI Director Robert Mueller hardly lives up to the promise "to
fundamentally change the way we do business." But it includes an
interesting implicit admission that deserves more exploration.

By announcing that 400 FBI agents would be shifted immediately from drug
law enforcement to anti-terrorism units, Mueller acknowledged without
saying so that continuing to try to fight the "drug war" is a distraction
from the main mission of preventing terrorism.

It is too bad that he didn't acknowledge this explicitly - or take the next
logical step and acknowledge that a policy of prohibition, by increasing
the profits available to the most ruthless of traffickers, helps to fund
international terrorism - but his actions had a certain quiet eloquence.

Other than that, however, the reorganization plans amount to superficial
patchwork - and just might make the problems posed by the uncontrolled
recent growth of dozens of federal law enforcement agencies worse.

Consider the implications of the recent flap over memos and requests from
FBI field offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis.

The Phoenix memo got lost in the bureaucratic paperwork shuffle; hundreds
of similar memos hit headquarters every day.

The Minneapolis request to issue a warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's
computer fell victim to bureaucratic timidity and PC fears of being accused
of "ethnic profiling."

Creating a more centralized anti-terrorist operation and hiring more FBI
agents is not likely to solve such problems. It is more likely to make a
paperwork glut and communications difficulties even worse.

As Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley put it, "Mueller should take the
advice of FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and not try to investigate
terrorists out of bureaucrat central, FBI headquarters."

The Bush administration has missed a golden opportunity to effect genuinely
fundamental reform of the federal law enforcement octopus. At least 40
federal agencies have some responsibility for gathering intelligence with
some relationship to terrorism. Even if they all had the latest and most
sophisticated computer database and networking systems - and it is
notorious that they are all in the Model-T era computer-wise - it would be
difficult for them to share information effectively. Furthermore, each
agency has more powerful incentives to protect its own turf than to work
well with others.

As Timothy Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal
Justice, put it, "The Sept. 11 attacks gave the administration an historic
opportunity to do a real overhaul of federal law enforcement, perhaps to
roll up all those agencies into one focused unit and return more law
enforcement responsibility to states and local jurisdictions. But that
would have required taking on entrenched bureaucratic interests. This
announcement suggests President Bush has no stomach for what needs to be done."

Many of the reforms announced by Mueller require congressional approval.

Several congressional committees have also announced probes into the
pre-Sept. 11 lapses.

They should broaden their scope to consider more fundamental reform.