That is MN described on the Maussoui (sp?) case..When Ms Crowley tried to get her message across to the powers that be in the Home Base of DC. They ignored her. Then and by then when she became public with all of this, is when they became “oh we are so sorry to have missed your intent” sortta routine. The same for the agents out in CA. about the taking flight lessons, and on down the line. Why are the bad employees still on board with this agency? They should have been dismissed ASAP over all of this.

Behavior like that creates lasting impressions of the generic ‘special agent’ of the FBI, who is often dimissed and reviled by local officers. And it is highly representative of the attitudes and actions of senior FBI officials, to some degree in the field, and certainly of those at Bureau headquarters. It is in many ways, all about the culture of the agency and the legends that surround it.

These attitudes tend to exclude agency personnel from the constant introspection that is necessary to hold the agency accountable for its actions and its failures, and are dimissive of the recognition that ineffiencies and problems exist, and that self-examination and reform and necessary and healthy.

But that’s only part of a very large set of problems. If I had to pick a single one, it would be the age-old culture of the agency, in which key personnel see it as superior to all others, creating an evironment of paternalism and effectively isolating the agency from other agencies at the executive and management levels. In Honolulu—as I imagine it was in other locales—cooperation at the street level was often very good, but it required that we circumvent the senior agents in the local field office, and often work around our own managers and executives in the police department. Clearly, this is a waste of effort and represents a myriad of lost opportunities.

The agency has a well deserved reputation for poaching, interference, independent and unilateral action, lack of cooperation and one-way communication that has fostered decades of mistrust and frustrated many cooperative enterprises involving other Federal, State and local agencies.

The FBI has long been far too bureaucratic, often poorly staffed and led, and incapable of consistently and reliably providing the services it is historically credited with. While Director Robert Mueller is ultimately responsible for these current failures, it is simplistic to lay the blame at his feet. Instead, it is generally failed leadership at sub-director levels that is largely to blame for…

• the 200-plus million dollor SAIC case management and information infrastructure project that utterly failed to produce anything useful for the Bureau

• the deplorable condition of the laboratory operation that initially led to the identification of Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield as a terrorist suspect in the Madrid train bombings

• the unjustified rejection of recommendations of field agents, the most notable of which involved Coleen Rowley and agents of the Portland field office, though literally thousands of such matter routine occur

• the politically driven shift of resources from criminal to counterterrorism efforts, a largely self-defeating proposition

• continued lack of cooperation and ongoing turf wars with other Federal, State and local agencies

The agency is legendary for its hunger for information and intelligence and its stonewalling of the free flow of information in the opposite direction, its reckless operations which have on several occasions led to the death of field agents where local authorities knew nothing of Bureau surveillance and apprehension activities, and the politically driven poaching of cases rightly the purview of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the US Secret Service and others. It has also been hampered by the lack of enthusiasm for prosecution by local US Attorneys, and its long standing unwillingness to assume responsiblitity for investigating matters that are not sufficiently ‘sexy’ for lack of a better term reflecting the ever changing priorities of its leaders in Washington DC, both in and outside the bureau.

These are complex problems that call for no less than the overhaul of the agency, and a publicly stated redirection of its missions. So long as the current crop of sub-directors remain at the helm, and without an external call from Congress for a complete examination of the agency, these nagging problems are likely to continue, and to become more accute as time goes on.

With politically driven decisions such as that to hand over the development of an information technology infrastructure to a huge and well regarded—but, clearly incapable—organization such as Science Applications International Corporation, there is little hope that the culture of the agency will change to a sufficient degree to allow the agency to simplify and streamline its structure, focus its resources, and deliver the services it was intially intended to.

Does anyone really know?