The omniscient InstaPundit thinks the FBI and Justice Dept. need to get their priorities straight.
[T]he Justice Department is devoting additional resources to stepping up obscenity prosecutions? Someone tell Gonzales that there's a war on.
Laurence Silberman has big concerns as well:
The FBI is the source of “probably the fiercest bit of resistance” to proposed changes in how the United States collects and analyzes intelligence, a chairman of President George W. Bush’s WMD intelligence commission said here yesterday.In its March 31 report, the commission wrote that the president should order the FBI to group together all its intelligence efforts and to place them under the authority of the director of national intelligence created by last year’s intelligence reform law. The panel said the new law “almost accomplishes this task, but at crucial points it retreats into ambiguity.”
Retired federal judge Laurence Silberman, one of the commission’s two chairmen, laid into the bureau again at a panel discussion yesterday afternoon at the American Enterprise Institute. If reforming the FBI proves too difficult, Silberman said, the United States should consider creating a separate security service akin to the United Kingdom’s MI5.
“As one of our consultants said to us, and we’ve made it clear in the report, this is the last chance,” Silberman said. “If the bureau will not reform, if they won’t set up a national security service focused on this issue and which is linked to the rest of the intelligence community and to the director of national intelligence, then I will … agree with the notion that you have to have a separate MI5.”
UPDATE: Here are even more troubles for the FBI. How should their intelligence analysts spend their time? Analysis or taking out the trash? The world is upside down....
The FBI is struggling to hire new intelligence analysts and then hold on to them, according to a new report from the Justice Department’s inspector general.Posted by Alan at May 5, 2005 12:18 PMAlthough the FBI’s newly hired analysts were “generally well qualified,” they are also more likely than other analysts to jump ship for a better offer from a different agency, Justice IG Glenn A. Fine concluded in his report, released Wednesday.
Part of the problem may be that FBI analysts spend only half their time actually doing intelligence work, Fine found. The rest of their work involves administrative duties, including such menial chores as emptying trash cans, answering phones and keeping an eye on custodians and repair people.
The FBI has struggled to hire intelligence analysts, Fine found: Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI has increased its cadre of analysts by 37 percent, to 1,403 analysts as of last October. Still, the bureau had more than 400 open positions available that it could not fill, the IG found.