FBI Whistle-Blower Testifies

W A S H I N G T O N, June 6 -- The FBI needs more staffing, money, and time and less bureaucracy to prevent further acts of homeland terror, the agency's director and an FBI whistle-blower told a Senate committee looking into missed signals before the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

"An honest and comprehensive examination of the pre-Sept. 11 FBI reflects an agency that must evolve and that must change if our mission, our priorities, our structure, our work force and our technologies are to revolve around the one central, paramount premise of preventing the next attack," FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee today. "The need for change was apparent even before September 11. It has become more urgent since then."

FBI reform is urgent because "those who want to hurt us remain highly motivated, well-funded and spread throughout the world," Mueller said.

A whistle-blower who claims that FBI headquarters thwarted attempts by its Minneapolis field office to search the possessions of a terror suspect also testified at the day-long hearing, expressing her frustrations with the many levels of the FBI's "ever-growing bureaucracy."

"Like the plant in the 'Little Shop ofHorrors' movie, the bureaucracy just keeps saying, 'Feed me, feed me,'" Coleen Rowley told the committee in a written statement. "Ironically, even with all the management layers at FBI headquarters, it often appears thatthere is little or no real supervision of the mid-management levels."

Rowley was particularly incensed over the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, aFrench citizen of Moroccan descent arrested in Minnesota last year on an immigration violation. A flight school instructor had expressed suspicion of Moussaoui's desire to learn to pilot a commercial jet, but not to take off or land.

FBI headquarters rejected a warrant request from the Minneapolis field office to examine Moussaoui's computer. After theSept. 11 attacks, the FBI got the warrant and reportedly found informationrelated to commercial planes and crop-dusters on the computer hard drive. The government grounded crop-dusting planes temporarily because of what it found.