Herald News Services
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said Sunday that he does not think the FBI is presently capable of doing the intelligence analysis work needed to head off terrorist activities within the United States.
"I just think they’ve got to go through a big learning curve, a lot of readjustment," Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., the House panel chairman, said of the FBI on "Fox News Sunday."
Goss said FBI Director Robert Mueller would be announcing reorganization steps "in the days ahead" and confirmed a story in Sunday’s Washington Post that about 30 CIA analysts and an agency supervisor have been loaned to the FBI in what he described as "cross-training."
Goss said that over the years, success in the FBI meant "to go out and apprehend criminals" prosecute them and "get them off the streets." That approach is still needed, he said, but with terrorism there is a new element of integrating overseas intelligence to prevent acts inside the United States.
Also Sunday, Goss — whose committee is joining with its Senate counterpart to investigate what the government knew and did to fight terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks — referred to a letter Minneapolis FBI counsel Coleen Rowley wrote May 21 to Mueller about the case a warrant application to search terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer.
The letter alleged that terrorism supervisors at FBI headquarters rewrote the Minnesota office’s warrant applications and affidavit and removed key information about Moussaoui before sending them to a legal office that then rejected the paperwork as insufficient.
Rowley wrote that some of the revisions "downplayed" the significance of intelligence linking Moussaoui to Islamic extremists, and blamed the changes on a flawed communication process.
FBI supervisors in Washington seemed so intent on ignoring the threat posed by Moussaoui, Rowley wrote, that some field agents speculated that key officials at FBI headquarters “had to be spies or moles … who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.”
Asked if he meant one reason the FBI may have rejected a warrant request was concern about racial profiling, Goss replied: "I don’t know the answer to that. But I’m surely going to ask the question, because it has been suggested."
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