George W. Bush, reacting to terrorist events of a year ago, has sought sweeping powers from Congress. He and Attorney General John Ashcroft have petitioned for executive power that would curtail civil liberties, a move that has been strongly opposed by both progressives and conservatives.

Now, in preparation for an attack on Iraq, the administration is seeking authorization from Congress to bypass that branch of government and decide how best to cripple Iraq without further action from Congress.

Judging from recent congressional hearings, the Bush administration should be placing a greater emphasis on serious gaffes by his administration, especially the failure of law enforcement bureaucrats to listen to the men and women in the field offices.

Anyone slightly familiar with the FBI or the CIA knows that administrators in Washington have a headquarters-knows-best attitude. The recent congressional hearings on blunders made before Sept. 11 proved the opposite—investigators in the field often know best. And bureaucrats in the central office of law enforcement agencies need to listen to them.

This was made clear last week when it was disclosed that two weeks prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, an FBI agent in New York begged officials at headquarters to let him pursue Khalid Almihdhar, later identified as one of the people who commandeered the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon. When his request was denied, the agent took the unusual step of firing off an e-mail warning of the consequences of the denial.

“Someday someone will die…” the FBI agent warned. “…the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’” He added, “Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Osama bin Laden], is getting the most ‘protection.’”

Rather than standing behind their decision, as the FBI agent had requested, the bureaucrats at the FBI’s National Security Law Unit claimed that the information that had been obtained through U.S. intelligence sources could not be legally used to launch a criminal investigation. The cautious lawyers were taking the safe way out.

The FBI agent, who was identified by name, is not the only field agent to request—and be denied—permission to act on what turned out to be crucial leads.

It was disclosed earlier that another agent, Coleen M. Rowley in Minneapolis, had complained that she was not allowed to pursue an investigation of accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

Among other things, Moussaoui, 34, of France, has since been charged with six terrorism-related counts of conspiracy and aircraft piracy. Although he said he wanted to plead no contest in a federal court in Alexandria, Va., the judge overruled him and entered a plea of not guilty for Moussaoui, who is serving as his own attorney.

Rowley’s blistering 13-page letter to FBI director Robert Mueller III noted, “Numerous high-ranking FBI officials who have made decisions or have taken actions which, in hindsight, turned out to be mistaken or just turned out badly (i.e., Ruby Ridge, Wasco, etc.) have seen their careers plummet and end. This has in turn resulted in a climate of fear which has chilled aggressive FBI law enforcement action/decisions.”

Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent assigned to the Phoenix field office, wrote a memo to headquarters two months before the attacks, urging a canvass of U.S. flight schools for suspected terrorists. That request was rejected because of a lack of manpower, FBI officials say.

In her letter, Rowley summed up the problem this way: “FBI Headquarters is staffed with a number of short term careerists who…must serve only an 18-month-just-time-to-get-your-ticket-punched minimum. It’s no wonder why very little expertise can be acquired by a Headquarters unit! (And no wonder why FBIHQ is mired in mediocrity!” …)

The sharing of intelligence information by the top officials of the FBI and CIA can’t even be called mediocre, if congressional investigators are to be believed. They cited numerous cases where the agencies failed to share critical information.

Still, there were enough warnings.

“Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,” Richard Clarke, the government’s top counter-terrorism expert, declared on July 5 of last year.

In a June 28 intelligence summary for national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, CIA director George J. Tenet wrote: “It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks.”

But despite these and other warnings prior to Sept. 11, the FBI, the CIA and other intelligence agencies failed to adequately respond to the impending threat.
“This failure is massive,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) would later say. “We have failure piled upon failure.”

The Bush administration should focus on those internal failures rather than trying to march us off to an undeclared war.