Another Round of Reform for the FBI-Will it Make a Difference?
By Douglas Farah
There is another long-overdue reform brewing in how the FBI handles terrorism cases. This one, six years after 9/11, would finally bring together analysts and field agents in an effort to spot trends and set investigative strategies.
This has been a crying need for analysts to be elevated above their traditional second-tier status to be given more say in driving counterterrorism. The career paths available, the status within the agency and other factors mitigated against attracting the best and the brightest there.
This is a worthwhile endeavor, but one that is likely to run into entrenched institutional norms and conceptions that have consistently hobbled serious reform efforts in the past, to our detriment.
A new book and depressing book by Amy Zegart, Spying Blind, argues that there were 12 major intelligence reform studies from 1991 and the end of the Cold War, to just before 9/11.
Out of those, she finds 340 terrorism-related reforms, almost all of them the major themes of the 9/11 Commission, where most were recommended again.
Of those 340 recommendations, mostly directed to the CIA and FBI, only 35 were fully implemented. Another 30 were partially implemented and seven were implemented to an unmeasurable extent, meaning that 79 percent of the total-268 recommendations-were not acted on at all. My full blog is here.