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How to help the FBI: a Temporary Analysts Corps staffed from America's leading law firms.
The FBI obviously needs a lot of help. Remember the reputation of FBI before 9/11? Ruby Ridge, Waco, Robert Hanssen, and the Oklahoma bombing files ring any bells? The current director, Robert Mueller, was brought in to clean up the stables before 9/11. The recent testimony of Colleen Rowley has made it clear that the culture of the FBI is profoundly dysfunctional, and, as she days, "mired in mediocrity." In one of his responses to 9/11 (and Rowley's memo), Mueller has called for hiring more than 1,600 new employees over the next 18 months, most of whom will be dedicated to counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases. I agree with Mueller that the FBI needs lots more analysts. All my reading suggests that the failure of our intelligence apparatus to find out about 9/11 hijackers in advance wasn't due to limits on the powers of our police agencies, it was a failure of coordination and intelligence. The FBI needs more and better analysts, andthe leading law firms of the United States should help provide them.
A brief digression. I once spent six months reading about 20,000 pages of FBI files, mostly memos call 302's. They were assembled as part of the investigation of the Hon. Alcee Hastings, at that time a sitting Federal District Judge, currently a congressman from Florida -- but that is another story.
Frankly, after reading through the FBI files, my impression of the FBI went down considerably. It was clear that they were far from the brightest bulbs. When you think about it, it makes sense. Given the salaries that the FBI pays, it isn't going to attract a lot of the A students. It hasn't done much to attract idealist. Most of the A students either go somewhere where they can get to litigate a lot, like the District Attorney or the Public Defender's office, or they go to the big law firms that pay the big bucks, often with a stop as a judge's clerk on the way. And those are the people that our FBI needs now.
My proposal is simple - create the equivalent of the Peace Corps for the FBI. The FBI should hire a Temporary Analysts Corps, staffed primarily from new lawyers. The leading law firms should agree support and encourage this by giving any of their junior associates leave to spend up to three years in the FBI's Temporary Analysts Corps, and by financially supporting any associates who do by supplementing their government salaries to bring them up to what they were or would have been making at the law firm. Finally, the law firms would need to count the time served in the Temporary Analysts Corps as time server towards becoming a partner, perhaps on a 2/3 time basis.
Advantages of the plan:
- Harnesses the natural idealism of the young. One of the hardest things about the post-9/11 era is the sense that there is nothing that most people can do to reduce the chances of more attacks. This could give some of our best and brightest something that they could do.
- Recruits very smart people to help an important but very troubled institution, the FBI.
- Brings in enough new blood en masse to be able to effect a change to the culture of the FBI
- Imposes the greatest sacrifice on a part of society most able to afford the sacrifice - America's leading law firms.
- It is doable. Between giving a public speech and calling up all his old buddies at Skull and Bones, Bush should be able to recruit plenty of new lawyers as fast as the FBI can set up office space for them.
What do you think?
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