FBI director delivers plan for changes

FBI director Robert Mueller said Wednesday there may have been more missed clues before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he suggested for the first time that investigators might have uncovered the plot if they had been more diligent about pursuing leads.

"The jury is still out on all of it," Mueller said, during a wide-ranging, two-hour presentation at FBI headquarters. "Looking at it right now, I can't say for sure it would not have, that there wasn't a possibility that we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers."

Mueller noted two documents Wednesday that he said might have tipped authorities to terrorist plans for suicide hijackings, including efforts by an unidentified Middle Eastern country, where U.S. sales are restricted, to buy a commercial flight simulator.

Mueller's remarks came after his announcement of a broad reorganization of the nation's premier law enforcement agency -- changes at least partly in response to criticism of the FBI after the attacks. The director is moving hundreds of agents, mostly from drug investigations, to focus on terrorism and prevent future attacks.

The FBI's new marching orders will focus on terrorists, spies and hackers, in that order.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department prepared to announce new guidelines lifting restrictions on the FBI to make it easier for agents to begin and pursue terrorism investigations without approval from FBI headquarters. The changes, to be announced today by Attorney General John Ashcroft, also lift restrictions on the FBI's use of the Internet and public libraries to give agents more freedom to investigate terrorism even when they are not pursuing a particular case.

View from Cape

Jim Lummus, a former FBI agent who retired in Cape Girardeau in 1994, said he supported the changes as long as they bring improvement.

"Any business needs to reorganized periodically, and its the same for the Bureau," Lummus said.

The new guidelines, obtained by The Associated Press, allow officials running any of 56 FBI offices around the country to approve new terrorism investigations. Under previous rules, only Mueller or his assistant directors could approve them.

Mueller's statement on clues represented the first time any senior official in the Bush administration has allowed that counterterrorism investigators might have detected and averted the Sept. 11 hijackings if they had recognized what they were collecting. That question is the focus of a congressional inquiry, and is almost certain to come up next week during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the FBI's reorganization plans.

"Putting all the pieces together, who is to say?" Mueller said, though he also noted that those pieces amounted to "snippets in a veritable river of information." Mueller took over as FBI director just days before Sept. 11.

Ashcroft said the time had come to change the "structure, culture and mission" of the agency.

President Bush has bristled over suggestions that the government knew enough to avert the attacks. "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," Bush said earlier this month.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the reorganization plan, saying it could "substantially improve the FBI's ability to investigate and prevent terrorism."