Editorial

CONFIDENCE IN FBI RESTS ON REAL REFORMS

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Just when the Timothy McVeigh, Wen Ho Lee and Robert Hanssen debacles were beginning to go away, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was in the headlines again, this time for losing 449 guns and more than 180 computers, one of them with classified information.

The FBI is supposed to protect us from the bad guys, and now we find there are bad guys within their ranks. One of the missing guns was used in a murder.

Former FBI director Louis Freeh is gone in the wake of the double whammy of the FBI's failure to turn over thousands of pages of documents to the McVeigh defense team and the discovery that agents suspected Hanssen of spying years before he was arrested.

No one can expect his likely successor, Robert Mueller, to fix everything in a few weeks.

But things have to change fast before the image of the G-man fighting for truth, justice and the American Way is tarnished forever.