For Immediate Release
May 21, 2008
|
Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691
|
FBI Response to Testimony Before the
House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland
Security
FBI Assistant Director John Miller issued the following
statement:
“While we appreciate any employee’s views
on the state and direction of the FBI, those assessments
may be very limited in scope. A clearer view of the big
picture may be more helpful in drawing conclusions. Over
the nearly seven years since the attacks of September 11,
2001, the FBI has made great and steady strides to build
a domestically focused national security organization with
the added value and responsibility of law enforcement powers.
In that time, the FBI’s priorities were dramatically
shifted to make prevention of another terrorist attack
our top priority. This shift in emphasis, as well as resources,
has proven successful to date in that we have now gone
several years without a successful terrorist attack by
al-Qaeda or its affiliates on U.S. soil. During those years,
by combining our intelligence-gathering capabilities with
our law enforcement experience and authority, as well as
our state and local partners, we have disrupted several
terrorist plots across the country. Working with our intelligence
community partners we have helped to disrupt more plots
across the world.
“As
the men and women of the FBI have accomplished these
goals, the threat picture as well as the capability of
our adversaries has constantly shifted. We have had to
continually develop and shift our strategies to meet
those changes. We do not expect that to change. It is
cynical to write off the work of so many dedicated FBI
employees or the accomplishments of the Bureau by suggesting
that these efforts are failing, especially when they
are not. We have worked hard to staff positions at FBI
Headquarters while at the same time being careful not
to do so at the expense of the field offices. We have
worked diligently through our community outreach and
recruitment efforts to attract and hire more Arabic speaking
agents as well those with other critical language and
cultural backgrounds. In doing so, we face the challenges
of competition for these qualities from the rest of the
intelligence community and the private sector.
“Since
9/11, but particularly over the past year, the FBI has
been addressing staffing concerns, career path issues
and how we can better leverage a strategic, intelligence-based
view, across all of our investigative programs. We are
doing this through the work of over one hundred FBI employees,
more than half from the field offices, to bring together
the most informed thinking and best practices. We are standardizing
these best practices across the field, region by region,
over the next several months. One of the key initiatives
relates to establishing career paths for FBI employees.
Employees will select career paths in an area of expertise,
such as counterterrorism, counterespionage or criminal
investigation and stay with that discipline over their
career.
“In
the FBI, like any other government agency, resources
will be an issue. We operate within the limits of those
resources, but over the last one hundred years, our greatest
resource has always been our people. They make up the difference
every day, because they are dedicated to the mission of
protecting the American people from threats near and far.”
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