DESPITE MY CRITICISM OF THE FBI, I have to note that some of my former students are flourishing there. And they’re damned good — and in some cases rather unconventional — students. But the FBI has always tended to have really good people at street level and really lousy people in mid- and upper management. That seems to be the lesson of this inquiry into the Bureau’s failures before 9/11.

One problem is that although agents face punishment for failure, higher-ups seldom do — and the Bureau never does. I remember Louis Freeh noting that his budget went way up (at a time when other budgets weren’t doing that) after he was raked over the coals during investigations of the Ruby Ridge and Waco debacles. If this was the penalty for failure, he remarked, it wasn’t so bad.

Ruby Ridge and Waco were, in fact, clear evidence that the FBI was badly managed — and particularly that it was inept at dealing with people of, ahem, strong religious beliefs. The problems revealed in the investigations of those failures were not addressed, except in an ass-covering sense, and the lesson to the Bureau was that even major national scandals wouldn’t produce any real accountability.

You prove you’re serious in these things by firing people and cutting their budgets. Nothing else matters — it’s correctly interpreted as mere noise.