FBI Agents Dedicated To Terror Doubled in Eight Years

The number of FBI agents dedicated to counterterrorism doubled between 2001 and 2009 accounting for more than a quarter of the work done by field agents by last year, a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general has found. Despite the increase, actual active counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases dipped over the last four years by 25 percent, and those involving domestic terrorism made up only a fraction of the bureau’s terrorism workload.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer spent several months in 2007 examining how the FBI’s major restructuring after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks meant other critical areas of federal law enforcement were neglected, including financial crimes that preceded the nation’s economic meltdown.

Reporters there examined Justice Department data and found deep declines generally in the number of criminal cases brought to federal prosecutors, and as many as 2,000 more white-collar criminals could have been put in jail over a 10-year period if the FBI had probed real-estate fraud and other misconduct at the same pace it did before 9/11.

via Source.