Baby Steps

In this recent post, I wrote about how---after almost four years---the FBI had not updated its website to include any mention of 9/11 on its pages for Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and that the "Most Wanted" section still contained a photo and offer of reward for Muhammad Atef, who has been dead since 2001.

Possibly in response to the attention generated by my post, the FBI has just made a few changes. As you can see here, it has placed an "Extra" section at the top of its front page trumpeting the updating of its long-neglected terrorist information. Indeed, it has finally removed Atef from its website. One wonders how many layers of bureaucracy it took to approve that decision. The pages for Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri, however, still make no mention of 9/11 and continue to state that both men are thought to be in Afghanistan, even though it is almost universally accepted within the intelligence community that they are either in Pakistan or elsewhere.

The employees of the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies work extremely hard trying to keep the rest of us safe. But gaffes like these don't exactly give me the warm and fuzzies about their ability to do so in a world of rapidly evolving technology. If you can't get the small stuff right, you won't get the big stuff right. Wasn't that the lesson of the intelligence failures that led to 9/11?