Feckless Bunch of Incompetents

Not all of them, of course, but enough of them to cause grave concern about the agency's genuine effectiveness and mission competence. Glenn Reynolds provides a good, brief rundown of the FBI's failures and transgressions over the last 30+ years. A sample:

And as the Boston Herald’s Howie Carr reminds us: “Remember serial killer Gary Sampson? Before he murdered three innocent men in 2001, he called the FBI office in Boston from a pay phone in Abington and offered to turn himself in on some unsolved bank robberies.” But the FBI apparently keeps banker’s hours, and the call came on a Friday afternoon; the bureau ignored the call. “The following day, Sampson started his two-state carjacking murder spree.”