Spike Bowman got a bonus. A huge one. Amounted to something between 20 and 35 percent of Spike's comfortable salary. And oh, don't forget, a framed commendation from his boss, the president of the United States.
"So what? Hey, good for Spike," you say.
And that's right. Good for Spike.
But for the rest of us, well, pick a sickening metaphor, any sickening metaphor. Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, went with the ever-ready "a slap in the face."
I like a kick in the head better, because it feels more like that than a knee to the groin or even a sharp stick in the eye.
The fact that this story never got legs nationally speaks so loudly of our collective attention span that it's abjectly depressing. It broke in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis under the byline of staff writer Greg Gordon on Dec. 20, but I'll lay odds of 6-1 against it fueling the sustained indignation that it should.
Perhaps you remember that in May 2002, Coleen Rowley, the obviously skittish but robustly determined FBI agent from the Bureau's Minneapolis field office, testified before Congress about how her "superiors" in Washington thwarted her office's investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th Sept. 11 hijacker.
Agents in Minnesota had suspected that Moussaoui was in America for some dark purpose months before 9/11, probably because he'd flashed bundles of cash around trying to find someone who'd teach him to pilot a 747, especially when he mentioned he'd just as soon bag the takeoffs and landings part of the curriculum. But when Minneapolis asked Washington for a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer, the request was denied. Alarmed, Minneapolis tried to go through parallel legal channels at the CIA. They got nothing but a reprimand from the FBI.
So here's the story. Warrants like the one Minneapolis wanted are submitted to the FBI's National Security Law Unit, which is headed by none other than . . . oh yeah, Bonus Baby Spike Bowman.
It's not the point of this column to presume that Bowman himself said no to Minneapolis in the face of compelling and urgent evidence, and it is not the point of this column to presume that had the Moussaoui warrant been green-lighted, the World Trade Towers would be standing today. It's true that a search of Moussaoui's apartment post-9/11 turned up enough incriminating dirt to put him on trial for crimes that could bring the death penalty four times over, but that's not the point, either.
The point is that even if the stench of FBI incompetence weren't still wafting across America's wounded soul, does the Washington office have to showcase its pervasive cluelessness by handing one of nine yearly "exceptional performance" awards to the guy who heads the division where one misplay after another might well have enabled 9/11?
For his part, Bowman has admitted little more than that there is no common thread in his department's failures, only that there has been an "inattention to detail."
The devil, now by horrible example, really is in the details.
So what does this tell agents like Coleen Rowley, who wound up on the cover of Time as one of its whistle-blowing persons of the year? What it tells her is that FBI Director Robert Mueller, with the tacit approval of this administration, thinks she can stick that whistle you know where. It says that the FBI, having failed to protect 3,000 people one morning in the fall of 2001, plans to be a lot more careful about protecting itself.
United we stand? Don't make me puke.
No "exceptional performance" citations are expected in the Minneapolis office of the FBI, nor in the office in Arizona, which first raised the flag about the curious demographics of enrollment at certain flight schools.
But Spike, he gets a raise and a Sheriff Bush autograph for running the FBI division Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama singled out in a Congressional investigation as "inept."
Grassley said last week he's anxious to conduct "oversight" hearings on this very matter sometime this month, the irony in that designation being almost painful.
"The FBI has to end this pattern of rewarding mistakes and wrongdoing," Grassley said the day after the exceptional-performance awards ceremony. "[The Bowman award is] a slap in the face to all the FBI agents who tried to investigate suspected terrorists and were shut down by bureaucrats at headquarters."
Uh-huh. And from all of us here at hindquarters, thanks for nothin'.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
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