NYT: An Inspector General Who’s Equal to the Fight (3/26)

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/washington/26inspector.html?ref=us

An Inspector General Who’s Equal to the Fight

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: March 26, 2007

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Mr. Fine’s report this month on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s mishandling of national security letters, which the bureau uses to obtain telephone and financial records, has contributed to calls for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

On Friday, Mr. Fine’s office, along with the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, began to examine the role of Mr. Gonzales and other officials in the dismissal of eight United States attorneys.

Mr. Gonzales and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, accepted the report on national security letters released on March 9 with the gritted-teeth public gratitude that routinely greets such official exposés in Washington. “An excellent report,” Mr. Mueller said, “and I appreciate the work of the inspector general in conducting this review.”

That is what Mr. Mueller, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Gonzales’s predecessor, John Ashcroft, have found themselves saying repeatedly over the last five years, in response to Mr. Fine’s reports on the Justice Department’s wholesale roundup of Arab and Muslim immigrants after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; on the F.B.I.’s failure to find two hijackers before the attacks; on its failure to act against Robert P. Hanssen long before the veteran agent was unmasked as a Russian spy; on the bureau’s botched efforts to update its computer systems; on its backlog of untranslated tapes and documents from counterterrorist investigations; and on many other failures.

“You’re part of the department, but you’re also independent,” Mr. Fine, a 51-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer, said in an interview. “You have to recognize that you’re not going to be popular. You have to be as fair and aggressive as you can and just accept that you’re not going to please everyone.”

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Fine is mentioned favorably here, also:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x271052