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FBI credited with progress, but report says more needed

WASHINGTON — The FBI has made great strides since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and has prevented other catastrophic acts of terrorism, but it urgently needs to improve its intelligence capabilities and hire more linguists to counter the rapidly evolving threats to the United States, according to a report released Wednesday.

The report by the FBI 9/11 Review Commission said that the bureau needed to elevate the status of its analysts and to enhance its ability to gain information from people and to analyze it, contending that the bureau lags “behind marked advances in law enforcement capabilities.”

“This imbalance needs urgently to be addressed to meet growing and increasingly complex national security threats, from adaptive and increasingly tech-savvy terrorists, more brazen computer hackers, and more technically capable, global cyber syndicates,” the report said.

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While the 2004 report of the national 9/11 Commission and subsequent reviews called for major changes to the FBI, the report released Wednesday was much less critical. Rather than a rebuke, it amounts to a status-check on the FBI transformation that began in 2001.

Today’s bureau bears little resemblance to that organization, and some of the areas cited for improvement are markedly better than they were years ago. For instance, the report was much less critical about the FBI’s foreign language ability than previous reports were.

Many of the report’s recommendations are similar to issues the FBI’s director, James B. Comey, has raised since he took over the bureau in September 2013.

Comey has said that one of his biggest priorities is continuing the FBI’s transformation from a law enforcement agency to an intelligence operation. Last year, he created a new high-level executive position to oversee a division meant to expand the use of intelligence across all investigations.

“I think this is a moment of pride for the FBI,” Comey said at a news conference in Washington. “An outside group of some of our nation’s most important leaders and thinkers has stared hard at us and said, ‘You have done a great job at transforming yourself.’ They’ve also said what I’ve said around the country: ‘It’s not good enough.’ ”

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He added: “There are a lot of ways you can be even better at becoming this national security and law enforcement organization that uses, collects, and shares intelligence information in everything we do.”

The review commission was created by Congress in 2014 to assess the bureau’s progress since the attacks. In particular, the panel examined how the FBI had put into effect the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.