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FBI Shifts Priorites

The FBI has been undergoing internal changes--many of its drug agents have been moved into the terrorism unit and some members of Congress are upset.

The General Accounting Office, in testimony Wednesday to a House committee, found that the number of FBI field agent positions dedicated to drug crimes had dropped from about 1,400 in fall 2001 to just over 800 today.

The number of new drug investigations has fallen from 1,825 in 2000 to 944 last year and just 310 in the first half of this year. At the same time, new FBI counterterrorism investigations have risen from just over 1,000 prior to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to 4,408 by early this year.

....36 percent of the FBI's field agent positions are now working on either counterterrorism or counterintelligence, compared with 26 percent shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. The report says that the FBI faces challenges in finding enough agents to meet the terror threat without further siphoning off resources from other criminal investigations.

The solution, according to FBI director Robert Mueller, is for Congress to fund more agent positions.

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