Lost amid all the intelligence data before the attacks was a memo from an FBI field agent in Phoenix raising questions about suspected terrorists taking flight training in the United States. The new computer system would see that such a memo got to the proper people, FBI officials said.
"To be successful, we have to share information in new ways," Mueller told reporters in a two-hour briefing about the system. "I believe we have made substantial strides in a number of key areas."
Mueller also said the FBI is preparing a comprehensive, classified "national threat assessment" for Congress about the nation's vulnerability to another attack and that the FBI supports President Bush's proposal to create a new intelligence analysis center.
The briefing, held in the FBI's Strategic Information Operations Center, was the latest step in a public relations campaign by Mueller to keep counterterrorism and domestic intelligence authority with the FBI. Some in Congress, pointing to past FBI missteps, want to create a new domestic intelligence agency independent of the FBI.
Mueller has made counterterrorism the FBI's top priority. Crucial to that effort, he said, is a multibillion-dollar overhaul of the agency's computer system, known as "Trilogy," to ensure that all agents and analysts with the proper security clearances have access to critical information worldwide.
The FBI's goal is to have much of that system online by March 31 with a "virtual case file" terrorism database containing tens of millions of documents -- and offering modern search and cross-referencing capabilities -- to be finished by December, said Wilson Lowery, the FBI executive assistant director for administration.
The computer system in place before Sept. 11, 2001, was completely obsolete. It often required agents to share terminals and could not transmit photos. Already, some 23 million documents related to terrorism, including some captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, have been scanned into the new database.
Yet the Justice Department's inspector general found evidence earlier this year of serious cost overruns and "major weaknesses" in the way computer system is being designed. That led the Senate this month to pass an FBI spending bill for the current fiscal year that is $324 million below the president's requested amount, according to congressional estimates.
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., chairman of the Senate subcommittee that sets FBI spending levels, has called the Trilogy project "a large disaster," adding that lawmakers had thrown so much money at it that it had become "gold-plated" and unworkable.
Lowery said the FBI will justify for Congress every additional expense and will meet its current deadlines. "This is not a gold-plated system," Lowery said. "It is a big challenge, but we anticipate making that schedule."
House Republicans have pledged to fight for full FBI funding in negotiations with the Senate on final spending levels for the current budget year that ends Oct. 1.
Mueller said the proposed Terrorist Threat Integration Center, sketched out by Bush in Tuesday's State of the Union address, would provide a central place for all intelligence analysis. Mueller said it would not impinge on the FBI's role as an intelligence collector and that the bureau, along with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, would provide the analysts to staff it.
"The concept of another analytical center is not something that has been foisted upon or thrust upon us," Mueller said. "It's something I believe in and something (CIA Director) George Tenet believes in."
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