Thank you,
Kathleen, and thanks to all those who put together today's celebration
and the excellent video perspective for us. On behalf of myself
and Director Mueller, I want to extend my warmest welcome to
our many distinguished guests and my thanks to all of you for
joining us. Unfortunately, Director Mueller was called away
to the White House at the last minute, giving me the chance
to be with your today.
Let
me start by offering my deepest congratulations to everyone
here at the FBI Academy -- all those past and present who
have made it such a tremendous success over the past three
decades. Without a doubt, this Academy is one of the crown
jewels of the FBI. Throughout the law enforcement community
nationwide and worldwide, you just say the word, "Quantico,"
and people automatically think leadership and excellence.
That is a tribute to all of you and the outstanding work you
have done and continue to do for the Bureau and the nation.
I particularly
want to thank our faculty and staff at the Academy, as well
as our partners at the University of Virginia. I hear again
and again from Academy graduates how much you are appreciated.
The class spokespersons at the graduations, in fact, often
thank you by name and quote your most memorable lines. It
is truly phenomenal, and it is a reflection of the high caliber
of training here at the Academy.
I also
want to thank everyone on the operational side of the Academy.
You do some great work for the Bureau, providing research,
analysis, lab services, construction, crisis response, and
library and communications support. I know you stepped up
to the plate in the days and weeks following September 11,
doing everything from staffing up SIOC to scouring crash sites
for clues to lending a hand at overtaxed field offices. So
thanks for all of your hard work and the many important services
you provide to the FBI and its partners, including our colleagues
at the DEA who we are proud to host here at the Academy.
And
none of us should ever forget the work of the maintenance
staff, the security officers, the administrative employees,
and the other support professionals who keep this facility
functioning at a very high level day-after-day and year-after-year.
Finally,
on behalf of the FBI, this Academy, and all the past and future
graduates of our National Academy program, I want to thank
Captain Miller and all the graduates of 207th for their generous
and moving tribute to the victims of September 11.
This
anniversary, of course, falls at a time of great change for
the Bureau. We have a new mission and new priorities, and
we are reorganizing from top to bottom to meet these challenges.
To succeed, we need the Academy to go into overdrive in the
things that it does best: providing training, building partnerships,
and developing leaders. Many of you here today have been Academy
change agents in times past. You build a solid, professional
infrastructure, then used it to adapt to new directions and
responsibilities. You forged critically important relationships
within the domestic and global law enforcement community.
You were open to new ways of doing things. You changed curricula.
You always saw it as your responsibility to build leaders
for the future.
Now,
the future is upon us, and we are counting on today's Academy
to help take us there.
First
and foremost, we need you to help us achieve the now overriding
mission of the Bureau: preventing terrorist attacks. We need
you to help us improve our analytic capabilities, to ground
our analysts in best practices, and to guide us through the
transition to new computer-based tools. The new College of
Analytic Studies is a positive step forward, and I applaud
you for taking the lead in getting it up and running.
We also
need you to build a cadre of subject matter experts in emerging
areas critical to fighting and winning the war on terror.
We need you to make our training more sophisticated and more
flexible through efforts like e-learning and the coming Virtual
Academy. We are counting on the Lab and the new Investigative
Technology Division to keep us on the cutting edge of forensic
analysis, creating new tools and sharing expertise with the
criminal justice community. We need to understand better the
psychology of terrorists, to identify crime patterns, to analyze
threats, and to devise investigative strategies. In all these
areas, I ask that you look at the work you do through our
new prevention lens and help us meet this important mission.
Second,
as Kathleen said, we need this Academy to build even stronger
partnerships throughout law enforcement. Within the walls
of these buildings you help us bring down the walls that often
stand between us and our partners. In this post 9-11 world,
those partnerships are more valuable than ever. We live in
a time when terrorists openly threaten us, when every landmark
and every asset and every critical system is a target, when
attacks on our homeland have gone from unthinkable to virtually
inevitable. To fulfill our prevention mandate, we must work
seamlessly with colleagues at every level of law enforcement,
whether they work in New York City or New Delhi. We need their
information and support, and they need ours. As I have said
so often, the FBI in the future will only be so good as it
relationships with law enforcement. And you can play a pivotal
role in taking those relationships to the next level.
Third,
we need you to produce more leaders -- leaders with vision,
leaders who understand not only today's issues but also tomorrow's
challenges. This Academy must build on its reputation as a
gateway to professional development and become an educational
crossroads for every member of the FBI, both Agent and support.
It must be the place where we shape tomorrow's leaders, both
within the FBI and throughout law enforcement. We must instill
in everyone who passes through here the understanding that
leadership is not a position, but a responsibility we must
all shoulder as protectors of the people and guardians of
democracy. More than ever, we need your help in developing
leaders in our profession who are willing to make sacrifices,
who are confident enough in themselves to take risks, and
who never fail to act with the utmost integrity.
To succeed
in these goals, of course, the FBI Academy needs more resources,
both in terms of people and budget. Director Mueller recognized
that fact in the second phase of our reorganization, when
he proposed shifting 25 Agents to the Academy to help train
new Agents. That's just a beginning. We need to get you more
help. We need to reach out across the FBI and across law enforcement
to continue recruiting the "best and the brightest"
faculty and professional staff. We need to continue improving
the facilities here. Yes, we're modernizing the firing range
and building a new state-of-the-art facility for our Lab.
But after thirty years, other areas are beginning to show
their age. We need to make the investments needed to bring
the Academy into the twenty-first century in every respect,
just as we are doing across the FBI.
Today,
we have the opportunity to look back and take some measure
of pride in our successes and those of our predecessors. We
see how far the Academy has come since it first opened its
doors here three decades ago. It's my hope -- and our mutual
challenge -- that another thirty years from now our successors
will look back and see the same thing. With your help and
hard work, they will see that the FBI Academy never rested
on its laurels, that it made the sometimes hard choices necessary
to fulfill its tremendous promise, and that it took the right
steps to ensure that it would remain the finest institution
of its kind in the world.
Thanks
and God bless.