Washington ? The FBI is weighed down by bureaucracy, “make-work paperwork” and a culture that discourages risk-taking, an agency whistle-blower told Congress Thursday, venting frustration with an organization she said could have done more to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Seven to nine levels (of bureaucracy) is really ridiculous,” Coleen Rowley, a lawyer in the FBI’s Minneapolis office, told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and a nationwide television audience.

FBI Agent Colleen Rowley from the Minneapolis FBI field office testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C. Rowley said the FBI was mired in bureaucracy.

Rowley appeared after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller suggested that Congress expand surveillance powers that were put into law only seven months ago, and said his storied agency needed to be “more flexible, agile and mobile” if it was to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Mueller also disclosed it could take two or three years far longer than the one year he originally hoped to bring FBI computer systems up to standards needed to sift intelligence information efficiently.

The panel met as President Bush outlined his latest plans for strengthening America’s defenses against terrorism. They included creation of a new Department of Homeland Security, combining responsibilities now scattered in several federal agencies including customs, immigration, the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

At the same time, members of the House and Senate intelligence committees met in a guarded room in the Capitol to continue their own review of the events of Sept. 11. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., said the session included a staff-led review of the growth of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network and U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

While Mueller has appeared in public several times since the worst terrorist attacks in the nation’s history, Rowley was making her debut, a veteran FBI attorney so unaccustomed to publicity that her prepared public testimony contained lawyerly footnotes.

Praised by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, as a patriot for stepping forward, she told lawmakers she would not talk about the details of the case of Zacarias Moussaoui that prompted her explosive letter last month. In a 13-page memo, the FBI agent accused bureau headquarters of putting roadblocks in the way of Minneapolis field agents trying to investigate the foreign-born Moussaoui, who is charged with conspiring with the hijackers in the attacks.

Instead, she focused her remarks on the frustrations of working in an “ever-growing bureaucracy.”

“We have a culture in the FBI that there’s a certain pecking order and it’s pretty strong, and it’s very rare that somebody picks up the phone and calls a rank or two above themselves,” Rowley said.

Last August, FBI agents in Minnesota arrested Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, on an immigration violation after a flight school instructor became suspicious of his desire to learn to fly a commercial jet.

FBI headquarters turned down the Minneapolis’ office request to seek a search warrant to examine Moussaoui’s computer. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI got the warrant and found information related to jetliners and crop-dusters on the computer hard drive, officials said. The government grounded crop-dusting planes temporarily because of what it found.

Mueller won praise from several senators for his efforts to reform an agency that Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., described as hidebound.

At the same time, he faced sharp questioning about the FBI’s failure to alert the committee earlier this year about the so-called Phoenix memorandum, a document sent to agency headquarters last summer noting that several Arabs were suspiciously training at a U.S. aviation school in Arizona.