WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI's failure to give thousands of documents to Timothy McVeigh's attorneys before his trial in the Oklahoma City bombing is the latest in a series of failures that are causing Americans to lose confidence in the law enforcement agency, a key senator says.

"I don't think you can blindly have confidence in anything," Sen. Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after his committee met privately Tuesday with FBI Director Louis Freeh. "It does cause us all to be concerned about some of the goings on, lack of efficiency, lack of judgment perhaps, at the FBI."

Freeh told the senators that information in the newly found documents "won't have any bearing on the case," said Shelby, R-Ala. Reflecting a wariness of such pronouncements, the senator added, "We'll have to wait and see."

"It's something that should not have happened, and it shows, probably, a lack of diligence somewhere in the FBI," Shelby said. The bureau, he said, has had "too many failures, too many blunders" of late.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said, "These mistakes should not have been made in a high-profile case, or any case."

"Every criminal defendant has the right to these types of materials and we've got to live up to our responsibilities," said Hatch, R-Utah, who was not in the Freeh meeting.

The FBI could be heading for some tough times in Congress after years of almost unquestioned support:

—Shelby called for "a broad review of the FBI, its mission, its problems and some solutions."

—Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., intends to propose creation of a separate inspector general for the FBI, supplanting the Justice Department's IG there. The new IG would report to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Durbin is on both that panel and the Judiciary Committee.

—Hatch plans hearings on the documents regarding the case of McVeigh, convicted in the 1995 bombing that killed 168 and wounded many more.

Freeh announced his planned June retirement on May 1, a week before the FBI revealed the discovery of the McVeigh documents.

The Intelligence Committee briefing was ostensibly about longtime FBI agent Robert Hanssen, arrested in February on charges of spying for Moscow.

But the talk moved to McVeigh and, of particular concern to Shelby, the case of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.

"From what I've learned recently, the FBI had information which they never furnished first to our former attorney general, Bill Baxley, when he reopened the bombing case" in the 1970s, Shelby said, "and only recently furnished it to the U.S. attorney's office in Birmingham."

The information — including hundreds of hours of tape recordings — helped win murder convictions against a former Ku Klux Klansman, Thomas Blanton Jr., 62, earlier this month.

The three-decade withholding of information infuriated Baxley, who convicted ex-Klansman Robert Chambliss when he reopened the probe in the 1970s.

"What excuse can the FBI have for allowing Mr. Blanton to go free for 24 years with this smoking-gun evidence hidden in its files?" Baxley wrote in a May 3 commentary in The New York Times.