The Job Has Become Too Big for Ashcroft: e fundamentalist is the wrong man to fight religious fanatics.

OK, so maybe John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller are not the sharpest tools in the shed. How else to explain that, after Sept. 11, it took the attorney general and the FBI director more than eight months to get around to telling the president and his top national security advisors about that prescient memo from the Phoenix FBI office warning of potential terrorists flooding American flight schools?

Of course, the best thing would have been to clue in the president when there was still time to tighten airport and immigration security and possibly avert tragedy. But, at the very least, you would think that Ashcroft--who learned of the Phoenix memo a few days after the attack--would have piped up when the president asked his top people whether U.S. intelligence had advance warning of the terror attacks.