Bureau Doesn't Deserve Even More Power

Of all the ways we know the FBI bungled the case of Sept. 11 before it happened, failure to snoop on people at prayer wasn't one of them.

The inability to "connect the dots" did not stem from a lack of dots. There was no shortage of FBI agents searching for dots, nor a civil liberties' straightjacket that prevented them from finding dots in the first place.

"The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI's law enforcement mission and mandate," wrote Coleen Rowley, the senior agent in Minneapolis who blew the whistle on headquarters' incompetence after the higher-ups had been alerted early on that Zacarias Moussaoui - now charged as the "20th hijacker" - was quite possibly a terrorist. The capital letters are Rowley's own.