Washington ? 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 straitjacket 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.

Fiction is often less believable than the true-life bill of particulars that damns this agency. The FBI’s Washington chieftains squelched efforts in Minneapolis to pursue Moussaoui, though agents there had been drawn to his threatening behavior at flight school and told by the French of his terrorist ties. The higher-ups ignored an earlier memo from Phoenix, warning that Osama bin Laden or other groups could be sending terrorists to flight schools to place them as pilots. Still another agent had similar suspicions about student pilots in Oklahoma.

Connect these dots. They do not produce a picture of a law-enforcement agency hamstrung by silly rules meant to protect citizens’ privacy or First Amendment rights when they are at church, or on the Internet, or at the library or even the ATM. Draw the lines and connect these dots and what emerges is a portrait of incompetence, and a culture of cover-up.

Now we are told this should be rewarded with vastly expanded surveillance power.

FBI gumshoes are to spy on Americans as they go about their daily lives. The surveillance could take place at church or synagogue or, more likely, in mosques. The spies might be in the library or at a political rally or a sporting event. No hint of criminality, or criminal connections, would be required. Field offices could snoop without approval from those headquarters types, with their bureaucratic instinct to cover behinds.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller insist this is needed now, to make up for the bureau’s own failures. And maybe they are right that in these times, we need a domestic intelligence agency. But why would we want it to be the FBI?

The bureau has a history of mistakes and malfeasance. These are followed, usually, by refusal to make amends. There is a reason that Waco, Ruby Ridge, Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell and Robert Hanssen are metaphors for FBI mess-ups: No matter how many botched cases come to light, there is evidence of another stuffed somewhere in a desk drawer.

Always there are pledges to reform. Never are they kept. Why would we expect something different now?

There is also the problem of John Ashcroft. He is no William Brennan. Other than what he believes is a God-given right to own guns, this attorney general has never met a constitutional principle he won’t trample.

Since Sept. 11, his Justice Department has rounded up hundreds of immigrant “detainees” but charged exactly one person Moussaoui with crimes connected to the attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon. It fights in federal and state courts to keep all proceedings against the detainees secret, though judges already have ruled against such wholesale secrecy.

Justice still holds an unknown number of people who’ve already had their immigration cases settled and await deportation without revealing what new charge, if any, they face. It battles to keep an American-born individual taken prisoner in Afghanistan from seeing a lawyer, though it admits Yasser Esam Hamdi was born in Baton Rouge, La., and is likely a U.S. citizen. Nonetheless, Ashcroft’s men claim that an unspecified “national security” risk trumps Hamdi’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

These are frightening times. Our freedoms were perverted into weapons used against us. We may have to preserve liberty by restricting it a bit. But if we are still to call ourselves a democracy, this cannot be done by fiat handed down by those who’ve already failed.