Peggy Noonan has a disturbing piece in today's Opinion Journal. It's particularly disturbing that it's coming from her.

She is asking the question seriously: was the FBI failure in 911 merely incompetence? Or something worse?

While few hold the FBI in lower esteem than I do, I have trouble believing that this was a deliberate effort to prevent the lower-level agents from thwarting the attack. Not because I believe the FBI incapable of such coverups and deliberate inaction--we saw plenty of it during the Clinton years, after Judge Sessions was fired and replaced by the more pliant Louis Freeh--but that they would do so for a foreign power (as opposed to a corrupt White House) is a new and frightening possibility.

The FBI was unable, or unwilling, to connect the dots that would have shown the pattern that resulted in the deadly attack of last fall. But now Peggy connects some dots herself, within the agency, and the picture isn't very pretty.

Any real probe will take this as an opportunity to air all of the agency's dirty laundry, going back to the Clinton years, and all the evidence tampering and obstruction that went on during that time. Because the dots from such an investigation may show the much bigger picture of government malfeasance that the kneepad press largely ignored, out its adoration for the man it put in the White House in 1992.

This whole FBI thing is becoming a bit overblown I think. Yes, the agency is bloated and inefficient. Yes, they have made some egregious oversights in the prosecution of tips and hints of terrorist activities. But, is this really all that different from normal modus operandi?

I have the distinct impression that a lot of what is going on is just an exercise in trying to find a scapegoat for the events of 9/11. I'm fairly certain that if you were to do the type of in-depth probe currently being done surrounding the event of 9/11 on any other major investigation or any other significant terrorist (domestic or foreign) you would find the same type of trail: lots of hints and tips that don't add up to much until after the fact.

We have the benefit of hindsight here. We are all looking to find out why we weren't able to prevent a terrible tragedy. We all want to assuage our guilt as the impenetrable, untouchable, all powerful U.S. of A. We certainly cannot be touched by terrorism - we are too strong for that. Therefore, there has to be some culpability, someone to blame for the lack of attention or failure to protect.

I know it's impossible, but just for a minute project yourself back to a pre-9/11 world, and look at the evidence and all of the hints and tips and ask yourself: what action would I have taken. An honest answer would probably have to be: not much. We are an arrogant nation, and we were slapped in the face with our own arrogance. We didn't look hard enough at what was going on because we had never had to before. We had never really been truly threatened by terrorist activities. The only other major incident in the public mind was the Oklahoma bombing - and that was a local product, not an international terrorist. International terrorists don't strike our homeland, they strike internationally - that's why they're called international terrorists.

Frankly, I think that the investigation into the FBI actions is a good one. It has the potential of pointing out some of the shortcomings of the agency. But it is an agency of bureaucrats and the problems will be fixed by bureaucrats. The end result - probably a few heads will roll, blame will be assigned, problems will be "fixed" using the same flawed bureaucracy, and things will continue on just as they always have.

What will we have accomplished? A little easing of our collective guilt - nothing more.

I understood Peggy's point to be that someone already sympathetic to enemies of America might have found a way past the security screening process for a decisionmaking position at FBI HQ. Given the Bureau's demonstrated fear of profiling, this isn't as farfetched as I'm sure we would rather believe.

There are distinctions that have to be made when the subject is "conspiracy." The idea that people who are, to all appearances, on the good guys' side, are secretly conspiring with the bad guys, has to be supported by more than suspicions and "who benefits" intellectual exercises -- but when someone has already demonstrated a determination to "get us" (Sept. 11, anyone?) the threshold comes down by some significant amount.

A nation at war, by definition, has people out to get it. Its national security apparatus must operate under that assumption or the war is lost.

The problem is that there were people who "connected the dots" and they were shut down by the bureaucracy up above. And after the fact, the people who were right are being punished, and the people who screwed up were promoted. That sounds like politicization to me, and there was a lot of evidence that this went back at least to the beginning of the Clinton Administration (which started off by firing every US attorney in the country, and replacing them with their own people).