EARTH TO President Bush. Earth to Bush. Earth to Bush.

Fire somebody.

And not just anybody. Make it somebody in, say, the Justice Department or the FBI. Or maybe the CIA. Bestow the royal order of the boot on any of those bozos in our intelligence -- ha, ha -- community who blew it when it came to warning signs about the acts of terrorism committed against us on Sept. 11.

Here's a start: Fire Attorney General John Ashcroft. I've never liked him anyway. I wrote, I'm proud to say, at least one column suggesting that his nomination was a bad thing and should be withdrawn. I didn't oppose Ashcroft because he was the anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action gun nut his opponents claimed he was. I opposed Ashcroft because, as governor of Missouri and in the U.S. Senate, he proved time and again he was the leading jackboot in the -- time for another "ha, ha" here -- war on drugs.

Ashcroft proposed Senate Bill 486, the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, which would have allowed "federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to enter your house, your office, your computer or your car without a search warrant and without any obligation to inform you that a search or seizure had been conducted," according to the Legislative Group for the organization Common Sense for Drug Policy. That bill didn't pass, no thanks to Ashcroft.

Then came Sept. 11, and many Americans figured, over the dissenting voices of a few, that giving Ashcroft and the Justice Department increased powers to ferret out terrorists might not be so bad. We supported this even though some of the things Ashcroft asked for flew in the face of civil liberties. We were, after all, at war.

Now we learn that Ashcroft took his Howdy Doody face before Congress and asked for more powers when the department he oversees, the FBI, didn't do much with the power it had. According to Coleen Rowley, chief division counsel of the FBI's Minneapolis office, bureau muckety-mucks failed to yank their heads from where the sun don't shine when it came to warnings about terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui.

Rowley said that weeks before Sept. 11, Minneapolis agents were onto Moussaoui and asked for a warrant to search his computer. The muckety-mucks ignored them, as they did the Phoenix agent who warned that several Middle Eastern men who might be terrorists were attending flight school in Arizona. Once the terrorists attacks occurred, Rowley did what she had to do: Girlfriend started singing like Patti Labelle and dimed out the FBI honchos.

Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, who's fond of drawing stick figures when public figures fail to understand simple problems, would have had a field day with these dimwits. This wasn't, to paraphrase a popular saying, three-variable calculus. Once the muckety-mucks learned about Moussaoui and the flight school attendees, they should have brought them in for questioning. They should have searched homes and computers. Those suspects who couldn't be held for any violations of the law should have been released with the admonishment that the bureau had its eye on them, that once they left their homes, agents were going to be on them like black on tar.

The bureau couldn't do that, of course. In testimony before Congress Thursday, Rowley said the FBI culture and bureaucracy are to blame. Perhaps the bureau is resting on its laurels from the 1960s, when it used its power to spy on civil rights groups, invade privacy and destroy the Black Panther Party. Maybe FBI muckety-mucks were like Ashcroft, determined to strike that fatal blow in the war on drugs while the terrorists' war against us was heating up.

If the bureau muckety-mucks had gotten a report that a couple of homeboys in do-rags and baggy pants were moving five pieces of crack over the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, they would have gotten off their sorry duffs and ordered agents to haul the pair in for a serious Q and A. That's because the war on drugs, for years, got top priority. For years, the FBI saw communists where they weren't in the civil rights movement. In 2001, the muckety-mucks couldn't see terrorists where they were.

Who is ultimately responsible for this? Ashcroft, as attorney general, or at the very least, FBI Director Robert Mueller. One of these guys should get the ax. I wouldn't be disappointed to see both of them go. Someone has to take the weight for the breakdown in national security Sept. 11.

And I don't want to hear the pitiful wail, made by conservatives these past few weeks, that there was no way Sept. 11 could have been avoided. If certain parties at the FBI had been on their jobs, it might well have been avoided. Bush's defenders need to heed President Truman's words about where the buck stops.