he federal government is so thoroughly saturated with left-wing ideas that fear of ethnic profiling stopped law enforcement authorities from conducting the kind of investigation that could have prevented the 9/ll terror attacks and saved the lives of thousands of American citizens.

The Washington Times reported last month that according to testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, "fears of racial profiling did impede the FBI's terrorism investigation of Arab men" at flight training schools in the summer of 2001.

It is widely known that those fears of crossing ideological fault lines permeate law enforcement agencies, and U.S. elites, worried about triggering public outrage, are willing to acknowledge the role of ideology only in the most cautious terms. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, for example, chose his words carefully when he admitted to the Senate panel investigating the FBI's pre-9/11 decision-making, "I've seen indications of concerns about taking certain action, because that action may be perceived as profiling."

He said one agent expressed worries about being accused of racial profiling last summer after an FBI field agent in Phoenix wrote a memo recommending investigation of Arab men attending flight training schools in the U.S.

"A person who was involved in the process articulated that as a possible concern," Mueller said.

Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams told FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., about his discovery that al Qaeda operatives were attending U.S. flight schools. His memo recommended a survey of flight schools nationwide to check on the backgrounds of Arab students. No one at the top is willing to say who made the decision, but Williams' memo was not acted on.

Within weeks of the Phoenix memo, FBI agents in Minneapolis investigating terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight school student, were severely hampered by officials at FBI headquarters in Washington who resisted seeking search warrants. Field agent Coleen Rowley said Minneapolis investigators had significant evidence of Moussaoui's radical views, as well as corroboration from the French government that Moussaoui had terrorist connections. Rowley later complained in a letter to FBI Director Mueller that officials in Washington deliberately downplayed Moussaoui's known Islamic radicalism when considering whether to press for a warrant to search the man's computer. Rowley's request to seek a warrant was denied.

Moussaoui's computer was later found to contain information linking him to some of the 9/11 suicide pilots, as well as clues that he was seeking information about crop-dusting airplanes.

News accounts emphasized Rowley's complaints about FBI "careerism" at headquarters hindering agents in the field. But it is the ideological component of careerism at FBI headquarters that stymied the Moussaoui investigation.

"It was FBI headquarters that ... refused to engage in racial profiling, denied a warrant request to search Moussaoui's computer, and thus failed to uncover the Sept. 11 plot," said columnist Ann Coulter. "The gravamen of Rowley's 13-page memo is essentially that FBI headquarters botched the Zacarias Moussaoui case by refusing to acknowledge" that his radical Islamic connections (confirmed by French intelligence) and the fact that he had overstayed his U.S. visa constituted probable cause to seek a search warrant.

"The FBI allowed thousands of Americans to be slaughtered on the altar of political correctness," she charged.

As congressional investigators try to piece together how the FBI and CIA missed important intelligence signals about the 9/ll attacks, Mueller's admission that fear of profiling played a role, as well as evidence from Rowley's letter to Mueller, have prodded some officials to publicly admit that it was the Feds' own "political correctness" that kept FBI officials from investigating hints of a terror plot by Middle Eastern men.

"I believe it [fear of profiling] played a role in the reticence to really move ahead," with the FBI investigation into Arabs at U.S. flight schools, said Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA. She is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"It probably is true," agrees Rep. Bob Barr, R-GA. "But I get a kick out of these folks like Diane Feinstein and others who have been on the FBI's back for years criticizing them for that. Now they're saying, 'Oh gee, maybe this caused a problem.'"

Racial profiling is a term invented by American left-wingers to discredit the common police practice of creating criminal profiles that include racial or ethnic information. Before the 1990's, no one ever heard of racial profiling. During the Clinton administration, the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union filed suits claiming the U.S. Border Patrol engaged in unconstitutional "racial discrimination" when it looked among Hispanics in a search for illegal aliens along the U.S. border with Mexico. The group argued that border cops should be barred from considering ethnicity as a factor when evaluating whether a suspect might be an illegal alien.

The outcry against police use of race in criminal profiles also came from black advocacy organizations seeking to reinvigorate a stagnating civil rights movement. They claimed police gave too many traffic tickets to black motorists, and too often asked to search their cars. In New Jersey, the head of the state police, a white man, was fired for admitting to reporters that his drug-interdiction efforts relied on federal drug crime data showing certain ethnic gangs involved in drug trafficking.

By itself, profiling is simply common-sense police work, the result of the kind of logic that even consumers use when shopping.

"If it were a well-established fact that tires made by Company X were eight times more likely to go flat than tires sold by Y, it would be foolish not to engage in 'brand profiling' whenever we bought tires," says Jared Taylor, president of the New Century Foundation, and author of The Color of Crime, a study of the racial component of crime statistics.

But the influence of left-wing ideology on U.S. elites is so strong that prohibition of racial profiling quickly became government policy after complaints of its use first appeared.

After his confirmation by the Senate, one of Attorney General John Ashcroft's first official acts was to meet with the Black Congressional Caucus on Capital Hill where he announced that eliminating racial profiling would be the top priority of the Justice Department. That policy set the standard for federal law enforcement investigations, including those conducted by the FBI into potential terrorist threats.