Over the past three-and-a-half years, America's law enforcement and intelligence personnel have proved that the Patriot Act works, that it was an important piece of legislation. Since September the 11th, federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have used the Patriot Act to break up terror cells in New York and Oregon and Virginia and in Florida. We've prosecuted terrorist operatives and supporters in California, in Texas, in New Jersey, in Illinois, and North Carolina and Ohio. These efforts have not always made the headlines, but they've made communities safer. The Patriot Act has accomplished exactly what it was designed to do -- it has protected American liberty, and saved American lives. [Emphasis added]

An analysis of the Justice Department's own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people — not 200, as officials have implied — were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.

Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law — and had nothing to do with terrorism, the analysis shows. For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months....

Among all the people charged as a result of terrorism probes in the three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Post found no demonstrated connection to terrorism or terrorist groups for 180 of them.

In fact, looked at with a cold eye, the administration's record of convictions in terrorism cases is remarkably inconsequential. Although it is extremely difficult to obtain reliable information on such cases, the facts, as best we know them, are these: Of the 120 terrorism cases recorded on Findlaw, the major information source for legal cases of note, the initial major charges leveled have resulted in only two actual terrorism convictions — both in a single case, that of Richard Reid, the notorious shoe bomber. Of 18 actual charges of "terrorism" brought between September 2001 and October 2004, 15 are still pending and one was dismissed. In lieu of convictions for terrorist acts, the Justice Department uses another related, lesser charge — that of "material support," which means providing aid or services to a terrorist or a terrorist organization. Its extreme breadth and over-inclusiveness has rendered it the fallback charge of choice and a catchall for anything from having trained in an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan back in the 1990s (when al-Qaeda's focus was the war in Bosnia and other places outside of the United States) to weapons training, or even the exceedingly modest category of producing fraudulent documents, so long as they are knowingly provided to a designated "foreign terrorist organization."

But what of the six cases of "terrorism convictions," material support or otherwise, that the president himself hailed as the benchmarks of the administration's courtroom success story? As it happens, five resulted from questionable plea bargains, often on lesser charges, not necessarily closely related to terrorism, and one has yet to be tried. Only in the Detroit case has there been an actual conviction for "terrorism" (albeit material support for terrorism), and that case has since been overturned in a manner embarrassing to the Bush administration.

When the plea bargains are considered in their own right, their apparent circumstances should cause the odd eyebrow to be raised. After all, over half of all terrorism cases tried so far have resulted in plea bargains. The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that such pleas are offered in exchange for important information in the War on Terrorism, and spokespersons at the DOJ invariably maintain that, as in criminal cases generally, these have yielded invaluable information. Yet despite the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act and the reorganization of our law enforcement efforts to fight terrorism, the yield seems neither better, nor worse than that which existed prior to 9/11.