Mike the Usurper wrote:
As I noted, everyone has acknowledged that the terrorist groups are operating under cell systems, and AlQ is more like a club these days than an organization. What that means is, you catch these guys, you foil their plan, you parade them up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and then you stick them in a cement box for the rest of the lives. You don't say "well we have done a lot but we can't say anything about it." There is no security purpose in NOT publicizing the wins.

Of course there is.

1. You are assuming that "foiled" and "arrested" are synonymous. They aren't. You've heard about everyone whose been arrested in the US because there are major consitutional battles going on about whether or not they can by held as enemy combatants or if they have to be tried in the normal court system. Other groups have either been disrupted in some way or they have been killed. They don't trot bodies down Pennsylvania Avenue, and if they disrupted a group but didn't shut them down they obviously still have a threat to contend with.
2. The fact that they are a cell doesn't mean they don't know anything valuable or they haven't had any contact with anyone else in the organization. These guys have often trained together in Afghanistan, and they have handlers who they interacted with before being deployed. Furthermore, the organization has standard training and techniques, and our intelligence groups take advantage of weaknesses in those techniques to foil attacks. Giving the enemy lots of information about what we know and what we did allows them to adapt their tactics.

I've got to round this back to the question I originally asked, which you didn't answer. Bush is listing terrorist attacks that were foiled in order to explain that there are real threats and that the U.S. Government is doing something about those threats. If you don't beleive this, then there are only two possibilities: Is it your contention that the threats aren't real, or that the U.S. Government hasn't responded to the threats?

RE: Bush: U.S. Foiled at Least 10 Terror Plots