bulldogg, I think that such a statement about terrorism completely overestimates al-quaida's abilities, misunderstands its objectives, and underestimates the difficulty of blowing something halfway accross the world from a cave in a 3rd world country.
I agree with you that the Patriot Act and other such civil-rights-reducing legislation hasn't done much against terrorism for one simple reason... if it had done ANYTHING you can bet the Bush Administration would be on TV talking about how great the Act is and how important it was in capturing suspect X and thrwarting terrorist plot Z. Can you imagine a better political coup for the Bush admin?
No, the way we've caught our terrorists is always through completely different means than you see on slick TV shows like "24" or "CSI". The origional 1993 world trade center bomber caught his apartment on fire while making bombs, left his laptop with all his terorrist information INSIDE the apartment for us to find, and we STILL didn't get him. It wasn't until his "new" aprentice in Pakistan decided to turn him in did we get him.
Same deal with Khalid Shaik Muhammed, mastermind of the 9/11 plot, no Patriot Act anywhere in sight. We learned that before the Spain train bombers blew their bombs they called a guy in Morocco for confirmation, so the moroccan authorities picked him up and handed that guy to the US. We 'interrogated' (I'm sure it was just by asking politely since torture is wrong) this guy and he told us about his handler in France. The French arrested him and gave us everything he had including a cell phone he used to call Khalid. We already had troops searching a region of Afghanistan, but with this cell phone we could basically pin down within the range of a cell tower where Khalid was. So we narrowed our search, found him, and now he's probobly been questioned (politely again I'm sure because torture is wrong) in a black prision. (which are wrong because everyone knows the only good prisons are the white ones)
Anyway, my point in this is that it is always very small crazy things that lead us to capturing terrorists, not some Patriot Act nonsense.
There are a lot of very good things America has done to prevent terrorism and as much as they've wanted to hit us over the last 4 years, they have been unable to. However, it looks like the Patriot Act and other civil rights curtailing laws haven't done a damned thing but move us one step closer to having our new national motto being "America, home of the brave and land of the free-er than North Korea!"