They're NOT looking to prosecute

They are just looking for headlines:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal government has fallen back to prosecuting international terrorists at about the same rate it did before Sept. 11, according to a study based on Justice Department data.

The surprising decline followed a sharp increase in such criminal prosecutions in the year after the attacks, according to a study released Sunday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research group at Syracuse University.

The analysis of data from Justice's Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys also found:

_In the eight months ending last May, Justice attorneys declined to prosecute more than nine out of every 10 terrorism cases sent to them by the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. Nearly 4 in 10 of the rejected cases were scrapped because prosecutors found weak or insufficient evidence, no evidence of criminal intent or no evident federal crime.

_Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, only 14 people have been sentenced to 20 years or more in prison in terrorism cases. Of the 1,329 convicted defendants, only 625 received any prison sentence. More than half got no prison time or no more than they had already served awaiting their verdict.

The important thing isn't to actually find and prosecute terrorists. The goal is to scare the shit out of people and grab more power while you do so. While making loud noises about HOW you are prosecuting. It's how you are able to set-up otherwise incompetent and harmless wackjobs in Florida and create a supposed al-Qaeda cell.
Meanwhile, all those things that you say help you monitor terrorists, really let you monitor political opponents and intimidate them. Creating a "soft-shoe" kind of police state. Folks like FoxNews are the ultimate enabler because, while they don't send anyone to jail (the self-proclaimed "Fox Security" notwithstanding) they create a location where anyone with ideas different than Sean Hannity's gets excorioriated as a traitor, a coward, a freak, an enabler, a terror-sympathizer.

It's all quite slick and sickening.

It won't just end in November either.