In the summer of 2002, the Bush Justice Department claimed a major victory in the War on Terra after rolling up what it called a "sleeper operational combat cell" based in Detroit.

Today's NYT chronicles the march of prosecutorial folly that ensued:

After winning highly publicized convictions of two suspects on terrorism charges in June 2003, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step five weeks ago of repudiating its own case and successfully moving to throw out the terrorism charges. In a long court filing, the government discredited its own witnesses and found fault with virtually every part of its prosecution.

The blame, the department suggested in its filing, lay mainly at the feet of the lead prosecutor in Detroit, Richard G. Convertino, whom it portrayed as a rogue lawyer. But documents and interviews with people knowledgeable about the case show that top officials at the Justice Department were involved in almost every step of the prosecution, from formulating strategy to editing the draft indictments to planning how the suspects would be incarcerated.

President Bush himself said the Detroit case was one of several critical investigations around the country that had "thwarted terrorists." But the wreckage of the case reveals that it was built on evidence that has since been undermined. A series of missteps and in-fighting weakened the case further, documents and interviews show. The first line of the government's indictment now appears to have been copied without attribution from a scholarly article on Islamic fundamentalism. Government documents that cast doubt on a critical piece of evidence - what was described as a surveillance sketch of an American air base overseas - were not turned over to the defense. And tensions between prosecutors in Detroit and Justice Department officials in Washington escalated into open hostility.

Mr. Convertino angered the Justice Department by testifying at a Congressional hearing held by a powerful Republican senator who is a vocal critic of the department. Mr. Convertino, who was ultimately removed from the prosecution, is now suing the department and is under investigation for his handling of this case and others. That inquiry led to the public disclosure of the name of an Arab informant in the case, who then fled the country because, he said, he feared for his safety.

The miscalculations and bad blood so overshadowed the case that the truth about the defendants' intentions may never be known.

Keep that last sentence in mind tomorrow night when President Bush tries to tell you that his Iraq-obsessed approach was the best way to protect the American people from terrorism in the wake of 9-11. And then decide for yourself whether that claim, upon which this president's argument for reelection now almost entirely rests, even passes the giggle test.

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