Where's The Anti-Terror Beef?

The strange failure of law enforcement to find, you know, any actual evidence of terrorist plots against America remains a mystery:

At some point, you'd figure we'd bust open a ring where there is actually hard evidence of wrong-doing.  Where are the weapons caches? The bomb factories? The foreign trained jihadists with forged papers? Where are the guys who have actually done dry runs against targets? The guys who have deposited "martyrdom" videos with AQ central?

It almost seems as if AQ is not even trying to strike the U.S. homeland because the "plots" we are disrupting show virtually no signs of have been devised and planned with the professionalism we usually associate with AQ activities.

Joyner suggests a reason:

The more likely answer, I think, is the fact that U.S. counter-terrorism policy is in the hands of a 1920s-style law enforcement agency whose bureaucratic incentives stress busts and convictions as the key metric.

On the other hand, maybe torture as the primary means of intelligence-gathering has turned out to be not-so-effective. But don't tell Cheney. He doesn't like it when the dark side just leads to more ... dark.