Federal agents in desperate pursuit of a terrorist preparing to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge: That’s the chilling scenario administration officials painted to defend their practice of allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to secretly eavesdrop on the conversations of hundreds, maybe thousands, of U.S. citizens without going to court for warrants.

This new breach of privacy on behalf of the war on terror, uncovered by The New York Times last week, is the latest shoe to drop on domestic spying activities. The administration last week similarly defended the deployment of secret, domestic Counterintelligence Field Activity teams to collect information on U.S. citizens. Defense Intelligence Agency personnel also helped the NSA by prowling U.S. cities with electronic listening devices. And the FBI was discovered to have sent 30,000 no-warrant “national security letters” to individuals, companies and organizations demanding information.

Yet, for all that, in the years since the surprise attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the White House has taken credit for busting only 10 domestic terror cells. This despite the deployment of what now seems to be a massive, and perhaps unconstitutional, domestic intelligence apparatus linking the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and state and local police in what they boasted about as a seamless information-exchange web.

“I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a prepared statement Friday. “Based on that service, I have had, until now, great confidence that America’s intelligence activities, at home and abroad, were conducted in accordance with the law. Today’s allegations call into question whether this is in fact true,” she said.

And for all this, has security been enhanced?

Mike German, who worked mostly undercover against U.S. domestic terror groups in his 17 years as an FBI agent, posed a simple question about all this activity.

“Where are the results?” he asks. “If we’re recording thousands of people and secretly collecting documents regarding tens of thousands of people, why aren’t thousands of people going to jail?

“Even with the possibility that people are being bundled off to [Guantanamo],” he added, “we’re still only talking about hundreds of people, not thousands.”

Even given those relatively paltry numbers, how many cases were busted by the feds? A number of terrorism cases in the list of 10 that President Bush boasted about months ago “were not stopped as the result of good intelligence work,” German said. It was fellow airline passengers who jumped on would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid four years ago this month. And last summer, a gang of prison jihadists weren’t busted “by NSA wiretaps, or Patriot Act powers, but by the Torrance Police robbery squad,” German pointed out.

Meanwhile, numerous commissions, studies and congressional hearings have concluded that U.S. intelligence isn’t suffering from a lack of information, it’s drowning in it. Turnover and turmoil at the top of the CIA and the FBI are still hampering the agencies’ ability to analyze what they’ve got.

“Now you have these people collecting thousands of dots, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dots,” German said, “but there’s still nobody back at headquarters connecting those dots.”

But even if wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping does help incarcerate hundreds of terrorists, why the rush to set up the taps? Why not wait for a judge to issue a warrant? The court that secretly meets to hear the Justice Department’s national security petitions almost never rejects them, according to public records. And since the court can turn around a request within hours, the administration’s argument that it doesn’t have time to wait rings hollow.

On the same day that The New York Times broke the NSA spying story, Lee H. Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman who co-chaired the 9/11 commission, was telling a small group of Democratic representatives and aides gathered in a small room on the third floor of the Rayburn House Office Building that he detected a lack of urgency at the FBI and CIA to solve problems that are still festering four years after Sept. 11.

“An urgent sense of priority is missing,” Hamilton said, visibly troubled, particularly about the potential of an al Qaeda nuclear attack on an unprepared U.S. city. There’s a lack of “political leadership,” he said. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, he said, is “a good man, who keeps asking for more time. . . . But the turnover in top management and their analytical capability shows they’ve got a long way to go.”

In a phone interview, Jim Turner, the former ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said information sharing with state and local police at DHS was a mess too. “Except for the New York Police Department, they’re not doing very well,” he said.

A DHS spokesperson did not respond to phone and e-mail requests for comment.

Feinstein and other Democrats, and some Republicans, complained loudly Friday about the administration’s keeping them in the dark about all the spying activities uncovered in the past several weeks, including, of course, the CIA’s network of secret detention facilities abroad.

The secrecy and resulting lack of oversight also allows the intelligence agencies to sweep their mistakes — and even criminal activity — under the rug. FBI criminal investigators, German pointed out, have to be prepared to defend their evidence in court. Except in rare cases, counterintelligence agents do not.

An upcoming Justice Department inspector general’s report will detail how FBI managers altered documents to cover up mistakes made in the handling of a terrorist case in Florida that German was involved in, according to him and a source who has a draft of the report. After he blew the whistle, German’s career at the agency went into a tailspin and he quit.

“If the integrity of internal FBI records is in question,” German said, “how do we trust anything the government is doing right now? If the FBI can’t even protect its own records from being altered and backdated, how is Congress and how is the public going to know that anything the government comes up with is true? If they can so easily alter their own records with no questions, then civil liberties is at a huge risk.”

Speaking of Jim Turner, a Democrat who retired from Congress after that notorious Texas redistricting: He has happily landed at powerhouse law firm Arnold & Porter, where he’ll be free to lobby on Jan. 1. “It’s a great firm. I’m glad I’m here,” he said in a West Texas drawl late Friday.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.