By ROBERT J. McCARTHY
News Political Reporter

President Bush makes an election-year visit to Buffalo today aiming to highlight a success in the war on terrorism and reassure a jittery nation that efforts like his Patriot Act are making America safer.
In a 9:30 a.m. speech in Kleinhans Music Hall, the president is expected to emphasize before a friendly audience of about 500 law enforcement and emergency personnel that potential threats like the Lackawanna Six — a local group with al-Qaida connections — have been rooted out by a vigilant administration.
He also is expected to cite the Patriot Act’s role in rounding up the Lackawanna Six as part of a re-election case that to a large degree revolves around his war against terrorism. The president even offered one of his top terrorism fighters, Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary of homeland security, to underscore that notion in a Monday telephone interview.
"The 9/11 commission has pointed out the historic problems of information getting put in a barrel and not getting out of the barrel to those who need it," Hutchinson ken down that wall so information can flow to the intelligence community and back to connect the dots. It has had success."
Following convictions of six Lackawanna men of Yemeni descent who had trained in Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan, federal law enforcement officials have always contended that they posed a genuine threat. Now, just days after the administra-