For Americans who want to see Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers brought to justice, today is at least a start.

In a triumph for the US rule of law, four men tied to the Al Qaeda network will be sentenced for their roles in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa. The sentencing in New York is the capstone of a painstakingly constructed prosecution - one that for the first time revealed the depth, complexity, and international reach of Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. But it also serves as a bitter reminder of just how hard it is to anticipate the actions of a shadowy, far-flung group bent on destruction, no matter how much is known about its adherents in advance.

"The trial revealed some explosive information about Al Qaeda's loosely affiliated networks of radicals that share resources, pool intelligence and expertise, come together, and then disperse," says Frank Cilluffo, director of the counterterrorism task force at CSIS, a Washington-based think tank. "But to be able to know what, when, where, and how something is going to happen next is very different from understanding what the organization looks like."

For Howard Kavaler, whose wife was killed in the embassy blast in Nairobi, Kenya, it will be bittersweet to sit again in a Manhattan courtroom, just blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to hear the judge hand down the sentences.

On one level, the trial and sentencing are a "shining moment" for America, because the men, whom he calls "pariahs," had a fair trial with competent counsel. But they are also a pointed reminder of the urgent threat he felt in the wake of those attacks - and of his frustrations that other Americans did not take what happened in Africa more seriously.

"I find it distressing that it takes the World Trade Center and Pentagon catastrophes to get the body politic galvanized to do anything," he says. "The threat was out there all along."

The six-month-long trial, which ended in May with the men's convictions, is the result of the largest international criminal investigation at the time for the US. During the trial, prosecutors painstakingly "connected the dots," revealing the depth, complexity, and international reach of Al Qaeda long before Sept. 11.

Former CIA Director John Deutch admitted that the inability of the intelligence community to detect and prevent the subsequent Al Qaeda attacks was "one of the great failures of all time." But he also noted that by the very nature of intelligence work, there are many successes that the public will never know about.

"You have to look forward here. It doesn't help to spend time, on the occasion of such risk to all of us, assigning blame as much it is to say, 'How do we equip ourselves to do better in the future?' " says Mr. Deutch.

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