[Steve_Seattle]

"Eventually, some loose cannon is going to break away from the Al Qaeda apparatus, get a couple people, and do it on their own."

I'm glad that al Queda only thinks in grandiose terms, which means they spend a lot of time planning and scheming and not actually committing terrorist attacks. The DC sniper showed what just one guy with a rifle can do to get the whole country on edge. They could do a lot of small-scale, inexpensive stuff that would be very hard to prevent or detect, and would have a tremendous impact on the public psyche. They could start forest fires, random murders, random arson, poison water supplies, sabotage the power grid, etc, and probably not be caught for a long time.

[Rutles4Ever]

You can say that again. It's almost like a work of art to them. The D.C. sniper was, in some ways, the essence of the kind of fear a terrorist attack is intended to generate. The alphabets have gone rather unappreciated in the past few years, shutting down terror cells here and across the world.