Joshua: I have often wondered why Al Qaeda has not done this type of thing before. It would be relatively easy to do, wouldn’t even have to be a suicide mission — just do the job and then give up — and would be phenomenally effective at crippling what is left of the retail economy.

I keep reading about what geniuses Al Qaeda’s leaders are, how many eager recruits and ‘sleepers’ they have, so why hasn’t this happened? Even easier would be a repeat of the anthrax attacks, and you wouldn’t even have to use anthrax everywhere. As Lenin said, “The purpose of terror is to terrorize”.