Al-Qaeda pivots to the economy

This is what I'd feared for some time now.

...He [Zawahiri] goes on to emphasize the importance of so-called "lone-wolf", or small-scale attacks as part of al-Qaeda's strategy.

Such attacks, he argues, will have an economic impact above all.

"We must bleed America economically by provoking it, so that it continues its massive expenditures on security. America's weak spot is its economy, which began to totter from the drain of its military and security expenditure," he says...

We all know how effective the Mohamed/Malvo shooting spree was at inducing regional paralysis, and those turds were amateurs, practically begging to get caught. Had they taken their show on the road, moved around a bit more, stretched the hit interval somewhat, they could still be doing it today.

Small dedicated independent one or two man teams are essentially immune to being compromised from the inside. You're not gonna get an undercover inside their "organization", and you're not going to be able to use all the usual network discovery tricks on them.

OTOH, if they're doing operations that are hardware/gear intensive, then they've got to risk (somewhat) more exposure in their acquisitions since a couple of dozen items can't be parceled out over a number of individuals to make them seem more innocuous.

If one guy walks into Home Depot and checks out with plastic sheeting, some shovels, rope, duct tape, a cordless sawzall, a machete, some bags of lime, and a bunch of hefty bags, it might raise some eyebrows. If those kill kit components are spread out over 6 buyers, no flags would ever be raised.

posted by Purp at 11:23 AM

| Access Comments