"If I Was a Conspiracy Theorist . . . .

. . . . I'd think that Bush and Cheney were just covering their asses bases."

In today's news -

Bin Laden Determined To Foreclose On 500,000 Homes:

The FBI is warning that al Qaeda may be preparing to offer adjustable-rate mortgages based on the bubble-inflated value of the homes of borrowers unable to repay them, leading to upwards of $1.3 trillion in potentially non-recoupable losses, according to an intelligence report distributed to law enforcement authorities across the country this morning. The alert said al Qaeda "hoped to disrupt the U.S. economy and has been planning the attack for the past five years."

-Gawker

Okay, so it's not verbatim. Here's the actual FBI's bulletin:

The unclassified shopping mall threat information was circulated by the FBI on November 7th, based on intelligence received by the FBI in late September. The full text of one version of that report is as follows: December 2007 Al-Qa’ida Plan to Target US Shopping Malls in Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California.

As of August 2007, al-Qa’ida planned to strike US shopping malls in Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California during the 2007 Christmas season. Al-Qa’ida hoped to disrupt the US economy and had been planning the attack for the past two years.

FBI Comment: This information was obtained through a lengthy chain of acquisition, and was provided to the source by a sub-source who spoke in confidence. The veracity of the information is uncertain but the threat is being reported due to the nature of the information.

In the days following 9/11/01, when everybody was running around like a chicken with its head cut off (as any good *shock and awe* campaign is supposed to inspire), Bush was busy spending Americans' taxpayer dollars on everything except that which might protect American citizens - starting wars where Al Qaeda was not, not providing tax breaks and incentives for the development of alternatives to Middle East oil (so that we might remove our bases from the area and end our meddlesome ways), and by providing Big Business with terrorist insurance in the event of more WTC-like disasters (plane crashes, building pull-downs, paying off the owners of skyscrapers, and, of course, reimbursing Big Insurance for the payout to Larry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC, for his losses).

My mind, however, was more productively occupied after 9/11/01 in trying to think like Osama Bin Laden: "What would a terrorist do (now)?"

If I was Bin Laden, I'd expect some reaction by the U.S. government in the way of retalliation. I'd expect the U.S. to try to hunt me down, either kill me outright or bring me to justice, and shut down my operation. I would have planned for that before I had ever launched the 9/11 attacks, so I'd have made sure I was 'tucked down' (deep in a cave in Tora Bora) by that date. I'd also have put secondary (and tertiary, and more) attacks into place in the event I couldn't surface for a good long while. Especially if there was a good chance I might not live to see daylight beyond that cave ever again.

If Al Qaeda's goal is to destroy America, only a half-wit would consider doing it one skyscraper at a time, and neither Bin Laden nor his comrade, Ayman Zawahiri, are half-wits; Bin Laden was trained by America's best clandestine operation, the CIA, and Zawahiri is well-educated and well-traveled (even if it was to the prisons of the world).

When the media talk about Al Qaeda's goal of 'destroying America', they don't really mean killing 300 million Americans and turning the land between Mexico and Canada/Pacific and Atlantic oceans into a scorched pile of rubble. 'Destroying America' is a euphemism for 'destroying our economy', and flying commercial jetliners into the Wall St. Stock Exchange wouldn't do that (much less the Cantor Fitzgerald floors and other financial companies in the WTC, or all of the buildings at the WTC site).

To destroy America's economy, you have to stop commerce.

If I was Bin Laden, I'd have had sleeper cells already in place by 9/11/01, ready to fly planes or drive cars into bridges at rush hour and shopping malls during the Christmas shopping season. Wherever people and commerce intersect, that's where I'd aim to disrupt, by blowing up roadways to prevent people from getting to work and goods from getting to market.

Bush's message to the country after 9/11/01, when the chance of further terrorist attacks was the greatest, was to "go shopping". Yet now, more than six years later, Bush lets the FBI release an alleged, non-specific warning that the malls might be targets for terrorist attacks at the start of the busiest sales period of the year. It only makes sense if the economy was already so far down in the toilet that Bush needed some cover story for the hash he's made of our economy to blame it on. In such a scenario (if I was a conspiracy theorist, believing that 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag operation), I'd think that another terrorist attack inside America's borders within the next few weeks were a sure bet.

If.