The smoke-blowers, in my opinion, were the ones on 9/11 and 9/12 and for a while after that who said that no terrorist group - without the help of a nation - would be able to mount such a devastating attack. It was not that difficult to do. All it took was coordinated airline reservations to make the various attacks happen on the same day. Any travel agent in the country could have performed this fiendishly clever coordination, or anyone with phone access to CheapTickets and a credit card.

It is not that Al Q is such a big bad bogeyman. It is instead that it was not that hard to accomplish. And it still is not. It has become more difficult to smuggle box-cutters on airplanes, true. And airlines are better at IDing passengers. But by no means have they made it impossible for terrorists to travel by air (they do it all the time). And there are lots of methods of terrorism that do not involve airplanes and boxcutters.

If I was of a mind, I could easily cause forest fires, train derailments, water poisonings, smuggling of evil stuff by sea, refinery explosions and fires, power supply interruptions, insanely powerful (though large) bombs made of chicken-shit and diesel fuel... So can they if they want.

In case you think I'm missing your point: it is not hard to accomplish terrorism in America; and Al Q could do it if they put their mind to it. It has nothing to do with how big and bad they are.

My theory: We have nice big targets painted on our butts in Africa and the mid-east. It is a little bit easier to hit us there. And it is a lot easier to do many small attacks than it is to do few large ones.