Terrorism About Which I Worry

TW: I concur with Klein. The type terrorist attacks I have always considered most likely are where heavily armed folks start shooting or exploding things amidst crowds (a mall, stadium, crowded street, airport check-in, schools etc.). This is what happened in Mumbai, the ease with which motivated (i.e. suicidal) terrorists could pull off such acts is not particularly high I would think regardless of security measures. This would essentially be Columbine on steroids.

The manic means by which American media and the public reacts to domestic sourced shootings overlaid with the emotion associated with "terrorism" would lead to a populist trauma that would have little bounds. Such trauma is exactly what the terrorists would be seeking of course.

There will come a time when Americans have to face up to sacrificing tremendous liberty in a likely futile effort to limit any losses to terrorists or learn how to absorb the risk and move on with their lives.

From Joe Klein at Time:
"The leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud--who likely planned the assassination of Benazir Bhutto--has claimed credit for [the recent] horrific attack at the Pakistani police academy near Lahore, and he is threatening similar attacks in Washington:

"Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world," Mehsud told The Associated Press by phone.

This is not an insignificant threat: U.S. intelligence officials have been worried since the Mumbai slaughter in December that a new wave of low-tech terrorist attacks are in the offing, less spectacular that 9/11--but horrific nonetheless. "We've been lucky, if you can call it that, that Al Qaeda has been fixated on duplicating spectacular plots like 9/11," one intelligence expert told me.

...The Mumbai effort required no local infrastructure--no sleeper cells in India, nothing more than a few boats to ferry the attackers into Mumbai harbor, plus communications equipment and smalls arms. Similarly, and unlike the elaborate planning that preceded 9/11, Al Qaeda or Taliban terrorists could sneak across the porous Mexican or Canadian borders and hit a shopping mall, a government building, a sports event, a school anywhere in the United States..."
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/03/31/terrors-next-wave/