Al Qaeda wants to maul the malls

ABC News:

The FBI is warning that al Qaeda may be preparing a series of holiday attacks on U.S. shopping malls in Los Angeles and Chicago, according to an intelligence bulletin distributed to law enforcement authorities across the country this morning. (Click here for full text.)

The alert said al Qaeda "hoped to disrupt the U.S. economy and has been planning the attack for the past two years."

Law enforcement officials tell ABCNews.com that the FBI received the information in late September and declassified it yesterday for wide distribution.

The alert, like similar FBI and Department of Homeland Security terror alerts issued over the past five years at holiday times, raised questions about the credibility of the information.

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It is no secret that al Qaeda wants to disrupt the US economy to make it harder for us to respond to their attacks. That was the main reason that the World Trade Center was the focus of two attacks. Hitting malls would on the surface not give them much bang for the buck especially if they are limited to the back pack bombs used in the UK. The other problem with this strategy is that they would really need to hit more than a couple of malls to have an effect. Then there is the Amazon effect which has made malls less important to supplying Christmas presents. I can't recall the last time I was in a mall. Now an explosive in an UPS truck would be kind of scary.