MR. MITCHELL: It would be horrific. I mean, it would just be absolutely horrific. He said that — again, he said, al Qaeda dreams of these large-scale attacks, he said, but
he got fascinated by the Beltway sniper. Remember when that was going on, Malvo, or whatever that guy’s name was — and the other guy, Muhammad. They were hiding in the trunk of cars and shooting people. I think they killed 17 people in and around here. He was fascinated by that. He would spend hours to me talking about that. And then he would talk about the economy of scale and what that actually means for planning attacks because that’s what he’s always doing is planning — he gets up every day and tries to figure out how to kill more Americans, you know.
And what he said was al Qaeda’s dreaming about these large-scale catastrophic attacks. And that would be great, but that’s not all that practical, right? It’s too slow, because the target isn’t our buildings or our tanks or our military. The target is our minds, right?
It’s not going to be one with blood and bullets. It’s going to be one in our heads. And so what he said is we need lots of lone wolf — he didn’t call them that — he called single martyrs, shahids, who would go into the American culture and pull off low-tech attacks. He said, with enough of those low-tech attacks, like happened with the Beltway shooter, it would cripple America. It would — and I can’t really go into the attacks because they were incredibly easy and horrific, you know.
Inside the Islamist terrorist?s mind: A conversation with former CIA interrogator James Mitchell - AEI
