City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in terrorist style

As snowfall turns our landscape into a gleaming, crystal masterpiece, there are some who see only darkness.

They want to break the silent night with agonizing screams from innocents and bleed the peace that most of us feel this time of year.

We hear the familiar Christian songs of the season, “The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head. The stars in the bright sky looked down where he lay, the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.”

Others this week recite the Jewish chant: “Outside, snow is slowly, softly falling through the wintry night. In the house, the brass menorah sparkles with the candlelight. Children in a circle listen to the wondrous stories told, of the daring Maccabeans and the miracles of old.”

At the same time, in Chicago, the suburbs and across the country, there are individual Muslim fanatics that federal investigators say are preparing for a ceremony of sacrifice that would begin with these words: “Allah Akbar!” God is great.

What would follow immediately would be an explosion in a church or synagogue, a wave of automatic weapons fire at Christmas shoppers in a mall or a truck plowing into tourists along a crowded avenue.

For the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, American authorities admit that the terrorist threat has dramatically changed. They are now more focused on stopping the lone, radical Muslim attacker who is executing his or her self-styled assault and not a well-orchestrated, multi-suspect mega-attack.

As American intelligence and law enforcement agencies have succeeded in preventing further Twin Tower-like attacks involving years of planning, dozens of conspirators and millions of dollars, the latest strategy by fanatical Islamists bent on killing westerners is just as intimidating.

It almost happened in Portland, Ore., at the city's Christmas tree lighting ceremony. But it could have been the Daley Center, Des Plaines or DeKalb, because the fuse for the deadly plot in the northwest is available to everyone.

The 19-year old Somali-American college student charged with plotting a bomb attack on Portland's tree-lighting ceremony told investigators that he was inspired by an al-Qaida magazine. Mohamed Osman Mohamud even claims to have written some articles for the online magazine, aptly called Inspire.

Mohamud is accused of trying to detonate what he thought was a car bomb. Thankfully, when he used a cell phone to “trigger” the bomb, nothing happened because the whole thing was an FBI sting and there actually were no explosives. The teenager's lawyer claims it was a frame-job, and that will be determined in court.

That kind of ”lone wolf” attack is exactly what al-Qaida leaders are prescribing in their magazine, available to anyone with access to the Internet.

In an ABC 7 investigation last October I first reported on Inspire magazine, specifically an article accompanied by a skyline photo of Chicago. The Inspire story urged individuals to install sharpened snowplow blades on the front of a pickup truck and then ram it into people on a crowded street corner. It was written by an alleged associate of the Portland teenager accused in that car bomb plot.

The most troubling part of this threat is that U.S. authorities don't have the foggiest idea how to prevent it.

“Although we aim for perfection” said Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in a speech last week about the evolving menaces, “perfection will not be achieved.” Then Leiter said matter-of-factly: “Lives will be lost.”

He said that preventing attacks is getting more difficult as the threat morphs from large-scale plots that develop over time to one-person random assaults.

Leiter described a three-layer threat:

Ÿ Leftover, pre-9/11 al-Qaida leadership that remains holed-up in the mountains of Pakistan.

Ÿ al-Qaida splinter groups such as the affiliate in Yemen that is responsible for last year's Christmas Day plot on a Detroit-bound jetliner and the more recent cargo bombs that were intercepted en route to Chicago synagogues.

Ÿ Homegrown radicals inspired online or by overseas terrorists but based in the U.S. There are several of them in federal custody right now in Chicago.

You won't find the names of potential attackers on those WikiLeaks lists. U.S. officials don't know who they are and that should be a concern to all of us. We'll eventually find out their names ... along with the names of the victims they end up killing.

The release of classified documents on WikiLeaks is a distraction to the real threat to our safety. Of course government officials should do a better job of keeping their own internal documents secure and policing low level employees to prevent theft.

But if they can't even do that, how can we expect them to stop young American Muslims from being radicalized and carrying out solo attacks?

Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie