...or little told story of 9/11 is that from the bad guys standpoint is was an unmitigated disaster. The US military is entrenched in Iraq for probably generations to come. They didn't want that. The US military is entrenched in Afghanistan, probably for generations to come. They didn't want that.
Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of jihadists who answered the call to arms are dead and gone. They didn't want so many to be lost.
US relations with Saudi still seem solid. They didn't want that.
Muslim oil countries have huge amounts of money to further entrench the the existing governments, governments hostile to al queda, that really don't have much interest in more war with the US. They didn't want that.
Certainly, there have been numerous attempts at attacks in the US that have failed and/or been thwarted. However, we all know that a decentralized outfit, like Al queda, is designed so that independent cells can be too numerous and too autonomous to track by anything but luck. And it should be readily evident that waves of violence can be conducted easily any time someone is willing to die trying which is supposed to be to stock and trade of AQ. It hasn't happened. The desire and ability to conduct attacks is clearly limited and credit for that has to go to the administration, however poorly they achieved this.
Any attack now damn near guarantees a McCain win and I think it should be obvious to anyone, including them, that they will be far happier with President Obama than President McCain, especially with that crazy gun happy bytch he's got who doesn't know her place.
There are plenty of issues to be considered. Another attack is simply out of the question. It ain't gonna happen because the people who would do it have far too much to lose be doing it now.
If you're conspiracy minded, anything that does happen has to be suspect as it simply does not achieve any positive goals for the bad guys.