Amen!

Ask the Pilot says on Salon this week:

It dawns on me that as I've spent thousands of words and, probably, too much of readers' time analyzing this stuff over the past few weeks, I've danced and dallied around the central point. Allow me to quote Bruce Schneier, the author and security guru, who in a recent blog entry more elegantly sums things up:

"The point of terrorism is to cause terror. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want."