... but that one percenter isn't the point. It's how the rest of them see the event and the actions around it that is the point.

Allowing the crazies to derail foreign policy that way means that they win. You're right... you'll never reach those people... but that's not most of the people. However, if you do go and kill a lot of innocent people and only a very small number of the guilty, you'll end up with more and more of the normal people moving into the camp of those who just hate regardless of what has happened.

In the short term, it may be viscerally satisfying, but in the long term you're creating more problems for yourselves.

The fact that there is all this movement towards curtailing the things that make you you (liberties, expectation of privacy, and so on) as a result of those actions means that they are achieving exactly what they set out to do. Terrorism is not about military victory... it's about changing the way people live, and therefore changing what people are. So far, it seems they are succeeding admirably well at this goal.

Ashcroft is handing them (al Qaida) their goals on a silver platter. Do you want them to have their success? I don't.