Bruce Schneier says that our mindless reactions to terrorist plots is a victory for them in itself:

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

Let me see if I understand this - If we react to terrorists and prevent them form attacking, the terrorists win. If we do nothing and the terrorists blow up some planes, the terrorists win.

So we've already lost.

It isn't terrorizing me, it's _angering_ me. There's a difference.

You rarely derail your enemies plan by acquiescing to their activities.

It's the hysterical overreaction that helps the terrorists achieve their goals. Someone finds a bottle of water that smells bad and they turn back the plane. Did the bottle have wires coming out of it and a cellphone duct taped to it? No? Then you know what, it was a bottle of water that smelled from the drinker's bad breath, and you just cost a lot of people a lot of money and inconvenience for nothing. A little common sense would go a long way in reducing these incidents.

I must have missed the part where anyone proposed doing nothing.

I'm not sure I understand what the writer is proposing. Given that we arrest terrorists with overwhelming amounts of evidence indicating an advanced bomb plot using liquids -- that we should NOT try to screen liquids? Given that we have endured a substantial number of terrorist attacks from Muslims of South Asia and Arab backgrounds -- that we should NOT react to suspicious behavior by Arabs and South Asians?

Consider what happened prior to 9/11. FBI agents had information that cast suspicion on multiple Arabs learning to fly (and not land). If we had used that suspicion to broaden the investigation to all Arab (or foriegn) flight school attendees we would have been one step closer to unraveling the 9/11 plot.

Taking information from one plot, and using it to generalize our searching pattern is EXACTLY the correct thing to do. Our reaction the liquid bombing plot, while a pain for travelers, is EXACTLY the correct action to take.

We've been here before. I still don't buy the argument that "but if we do X, Y or Z the terrorists win".

The terrorists win when they kill us, we win when we kill them.

Speaking of airport security:

A passenger who rather ill-advisedly told security at Chicago's O'Hare Airport that part of his p3nis pump was a bomb faces a possible three years' jail on a felony disorderly conduct rap, The Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Mardin Amin, 29, was en route to Turkey on 16 August with his dear old ma and two small children when a female security operative extracted a "small, black, squeezable rubber object" from his backpack. Since he was standing next to his mum, Amin decided to whisper out of the corner of his mouth that it was a "pump". The guard misheard it as "bomb", with inevitable consequences.

Cecil is right -- Schneier and others who make those arguments are conflating the name given to "terrorists" with their principle objective. Simply creating fear among airline travelers isn't the goal of our leading Islamofascist enemies -- if it were, we would have seen Hamas tactics employed in America (i.e. Starbucks suicide bombings) a long time ago. More specifically, to the extent that we know their goals (a good postulate is: establish a new caliphate over the Middle East, and eventually, the world), their strategy for achieving these goals appears to include carrying off massive, well-organized, and impressive attacks -- often involving airplanes, trains, landmarks, and/or mass casualties.

Our successes in thwarting attacks, and overreactions to suspicious, but non-terrorist events (if that is indeed what took place on the NW flight from Amsterdam) thus amplify the deterrent against these plots, rather than increasing their effectiveness, as Schneier posits.

That said, the stronger and more public our security measures, the greater the effects of any eventual success by the terrorists against a supposedly "hard" target will be.

Cecil is right on this. As I recall the Islamic extremists vowed to kill us or convert us. I don't remember a fatwah where they vowed to slow down air traffic and get water and perfume thrown away.

Getting stopped at airports, delayed flights and long lines isn't terror. Terror is riding a jet into a tall building or a five-sided building.

Fighting back on the other hand is going about your life even when you’re inconvenienced, in airports, train stations, wherever it happens.

Winning is having the testicular fortitude to take an airplane back from hijackers even if you lose your life doing so. Winning is killing them and locking their stupid fanatical a$$es up BEFORE they carry out their next attack(s).

Just checking, but what was Dr. Schneier's proposed course of action these days?

So, if the best way to show that the terrorists haven't won is to go about one's own business with only a minor blip, then one has to ask:

Was Dubya right in suggesting, after 9-11, that the one thing that every American could do was to continue leading their life normally, including going shopping?

"Consider what happened prior to 9/11. FBI agents had information that cast suspicion on multiple Arabs learning to fly (and not land). If we had used that suspicion to broaden the investigation to all Arab (or foriegn) flight school attendees we would have been one step closer to unraveling the 9/11 plot."

Yes, the communication problems between the CIA and FBI were identified in the 9-11 Commission report. Since then the current administration has completely ignored the need to implement institutional change within the two agencies.

I'm not sure what the intent of this latest bombing attempt was. I am not quite certain of these terrorists being able to setup a lab on the airplane and take over a bathroom for the several hours it would have taken to properly mix the liquids for maximum explosive power. Otherwise, I guess they would have hastily mixed the ingredients to start a fire on the plane which has a chance of happening even when trying to take one's time. I know a fire in mid-flight would be bad but wouldn't be on the same scale as a cargo hold full of oxygen generators going off. It would be a containable fire by a well trained crew and the plane would have a good chance to turn around. People would be hurt by smoke and flame but the news seems to have taken the story and ran with it to incredible extremes. Putting the capabilities of these terrorists and their liquid exlosives up on a pedestal of perfection by proclaiming they were just days away from down 10 planes for sure. They are helping the terrorist cause by inflating their capabilities beyond what even the terrorists themselves possibly thought was going to happen. They'd probably estimated being able to damage a few of the planes to the point of crashing but otherwise were just going for general mayhem caused by mid-flight fires, perhaps a sudden decompression, and most likely the fiasco of a nutball needing to be wrestled to the ground. I wish the media woulda have at least tried to play it down and cast these thugs in the light that they truly should be shown in. Idiots doing idiotic things.