It's useful to remember that the ultimate goal of terrorism isn't to kill people -- it is to create fear. Otherwise these groups could have killed multiple orders of magnitude more Americans by opening a new fast food chain and loading all the menu items with trans-fats. That wouldn't accomplish anything useful for them, though, since it does not create any leverage for political demands. Terrorism is mass extortion.

And so terrorists succeed only to the degree by which we are actually terrorized. With that context, what are we to make of the top internal US security official suggesting that Americans should be "afraid to leave the house"? Doesn't that seem a wee bit counter-productive in this so-called 'war on terror'?