They're winning...

It's naive to assume that terrorists expect to take over the world. The numpties who blow themselves up in the expectation of a sexually enhanced paradise might very well believe that - but the people who organise them (people in no hurry to reach paradise themselves) know very well that's impossible.

What they do seek is to shock and polarise the world into good guys and bad guys (which is which depending on where you're standing), provoke suspicion and bigotry, and put us all at each others' throats. Secure in the certain knowledge that military and security responses will generate even more terrorists.

They don't directly achieve fear in the majority of people, only defiance - it's governments who cynically promote and abuse fear. They don't detract from our civil liberties - they don't need to. They can rely upon our governments to do that, with measure after measure aimed at infallibly combating the last attack, increasing petty bureaucratic power in the process. Terrorists don't take our taxes - governments do that, and hand over large sums to finger-in-the-pie corporations in the name of security, or invest both money and young lives in foreign wars with no foreseeable end or result.

In the meantime, power passes into the hands of people and organisations who have forgotten who they are serving and why, and about whom we should be as profoundly suspicious as we are about terrorists. For many politicians, bureaucrats and police officers, the 'war on terror' is nothing less than a gift. Almost as big a gift as an endlessly gullible and acquiescent population.

On those counts I suspect the terrorists are winning already...

Robert Hill...

It's not the scanning of me that I mind, it's the fact that the terrorists have already won if our society has been forced to change this much to accommodate their threat.