You wrote something that resonated with a thesis I've been thinking about for a while:

It seems to me that "international terrorists" have goals that don't really include terrorizing the general population of the US.

ObL and his gang didn't spend several years and a considerable part of their operating capital planning the September 11th attacks just to hit random targets. The attack was carefully structured to send a message: Their beef is with (what they perceive as) the power structure of the United States. The WTC obviously symbolized capitalism--financial institutions, the stock market, and the headquarters of some of the largest corporations. The Pentagon symbolized America's military power. The probable, but aborted, attack on the White House symbolized America's civil power. It was a clear attack on the triad of powers that run America.

There are many other potential targets they could have hit--nuclear power plants and the electrical grid, water supplies, refineries, the downtown business district of any major city. They could have attacked the general population with a bioweapon like anthrax, but it's very likely that the only known anthrax attack was perpetrated by a domestic terrorist and/or a nutcase.

Al Qaida did not attack the general population of America.

The Bush Administration has worked diligently to obscure the obvious message of the 9/11 attacks for political reasons; and understand, I'm not using "political" in a necessarily partisan sense...although it's also objectively true that maintenance of a constant anxiety among the people about the terrorist threat has caused Bush's political fortunes to soar. Bush wanted solid support for the actions he subsequently took, and portraying 9/11 as an attack on the American People was a simple message that went down smoothly with a large part of the population. A case might even be made that, in a perverse way, that redefinition of the attacks has indeed helped discourage more attacks. The terrorists now know that the American people have been inoculated against getting the message and are primed for an automatic response of righteous anger and demands for bloody retribution. Bush has worked the situation effectively to give himself carte blanche, including the extraordinary powers of the "Patriot" Acts.

It's impossible to say whether any credible threat remains from terrorists. It's in the interests of the Bush Regime to ensure that we always think that there is, that we will always live in a constant state of low-level anxiety with the inevitable reaction of gratitude toward any government that constantly issues press releases to assure us that it's Doing Something.

--Robert