On Thu, 13 Sep 2001 08:11:31 EDT, stan kulikowski ii
<stankuli(_at_)etherways(_dot_)com> said:
how many times can any of us recall that this was done? for what reasons?
A case could be made that we should keep our web sites *not* dark.
Consider this: Israel is a small country surrounded by much larger countries
that don't particularly care for it. Yes, it has a continuing problem with
terrorist attacks - but not as much as you'd expect from location and population
considerations. Why don't they have MORE of a problem?
I'll submit the hypothesis that it's because every terrorist wanna-be that
didn't
just fall out of a tree knows that if you use a car bomb on an Israeli site, it
doesn't accomplish much - you kill a few victims, they have funerals, the
Israeli military launches a reprisal atttack. But the terrorist doesn't
accomplish
his main goal - upsetting the populace.
In the initial hours after the attacks, somebody stated that George W Bush
should return immediately to Washington DC, to send the message that he believed
that DC was safe. I opined that no, he should remain in Nebraska for a while -
because an even more powerful message for the terrorists than "DC is safe" is
the message "it doesn't even *matter* if DC is safe - this country is so great
and so capable that we can drop our President in the middle of a corn field
200 miles from anywhere, and he can STILL run the country from there". It may
not be the message *our* people want to hear - but if the terrorists learn that
they're just trying to nail Jello to a tree - and that it's explosive Jello to
boot.....
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech