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Comment by simon_ | Hacker News Reader

Agree.

I'd put both words -- "the terrorists" -- in quotes. There definitely are individual terrorists in the world, but the notion of a unified red team of "the terrorists" has motivated a lot of bad decisions.

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I've always thought that elements of the terrorist infrastructure -- plots, operatives, muscle, money, connections -- are sort of cloud-provided and available to pretty much anybody capable of implementing the API. Al Quaeda is sort of the 37 Signals of terror: they aren't the central nexus, they're a media-savvy early adopter whose core competence is marketing and have a happy little Italian restaurant-scale kill-the-Jews-and-Crusaders business, and they inspire people all over the globe to quit the day jobs, try a little lean jihad, iterate rapidly, and blog about the whole process.

Sadly the I in API does not stand for Interface and we are totally unwilling to discuss what it does stand for so War on Terror it is.

Does it stand for "Basque"? No, wait, that doesn't start with "I". Oh! "I.R.A." No, wait, that's itself an acronym. It's not FARC... no, hrm, not "Shining Path", either. And clearly not Aum Shinrikyo. Wait, waitwaitwait... you couldn't mean "Islamism", could you? But what about all the terrorist organizations that aren't Islamist?

See, that is exactly why the War on Terror naming doesn't make sense (+). All of the above are terrorists (and contemptible), none of the above are even a remote threat to American air travel, and approximately none of our War on Terror related activities target them except incidentally.

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