To my great disbelief, I find Mr Pillai wondering why people think the World Trade Center attack was wrong. He apparently takes the view that since Baghdad or Arab cities were bombed, what happened at the WTC is acceptable.

While I will not pretend to have a vocabulary as extensive as Mr Pillai's, I believe that the fundamental distinction which he has ignored is what is "collateral" and what is not. It is sad that civilians die in the course of a war between soldiers trying to kill each other. But killing civilians for the sake of killing civilians is evil.

The destruction in Iraq (and let us not forget Kuwait) was the result of a war between the armed forces of Iraq and the American-led coalition.

The American-led forces were probably cruel and overzealous in their massacre of the Iraqi forces, but their intended victims were enemy soldiers and enemy facilities. (I do not recall the Iraqi government putting forth any account of the American-led forces intentionally targeting Iraqi civilians. Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

For similar reasons, the deaths resulting from the attack on the Pentagon are somewhat justifiable. Soldiers and navy sailors, by definition, run the risk of being killed by enemy forces.

But the civilian deaths resulting from the WTC bombings cannot be dismissed as "collateral damage". The victims did not happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time; they are not dead because they were too near some target. The civilians were the targets.

The sad fact is that the hijackers picked the WTC because they wanted to kill as many Americans as possible, regardless of the victims' beliefs. The WTC towers were the biggest office buildings they could destroy with a single blow (in this case, two blows, one for each tower).

A lot has been made of the WTC being a symbol of America but I believe that this is overblown. I doubt if many non-New Yorkers, American or otherwise, even knew what the WTC looked like, let alone that it was located in the New York financial district.

If the hijackers had really wanted to destroy a symbol of America, they would have done better by crashing the plane into the Statue of Liberty. It is world famous, and only a short distance from the WTC.

Nor is the WTC a facility which is significant to America's financial system. It is not home to any stock exchange (contrary to what Mr Pillai implies, the New York Stock Exchange is not in the WTC but has its own building).

The WTC did not serve as headquarters for any of the major American financial institutions; most did not even have a significant presence there.

The American financial system's independence from the WTC is demonstrated by the fact that the capital markets will resume operations one week after the attack.