Much as I don't want to be seen as publicly supporting Maggie Thatcher...wasn't it she who coined the very telling phrase of "depriving terrorists of the oxygen of publicity"?
I think that she (or her army of speech writers) were dead right on that score. If a terrorist action receives absolutely no response in the media the result will be that terrorists simply give up. Of course, the absolute opposite may happen leading terrorists to massively escalate their actions to totally un-ignorable new levels of atrocity.
Unfortunately, no political pundit or security chief seems to know in which of those two ways an ignored terrorist group will turn.
Personally, I am confused. On the one hand terrorists have effectively declared war on us...and should be treated as an enemy and blown to bits before they can do the same to us.
On the other hand, the terrorists' grievances do have some credence in that many of them are reacting to decades or centuries of atrocities inflicted on them by the West and by Western imperialism and capitalism.
Despite this, I still come down on the side of prevention being better than a cure and, if "depriving terrorists of the oxygen of publicity" is part of that prevention, then I am all for it. Just very pessimistic about the backlash.