Meyer Wolfsheim wrote:

Have there ever been any large-scale terroristic attacks where profit was the only motive?

Who said anything about profit? The point under discussion was cost/benefit analysis. Don't engage in Inchoate over-simplification. Neither cost nor benefit is limited to monetary profit or loss. Here's a silly example. Let us suppose the terrorists are Muslims. It has been reported that the body of one of the terrorist pilots has been recovered. Perhaps future Muslim terrorists might deem costs too high if that body were fed to pigs and the resulting pig shit dropped on Kabul (or maybe that would just increase the "benefit" of killing more innocents). In either case the cost and benefit have nothing to do with profit. S a n d y