Jack Kelly writer
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TERROR AT THE TOWERS - THE FIRST TIME
(AmericanHeritage.com)
On this day in 1993, a New York City 911 dispatcher
answered a call around lunchtime by asking if there was an
emergency. “Yes, there is an emergency. Something just
blew up underneath the parking-garage tunnel between
World Trade Center Tower One and the World Financial
Center, across the street.” International terrorism had arrived
on American soil.
Extremists had set off a bomb that killed six people and
injured more than a thousand. The explosion became a
prelude to the far more devastating attack on the same
building eight years later and raised now familiar questions
about the most effective strategy for combating this modern
scourge.
The first Persian Gulf War, concluded in February 1991, left
bitter feelings among many in the Islamic world. Resentment
over America’s support for Israel ran high. A man known as
Ramzi Yousef (he went by many aliases), a Kuwaiti of
Pakistani descent, decided to act on his hostility. He entered
the United States on an Iraqi passport in September 1992.
Authorities briefly detained him for having no visa, but they
released him pending a hearing.
The 25-year-old settled in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he
gathered around him a cadre of like-minded Arab men. The
group chose the World Trade Center not so much as a
symbol of international capitalism as for logistical reasons.
Yousef considered himself an explosives expert, and he
imagined his bomb would undermine the north tower, toppling
it into the other, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths
(50,000 people worked in the complex and another 80,000
visited every day). The buildings were clearly visible to the
plotters from across the river; one of them, a cab driver,
picked up fares there.
The bomb Yousef constructed in a Jersey City apartment and
storage locker consisted of an improvised explosive made
from nitric acid, urea, and paper to which he added
containers of homemade nitroglycerine and bottles of
compressed hydrogen. He attached long fuses to blasting
caps in order to set off the 1,500-pound mass.
Mohammed Salameh, a 25-year-old Palestinian who had
been living illegally in the United States for five years, rented
a Ryder van to carry the bomb. On February 26, the second
anniversary of the end of the Gulf War, another young
Palestinian drove the van to the B-level of the 2,000-car
parking garage that was part of the seven-story basement of
the World Trade Center. He lit the 20-foot long fuse and
walked away.
According to FBI agents, the bomb was “the largest by weight
and damage of any improvised explosive device that we’ve
seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification.”
It ripped a gaping hole through 11-inch-thick slabs of
reinforced concrete into an airline ticket office two stories
above and threw an employee there 30 feet. It also blasted
open the elevator shaft of the north tower, allowing smoke
from hundreds of burning automobiles to rush up the
skyscraper. It did not, however, put the building in danger of
collapse.
Yousef boarded a plane to Pakistan that evening. Salameh
returned to the Jersey City office of the leasing company to
report the van stolen. Less than a week after the bombing,
he came back again to collect a refund on his $400 deposit.
In the meantime, authorities had discovered a vehicle
identification number on a piece of the wreckage that led
them to the same office. Unaware that the clerk across the
table was an FBI agent, Salameh revealed information and
even haggled over the $15 he claimed to have spent filling
the vehicle with gasoline.
Salameh’s arrest led the FBI to a tangled network of
conspirators, many of them connected to Sheik Omar Abdel-
Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric later convicted of seditious
conspiracy in connection with the case. Yousef remained on
the FBI’s most-wanted list for two years. January 1995 found
him in the Philippines planning to knock 11 passenger planes
out of the air using liquid explosives. A fire in the Manila
apartment that he had turned into a bomb factory forced him
to flee. Data on a computer he left behind led to his arrest in
Pakistan a month later.
Yousef and nine other conspirators ultimately received life
sentences for their roles in the 1993 bombing. A memorial
fountain constructed at the World Trade Center read, “This
horrible act of violence killed innocent people, injured
thousands, and made victims of us all.” It was destroyed on
September 11, 2001.
Those who use indiscriminate violence against civilians are
often seen as both mad and evil. Yet Ramzi Yousef was
rational and saw his actions as morally justified. He cited
America’s killing of Iraqi and Libyan civilians in retaliation for
the actions of their governments as justification for targeting
U.S. citizens for “collective punishment.” In a letter claiming
responsibility for the bombing, his group asserted that their
“action was done in response for the American political,
economical, and military support to Israel, the state of
terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the
region.”
The decision of the Clinton administration to treat the
bombings as a criminal matter was later questioned. “After
the World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, some of
the guilty were indicted and tried and convicted, and sent to
prison,” President George W. Bush said in 2004. “But the
matter was not settled. . . . After the chaos and carnage of
September the Eleventh, it is not enough to serve our
enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their
supporters declared war on the United States, and war is
what they got.”
The new administration’s approach was to counteract
terrorism largely by attacking alleged state sponsors
militarily. The subsequent high cost and mixed results of that
policy have led some to question whether a greater emphasis
on intelligence and “law enforcement,” as applied in the 1993
case, might be a wiser course after all. It is safe to say that a
final answer has not yet been arrived at.
(AmericanHeritage.com)
On this day in 1993, a New York City 911 dispatcher
answered a call around lunchtime by asking if there was an
emergency. “Yes, there is an emergency. Something just
blew up underneath the parking-garage tunnel between
World Trade Center Tower One and the World Financial
Center, across the street.” International terrorism had arrived
on American soil.
Extremists had set off a bomb that killed six people and
injured more than a thousand. The explosion became a
prelude to the far more devastating attack on the same
building eight years later and raised now familiar questions
about the most effective strategy for combating this modern
scourge.
The first Persian Gulf War, concluded in February 1991, left
bitter feelings among many in the Islamic world. Resentment
over America’s support for Israel ran high. A man known as
Ramzi Yousef (he went by many aliases), a Kuwaiti of
Pakistani descent, decided to act on his hostility. He entered
the United States on an Iraqi passport in September 1992.
Authorities briefly detained him for having no visa, but they
released him pending a hearing.
The 25-year-old settled in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he
gathered around him a cadre of like-minded Arab men. The
group chose the World Trade Center not so much as a
symbol of international capitalism as for logistical reasons.
Yousef considered himself an explosives expert, and he
imagined his bomb would undermine the north tower, toppling
it into the other, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths
(50,000 people worked in the complex and another 80,000
visited every day). The buildings were clearly visible to the
plotters from across the river; one of them, a cab driver,
picked up fares there.
The bomb Yousef constructed in a Jersey City apartment and
storage locker consisted of an improvised explosive made
from nitric acid, urea, and paper to which he added
containers of homemade nitroglycerine and bottles of
compressed hydrogen. He attached long fuses to blasting
caps in order to set off the 1,500-pound mass.
Mohammed Salameh, a 25-year-old Palestinian who had
been living illegally in the United States for five years, rented
a Ryder van to carry the bomb. On February 26, the second
anniversary of the end of the Gulf War, another young
Palestinian drove the van to the B-level of the 2,000-car
parking garage that was part of the seven-story basement of
the World Trade Center. He lit the 20-foot long fuse and
walked away.
According to FBI agents, the bomb was “the largest by weight
and damage of any improvised explosive device that we’ve
seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification.”
It ripped a gaping hole through 11-inch-thick slabs of
reinforced concrete into an airline ticket office two stories
above and threw an employee there 30 feet. It also blasted
open the elevator shaft of the north tower, allowing smoke
from hundreds of burning automobiles to rush up the
skyscraper. It did not, however, put the building in danger of
collapse.
Yousef boarded a plane to Pakistan that evening. Salameh
returned to the Jersey City office of the leasing company to
report the van stolen. Less than a week after the bombing,
he came back again to collect a refund on his $400 deposit.
In the meantime, authorities had discovered a vehicle
identification number on a piece of the wreckage that led
them to the same office. Unaware that the clerk across the
table was an FBI agent, Salameh revealed information and
even haggled over the $15 he claimed to have spent filling
the vehicle with gasoline.
Salameh’s arrest led the FBI to a tangled network of
conspirators, many of them connected to Sheik Omar Abdel-
Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric later convicted of seditious
conspiracy in connection with the case. Yousef remained on
the FBI’s most-wanted list for two years. January 1995 found
him in the Philippines planning to knock 11 passenger planes
out of the air using liquid explosives. A fire in the Manila
apartment that he had turned into a bomb factory forced him
to flee. Data on a computer he left behind led to his arrest in
Pakistan a month later.
Yousef and nine other conspirators ultimately received life
sentences for their roles in the 1993 bombing. A memorial
fountain constructed at the World Trade Center read, “This
horrible act of violence killed innocent people, injured
thousands, and made victims of us all.” It was destroyed on
September 11, 2001.
Those who use indiscriminate violence against civilians are
often seen as both mad and evil. Yet Ramzi Yousef was
rational and saw his actions as morally justified. He cited
America’s killing of Iraqi and Libyan civilians in retaliation for
the actions of their governments as justification for targeting
U.S. citizens for “collective punishment.” In a letter claiming
responsibility for the bombing, his group asserted that their
“action was done in response for the American political,
economical, and military support to Israel, the state of
terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the
region.”
The decision of the Clinton administration to treat the
bombings as a criminal matter was later questioned. “After
the World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, some of
the guilty were indicted and tried and convicted, and sent to
prison,” President George W. Bush said in 2004. “But the
matter was not settled. . . . After the chaos and carnage of
September the Eleventh, it is not enough to serve our
enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their
supporters declared war on the United States, and war is
what they got.”
The new administration’s approach was to counteract
terrorism largely by attacking alleged state sponsors
militarily. The subsequent high cost and mixed results of that
policy have led some to question whether a greater emphasis
on intelligence and “law enforcement,” as applied in the 1993
case, might be a wiser course after all. It is safe to say that a
final answer has not yet been arrived at.