Have YOU forgotten?
Investigators going through the rubble following the bombing of the World Trade Center
From FBI:
Twenty years ago today, at about 17 minutes past noon, a thunderous explosion rocked lower Manhattan.
The epicenter was the parking
garage beneath the World Trade Center, where a massive eruption carved
out a nearly 100-foot crater several stories deep and several more
high. Six people were killed almost instantly. Smoke and flames began
filling the wound and streaming upward into the building. Those who
weren’t trapped were soon pouring out of the building—many
panic-stricken and covered in soot. More than a thousand people were
hurt in some way, some badly, with crushed limbs.
It was Friday, February 26, 1993, and Middle Eastern terrorism had arrived on American soil—with a bang.
As a small band of terrorists scurried
away from the scene unnoticed, the FBI and its partners on the New York
Joint Terrorism Task Force began staffing up a command center and
preparing to send in a team to investigate. Their instincts told them
that this was terrorism—they’d been tracking Islamic fundamentalists in
the city for months and, they’d later learn, were tantalizingly close
to encountering the planners of this attack. But hunches weren’t
enough; what was needed was definitive proof.
They’d have it soon enough.
The massive investigation that followed—led by the task force, with
some 700 FBI agents worldwide ultimately joining in—quickly uncovered a
key bit of evidence. In the rubble investigators uncovered a vehicle
identification number on a piece of wreckage that seemed suspiciously
obliterated. A search of our crime records returned a match: the number
belonged to a rented van reported stolen the day before the attack. An
Islamic fundamentalist named Mohammad Salameh had rented the vehicle,
we learned, and on March 4, an FBI SWAT team arrested him as he tried
in vain to get his $400 deposit back.
One clue led to another and
we soon had in custody three more suspects—Nidal Ayyad, Mahmoud
Abouhalima, and Ahmed Ajaj. We’d also found the apartment where the
bomb was built and a storage locker containing dangerous chemicals,
including enough cyanide gas to wipe out a town. All four men were
tried, convicted, and sentenced to life.
The shockwave from the attack continued to reverberate.
Following the unfolding connections, the task force soon uncovered a
second terrorist plot to bomb a series of New York landmarks
simultaneously, including the U.N. building, the Holland and Lincoln
Tunnels, and the federal plaza where our office in New York is housed.
On June 24, 1994, FBI agents stormed a warehouse in Queens and caught
several members of a terrorist cell in the act of assembling bombs.
Meanwhile, the mastermind of the World
Trade Center bombing was still on the run—and up to no good. We’d
learned his name—Ramzi Yousef—within weeks after the attack and
discovered he was planning more attacks, including the simultaneous
bombing of a dozen U.S. international flights. Yousef was captured in
Pakistan in February 1995, returned to America, and convicted along
with the van driver, Eyad Ismoil. A seventh plotter, Abdul Yasin, remains at large.
We later learned from Yousef that his Trade Center plot was far more sinister.
He wanted the bomb to topple one tower, with the collapsing debris
knocking down the second. The attack turned out to be something of a
deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11; with the help of Yousef’s uncle Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda would later return to realize Yousef’s
nightmarish vision.
[...]
An emotional Mario Cuomo, New York's state governor, told
journalists: "We all have that feeling of being violated. No foreign
people or force has ever done this to us. Until now we were
invulnerable."[**Bratnote: emphasis mine]
[...]
In Context
In May 1994, four men - Mohammed Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima
and Ahmad Ajaj - were sentenced to life for bombing the World Trade
Center, which killed six people and injured 100.
In October 1995 Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind cleric who preached at
mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City, was sentenced to life for
masterminding the bombing,.
He was also found guilty of the murder of extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane
and a scheme to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak during a
trip to New York in 1993.
The bombing of the World Trade Center has been totally eclipsed by the
events of 11 September 2001 which saw thousands killed, the collapse of
both Twin Towers and an all-out "war on terror" declared by the Western
world.
Rahman's organisation, the Islamic Group, is believed to have links to
Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, accused of carrying out the 11
September attacks.
Go read more at the Beeb here.
More at ABCNews.
These days, as we have Kerry and Hagel as the MIC's most favored and visible water-carriers, it is incumbent on ALL of us to remember such days as this: days when terrorism reared its ugly head on American soil. These days, to stick our heads in the sand, to allow the administration to distract us from the major upheavals in the world, is insanity...
These days, we must ALL remember warnings such as we had on 26 February 1993. To do otherwise is suicide.
Pay attention..
