Taylor said:
Re-read the article
" It was only a matter of time before it hit US soil and 9/11 would have happened no matter who was in office.
I have never been scared to ride a bus, eat at a pizza parlor, or vote. In reality, these are targets for terrorism and citizens in other countries live in fear of riding the bus or getting a pizza because of suicide bombers. Bush should be commended for fighting to keep it out of our country. Americans didn't worry about terrorism because it was rare that any Americans would have encountered it."
I do not know whether to laugh or cry.
The Bush junta planned and engineered 911, deal with it.
Don't you think it odd that there was ONLY that one incident of a, ahem, "terrorist attack" (911)?
Why, man, our borders are wide open, people flock across it practically unchecked on a daily basis. It would be a SUPREMELY EASY matter for, ahem, "terrorists" to sneak across to wreak more havoc. But it hasn't. Don't you think that is odd?
I don't.
Only one? Bush planned it? Forgot this one?
Trade Center bombing
The World Trade Center bombing refers to the 1993 attack in the garage of the New York City World Trade Center. For information on the 2001 terrorist attack, see: September 11 Terrorist Attacks.
Before the attacks
A man named Ramzi Yousef entered the United States with a false Iraqi passport in 1992. Police found instructions on making a bomb in Yousef's partner's luggage. The name Abu Barra, which was an alias of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, appeared in the manuals.
Therefore, his partner was arrested on the spot for his false passport and his bomb-making instructions. At the time, INS holding cells were overcrowded, so the authorities told Yousef to come back in one month. Yousef set up residence in Jersey City, New Jersey and travelled around New York and New Jersey and called Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a controversial Muslim preacher, via cell phone. Yousef got the manuals back from his partner. He got conspirators and tried obtaining mixing chemicals to make a bomb. After a hospital stay from a car accident, Yousef got back the manuals from his car, which was in a police impound.
El Sayyid Nosair, who was one of Sheikh Rahman's men and who would later be convicted for the bombing, was arrested in 1991 for the murder of rabbi Meir Kahane. A man named Mahmud Abouhalima, who was later convicted in the bombing, told a man named Wadih el Hage to buy the assault rifle used in the Kahane shooting. Nosair was acquitted of murder but convicted of gun charges. There were dozens of bomb-making manuals and documents related to terrorist plots found in the apartment, but they had not been translated into the English language from the Arabic language.
Yousef stole or rented a Ryder van that was to be used in the attacks. If Yousef had more funds, he would have used a truck bomb. The van that he used has 295 cubic feet of space, which would hold up to 1,000 kilograms of explosives. However, the van was not filled to capacity.
The bomb
Yousef's complex 600 kilogram bomb was made of urea pellets, nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, aluminum azide, magnesium azide, and bottled hydrogen. He added sodium cyanide to the mix as the vapors could go through the ventilation shafts and elevators of the towers. The van that Yousef used had four twenty-foot long fuses, all covered in surgical tubing. Yousef calculated that the fuse would trigger the bomb in twelve minutes after he would use a cheap cigarette lighter to light the fuse.
He wanted to prevent smoke from escaping the towers, therefore, catching the public eye by poisoning people inside. He foresaw Tower One collapsing onto Tower Two after the blast would occur.
The attack
On February 26, 1993, a car bomb was planted by the Islamist terrorists in the underground garage below Tower One. The bomb's fuses burnt at a rate of one inch per two and one half seconds. The men spent 300 United States dollars for the materials to build the bomb.
The bomb exploded in the underground garage at 12:17 P.M., opening a 30 meter wide hole through 4 sublevels of concrete. The bomb generated a pressure of more than 70,000 kilograms per square inch. The detonation velocity of this bomb was about 15,000 feet per second. The cyanide gas that Yousef put in the bomb burnt up in the explosion.
However, only six people were killed and at least 1,040 were injured. The towers were not destroyed like how Yousef invisioned it to be. Yousef had escaped to Pakistan several hours later.
The bomb cut off the center's main electrical power line, and all telephone service for New York City. The bomb caused smoke to rise up to the 93rd floor of both towers, and cutoff the towers' four stairwells and emergency lighting system.
Despite its low death toll, the bombing shocked the American public. Only once before the 1993 attack that the FBI recorded had a bomb of that force had been used. The FBI has recorded a total of about 73,000 explosions.
Yousef's friends reported the van stolen in an attempt to slow investigators down.
After the attacks
A granite memorial to the six victims of the bombing was erected between the Twin Towers, directly above the site of the explosion.
On March 4, 1993 authorities announced the capture of one of the suspected bombing conspirators Mohammad Salameh and exactly one year later four terrorists were convicted for their roles in the bombing.
The capture of Salameh led authorities to Yousef's apartment, where they found bomb-making materials and a business card from Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.
Khalifa was arrested in relation to the crime in December 14, 1994, and was deported to Jordan by the INS in May 5, 1995. Jamal was acquitted by a Jordanian court and now lives as a free man in Saudi Arabia.
In 1995, militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted of conspiracy charges to bomb several New York City landmarks, and in 1998, Ramzi Yousef, believed to have been the mastermind, was convicted of "seditious conspiracy" to bomb the towers - no one was ever convicted for the actual bombing. Another man named Eyad Ismail was tried alongside Yousef for the bombing.
Six militant Islamist conspirators were convicted of the crime in 1997 and 1998 and given prison sentences of a maximum of 240 years each. The main reason that the World Trade Center did not collapse was due to the towers' strength and the fact that Yousef did not have enough money to build a more powerful bomb. In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, an Egyptian man named Emad Salem, who was involved with the bombing conspiracy. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992, information he was privy to possibly because he himself initiated the plot. Salem's role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of possible suspects.
Salem asserts that the original plan was to have the plotters build the bomb using a harmless powder instead of actual explosive, but that an FBI supervisor decided that a real bomb should be constructed instead. He substantiates his claims with hundreds of hours of secretly-recorded conversations with his FBI handlers, made during discussions held after the bombings.
Salem says he wished to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the failure to prevent the bombing despite foreknowledge, but was dissuaded from doing so by the New York FBI office.
The FBI has not explicitly denied Salem's account.
Another conspirator in the plot was Nidal Ayyad.
This granite memorial erected in memory of the first attack was obliterated during the destruction of the towers in 2001.
Reference
Ralph Blumenthal, Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast, New York Times, Thursday October 28 (1993) p. A1; online edition by
www.whatreallyhappened.com
