Posted by
Defend America on Friday, February 26, 2010 7:00:19 PM
Andrew McCarthy wrote this back on the 15th anniversary:
February 26, 2008 8:00 A.M.
15 Years@War
The WTC bombing was radical Islam’s declaration of war against the United States.
On the morning of February 26, 1993, Islamic
militants steered a nondescript Ryder van through the winding darkness
of the parking garage under the World Trade Center. They had spent
years planning this moment in secret meetings at mosques and
jailhouses, in rural outposts that served as paramilitary camps, and in
safehouses where explosive compounds were mixed in makeshift labs.
Loaded into the van’s rear compartment was a 1,400-pound chemical bomb.The explosive detonated at a few minutes after noon. The
hyper-intensive shockwave bored a six-story canyon into the bowels of
the complex. Seven people were killed (one of the six officially listed
murder victims having been well along in her pregnancy), over a
thousand were injured, and the structural damage would cost nearly a
billion dollars to repair.
Amid the terror,
the dark cloud that envelops us still 15 years later, was a silver
lining. This time, the “battalion of Islam” — as the “blind sheikh,”
Omar Abdel Rahman, liked to refer to the cells in his emerging jihad
army — had failed.
It had been the intention
of the World Trade Center bombers to annihilate tens of thousands of
Americans, in addition to rendering the world’s most significant
financial district uninhabitable. Detonation was consciously timed for
maximum carnage: high noon on a Friday, when as many as 120,000
business professionals, laborers, diners, tourists, and area residents
typically swarmed the Twin Towers and their immediate Wall Street
environs.
More diabolically, not content
with their sophisticated, powerfully combustible urea-nitrate mixture,
the jihadists laced the compound with deadly sodium cyanide and
attempted to boost the explosion with hydrogen tanks. The aim was a
horror virtually unimaginable back then (though it is, today, an
omnipresent fear): wide dispersal of a lethal, aerated chemical,
killing the thousands too distant to be obliterated by the sheer force
of the blast.
The battalion, however,
miscalculated. They’d hoped to place the bomb close enough to primary
support structures that one tower, in its decimation, might topple into
the second. The van, though, had been parked many yards away from the
ideal location. Added to this good fortune, the hydrogen tanks had been
destroyed upon detonation, adding nothing but shards to the impact. And
another break: The cyanide failed to vaporize — simply burning away
like the rest of the bomb components.
So
yes, the aftermath resembled the ninth ring of hell, but the
devastation was orders of magnitude less than it could have been.
In hindsight, we now know the silver lining caused us to miss the ferocity and determination of our enemies.
http://article.nationalreview.com/349383/15-yearswar/andrew-c-mccarthy