Anniversary today

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IT WAS 15 YEARS AGO TODAY, AL QAEDA TAUGHT THE BAND TO PLAY...

Remembering the first WTC bombing whose anniversary is today:

15 Years@War

The WTC bombing was radical Islam’s declaration of war against the United States.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

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.

Only a few weeks before the bombing, the blind sheikh, who had been in constant communication with his co-conspirators, had attracted a crowd of followers at a Brooklyn rally. “God has obliged us to perform jihad,” he thundered. “The battalions of Islam and its divisions must be in a state of continuous readiness . . . to hit their enemies with strength and power.”

The “enemies at the foremost of the work against Islam,” he declared, were “America and the allies.” For them, he had a warning:

If those who have the right [to have something] are terrorists then we are terrorists. And we welcome being terrorists. And we do not deny this charge to ourselves. And the Qur’an makes it among the means to perform jihad for the sake of Allah, which is to terrorize the enemies of God and our enemies too. . . . Then we must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.

Radical Islam had sought an Armageddon for its declaration of war. But the paltry number of deaths, an absolute miracle under the circumstances, denied the jihadists the monstrous “victory” they’d hoped for. Simultaneously, it confirmed us in our determination to regard them as mere criminals.

That they would learn from their errors faster than we from ours is now clear. In truth, it was clear then. On the hard drive of Nidal Ayyad, one of the bombers arrested in early March 1993, the FBI recovered a claim-of-responsibility letter. It is even more chilling today than it was all those years ago:

We are, the Liberation Army fifth battalion, again. Unfortunately, our calculations were not very accurate this time. However, we promise you that next time it will be very precise and World Trade Center will continue to be one [of] our targets unless our demands have been met.

And so it was.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmI1Z...jBlNmEyMmM5Zjg=

The 'silver lining' of the resultant devastation was that the terrorists miscalculated and did not manage to bring down the towers like they intended, and thus did not cause the degree of terror they had hoped to do.

McCarthy notes, "In hindsight, we now know the silver lining caused us to miss the ferocity and determination of our enemies."

This was in 1993. Then there was Bin Laden's February 23, 1998 declaration of war on the US and Israel for a variety of "crimes" against Islam (including, btw, Iraq--remember, this was 1998):

Recently, , Henry Kissinger told Der Spiegal magazine that:

SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?

Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.

[…]

Kissinger: … But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.

SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?

Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.

Specifically, Kissinger believes that Bush managed to take the fight to the Islamists and by doing so has changed the dynamics of the conflict to the advantage of the west. You've got to wonder how many bombings and how much further loss of life in the homeland would have been tolerated by a Gore administration; and if they would have ever come to understand the global nature of the threat. Certainly, the party of Gore, of Clinton, of Obama still do not.

Soon the world will not have a visceral hatred of George W. Bush--a relative visionary in a world of near-sighted, and ideologically-limited leftists, obsessed with their loss of power, influence, and relevance in the new century--to be a shield against the reality of Islamic fanaticism.

So, may I introduce to you/ the act you've know for all these years,/ O.Bin Laden's jihad terror thugs.

But Obama says he can talk nice to our enemies and all will magically be O teh.