Well, I don't think it was seen as a large-scale, international plot against the United States. It was written off initially as just an amorphous grouping of radicals who were somehow motivated by the blind sheik but were not part of an international conspiracy. The arrest of Ramzi Yousef and Ramzi Yousef's involvement in that bombing should have been a huge wake-up call. It simply wasn't.
And we've all heard the term, "connecting the dots." That wasn't done. It wasn't done on a federal level. We certainly couldn't do it on a municipal level. But it should have been the wake-up call for America that we were at war. We've been at war since 1993, and we simply didn't realize it.