Posted on 02/26/2003 2:30:24 AM PST by kattracks
Ten years ago today, a 1,000-pound bomb shook the north tower of the World Trade Center, ripping a crater in the underground parking lot, killing six people, injuring more than 1,000 and giving America a wakeup call.America didn't get the message.
A business-as-usual complacency - the tragic burden of a comfortable people - soon set in. Which gave terrorists time to plot the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that finally brought the twin towers, and our innocence, crashing down. The terrorists got more sophisticated. America did not.
Yes, we went after the 1993 bombers and their confederates and within two years had locked up many. But as Ray Kelly, the current and then NYPD commissioner, notes, "We simply didn't see it as an international conspiracy to destroy our society."
Even after the feds foiled a plot to blow up two city tunnels, a bridge, FBI offices and the UN in one day, there was less intelligence sharing - not more - among enforcement agencies. Even after the 1995 arrest of bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef, the emergence of Osama Bin Laden and reports of Middle Eastern student pilots in U.S. flight schools, the U.S. did not recognize the enormity of its enemy.
On Feb. 28, 1993, this page warned that "this may happen again."
"The Clinton administration must treat the bombing not as a simple criminal act, but as an act of war," the Daily News wrote, adding that "measures aimed at controlling the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons" also were urgently needed. "Iraq, Iran and North Korea could end up with atomic bombs."
It was all there then. It was all there 9/11. And it's all there now. North Korea got its bomb. Iraq has its arsenal and wants more.
Now we are waging war on terror. We honorably seek to stop Saddam Hussein before Iraq gets its nukes. But even as we acknowledge terror's relentless tide, complacency tugs. Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy unrealistically demand hard proof of an imminent threat to the U.S. Such myopia afflicts even the feds, who still won't give the NYPD $261 million for counterterrorism.
Ten years ago, murderous U.S.-hating terrorists announced themselves on the spot now known as Ground Zero. They are still out there. Complacency - at home or abroad - is no weapon against them. It is, in fact, a weapon for them to use against us. And it is as lethal as any.
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Ah, the infamous "Axis of Evil" that President Bush identified and was mocked in some circles for doing so, was marked by the Daily News way back when. Interesting.
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