Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 557especially in the mountainous areas along the Pakistani border. At the same
time, al Qaeda terror activities continued, the best known of which was a
1993 attack on the World Trade Center [WTC]. Al Qaeda fighters used a
truck bomb to attack Tower One, hoping it would be destroyed enough to
crash into Tower Two and bring the entire structure down. It did not, how-
ever, but the blasts did kill six people. In the aftermath of the WTC bombings,
U.S. authorities arrested al Qaeda operatives who said that the bombing was
a response to the U.S. role in sponsoring Israel’s repression of the Palestinians–
they did not mention any Islamist or other religious motivations.
Following the WTC bombings, al Qaeda ramped up its terror activities. In
1996, it apparently helped another terrorist group, Hezbollah, kill 19 service-
men in a bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, a complex used to
house foreign troops. In August 1998, bin Laden was responsible for the
bombings of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya,
which killed about 300 people. And in October 2000, al Qaeda fighters
bombed a U.S. destroyer, The Cole, in port in Yemen, killing 17 Americans. In
each case, the Clinton administration responded with vigorous attacks on
what it suspected were al Qaeda outposts [it was blasting Iraq on a regular
basis at the same time] but with little damage to the al Qaeda infrastructure.
It was clear to the Americans that bin Laden was a growing threat, and, as the
administration of George W. Bush took office in 2001, al Qaeda was recog-
nized as the most dangerous terror network in the world, and it was no secret
that it was planning more actions against the U.S.In fact, on August 6th, 2001,
the headline of the “President’s Daily Briefing” [PDB] was “Bin Laden
Determined To Strike in US” and specifically warned about al Qaeda making
“preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveil-
lance of federal buildings in New York.” In a little more than a month, those
words, ignored at the time, would hit with a force never felt before on
American soil.