In early March 1993, while searching the New Jersey offices of Allied Signal, a scientific research company, FBI agents and New York City police attached to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) seized a computer hard-drive belonging to Nidal Ayyad. A week earlier, Ayyad and his confederates had bombed the World Trade Center. Rutgers-educated with a chemical-engineering degree, the ostensibly Americanized Ayyad was widely regarded as an unlikely terrorist. JTTF agents knew better. In 1993, they were not so much discovering as rediscovering the Kuwaiti-born Palestinian. They’d first encountered him four years earlier among a fanatical group of young Muslim men engaged in paramilitary training at a remote shooting range in Calverton, Long Island. The 1989 investigation, unfortunately, was dropped. The group was a budding jihadist militia — a “battalion of Islam” as Omar Abdel Rahman, the notorious “Blind Sheikh,” liked to put it. As the battalion’s inspirational leader, Abdel Rahman taught that the happenstance of being vastly out-numbered and under-armed was no justification for refraining from the duty of jihad. “The individual work, and the jihad done by the individuals whether separately or in groups, is work Islam has approved,” he explained. There wasn’t time to develop a larger force. “If we said, ‘Let us wait til the establishment of an Islamic army,’ then we have eliminated jihad, then jihad does not exist.” The solemn duty to render Islam triumphant would go unfulfilled. No, the battles would have to be carried out by embedded jihadist cells. “Power is in the guerrilla warfare,” the cleric told them. “There is power in city battles.” Shiite Hezbollah had already proved it in 1983 by killing 241 United States marines who were on a peace-keeping mission in Lebanon. Thus, Abdel Rahman brayed to a throng of supporters at a 1990 rally in Denmark, “If Muslim battalions were to do five or six operations to the Americans in surprise attacks like the one that was done against them in Lebanon, the Americans would have exited [the Persian Gulf] and gathered their armies and gone back . . . to their country.” The Blind Sheikh’s sentiments were far from unknown to the JTTF. And the men being monitored in Calverton in 1989 were just the type of battalion Abdel Rahman had in mind. They were already planning terrorist operations against the United States. Like Ayyad, several of the men who made the weekend training trips — men like Mohammed Salameh, Mahmud Abouhalima, and Sayyid Nosair — would carry out radical Islam’s declaration of war against the United States by striking the Twin Towers in 1993. And in so doing, they would take pains to foreshadow the cataclysmic attack to come on September 11, 2001. That adumbral warning was right there on the hard-drive agents grabbed at Allied Signal. It was framed in a claim-of-responsibility letter which, unlike the first one mailed by the bombers to the New York Times, had been left unsent, interrupted by Ayyad’s arrest:

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 our [sic] targets unless our [space] demands have been met.

Ayyad’s monstrously rueful damage assessment was spot on: Belying the apocalyptic scene at Ground Zero, the battalion had failed. It was an absolute miracle, one that has been overlooked ever since. But the mass-murder that didn’t happen proved more consequential than any other terror-related development in the tumultuous 1990s.

THE MIRACLE

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.

Not content with their sophisticated, powerfully combustible urea-nitrate mixture, the jihadists also 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. True, the aftermath resembled the ninth ring of hell, but the devastation was orders of magnitude less than it could have been. 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.

Thus the miracle: Only seven lives were lost in the attack. No one then, or since, has had a good explanation for why. Hundreds of people were injured, mainly due to smoke inhalation during their frantic flight down scores of narrow staircases — harrowing, but a coup compared to being gassed, as the jihadists planned. It makes no sense, however, that the death toll was not geometrically higher given the time of day, the lethal combination of bursting pipes and shredded power lines, as well as wintry weather that shuttered indoors many who would otherwise have been out for lunch or a leisurely stroll. All loss of life to terror is an outrage, but with tens of thousands of people in and around the complex at zero-hour, that there were only seven deaths surely qualifies as a suspension of nature’s laws.

Every silver lining, though, has its dark cloud.

The miracle kept America’s guard down. As shocking as the World Trade Center bombing was to the national psyche, the finite casualties and relatively modest damage (estimated at less than a billion dollars, comparative chump change) proved crucial to our perception of, and response to, the radical Islam. Ayyad’s letter conjured visions of a next time, but what consumes human beings is this time. The strike haughtily announced the global jihad with a dagger aimed at the Western economy’s beating heart. Fright aside, though, the dagger was a pin-prick. Declaration of war or not, without wartime casualty levels there would be no hue and cry for a wartime response or a new type of enforcement paradigm.

Had the carnage been of 9/11 dimensions, there would unquestionably have been a searching inquiry into who had attacked the United States, who had abetted the attack, and how the nation should respond. Instead, the wheels of rote reaction began to spin. From the get-go, the attack was regarded as a crime, investigated as a crime, and prosecuted as a crime.

CATHARSIS ON STAGE

The modest death toll helped bring another foible of human nature into play. Unlike 9/11, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was not a suicide attack. The terrorists hoped to live to fight another day. They did, but some of them, of course, were captured. When the public is roused, what it most wants is catharsis. Its sense of justice demands that the guilty be identified, seen openly, and called to account. The legal system is our default center-stage for such dramas.

By contrast, the 9/11 hijackers self-immolated. That, however, did not mean Americans would be denied their catharsis. The focus simply shifted from the culpable parties who had committed the atrocity to the politically useful public officials who “allowed” it to happen, and who were ceremonially flayed by sundry blue-ribbon investigations. That these officials were exponentially less culpable mattered little in our public drama. With the jihadists off to Allah’s promised orgiastic paradise, someone had to take the heat.

Admittedly, our operating assumptions about radical Islam’s intentions and capabilities called for less wariness before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing than after. The performance of law enforcement and the intelligence community, however, was at least as abysmal, if not worse, in the run-up to that attack than in the years just prior to 9/11. Why is the earlier event remembered as a government triumph but the latter as a failure of such monumental proportions that a wholesale restructuring of the intelligence community was warranted? Very simply, because the 1993 bombing, unlike 9/11, featured captured defendants. Core participants were available to satisfy our craving for a public accounting.

This fact-of-life had a variety of negative ramifications. First, with minimal fatalities and a bullet-dodging perception that things could have been much worse, the public was content to let events unfold and information trickle out through the long and winding road of court proceedings. The quick arrests of five suspects a week after the bombing provided both a comforting image of law enforcement efficiency and some worthy objects for the public’s wrath. The arrests of another fourteen terrorists just four months later, under circumstances where a frightful plot to bomb other New York City landmarks was snuffed out before it could become a serious threat, underscored the sense that the threat was well-contained — a perception bolstered by the subsequent arrest of the Blind Sheikh, suggesting that the blight’s catalyst had been neutralized.

Unaware that there had been abundant reason for government to foresee radical Islam’s bursting on the American scene, satisfied that the problem was now under control, the public — and a media dependably less curious with a Democratic administration in the White House — did not rise up in that shopworn mantra of scandal: what did you know and when did you know it?

Second, law enforcement is a very effective propaganda tool in the hands of policy makers who don’t see the need, or lack the will, to adopt more controversial, preemptive approaches to national-security challenges. The criminal justice process presents limitless opportunities to choreograph the illusion of progress.

A successful non-suicide terrorist attack will typically feature an immediate post-event press conference to assure the public that an alphabet soup of enforcement bureaucracies is on red-alert, scouring the earth for clues. Soon afterward follows the press conference to announce that arrests have been made. Then, court appearances present the accused terrorists and publicize the charges as well as some of the ghastly supporting evidence.

Within a few weeks, there will be an indictment with additional charges, attendant press releases, and, perhaps, another bells-and-whistles press conference — or even two, one by the district U.S. attorney and one by the Attorney General in Washington. Hard on that follows the arraignment, another closely scrutinized public appearance of the accused. Subsequently, a flurry of activity precedes the much-anticipated trial: motion practice, voluminous discovery, pretrial hearings, perhaps superseding indictments.

Then, at last, comes the trial, or, better, the “mega-trial.” These are lengthy affairs, generally five months or more, and covered wall-to-wall. The end will feature days of tense jury deliberations and, finally, convictions prompting a blusterous wave of publicity, including celebratory press conferences. The denouement, about three months later, is imposition of sentence, attended by another spike of media intensity.

Start adding all that up, and four defendants with the seemingly interchangeable Arabic names that still ping oddly on Western ears, start to look like forty, or more. But there weren’t forty. In fact, in the eight years between the World Trade Center’s bombing and its destruction, the high-profile court cases that constituted the Clinton administration’s counter-terrorism strategy resulted in the convictions of exactly only twenty-nine terrorists. Twenty-nine. For a frame of reference, consider that since military hostilities began after 9/11, the United States forces have often killed and captured in a single day of combat more jihadists than were prosecuted throughout the 1990s.

INTELLIGENCE & CRIME

A third consequence of treating the World Trade Center bombing solely as a crime rather than an act of war was the tunnel-vision self-imposed on our intelligence by reliance on the criminal process. Law enforcement has its time-honored methods, and they are geared to courtroom success. Adherence to them is why conviction rates soar, with well over 90 percent of those charged ultimately convicted of some offense. The rudiment of all investigative inquiry is, naturally the crime. Clinically, it is a statutory offense comprised of certain “essential elements” — the component facts that must be established beyond a reasonable doubt to secure conviction.

Typically, some of these facts have little or nothing to do with the big picture being probed. It is difficult, for example, to think of anything more elemental to Islamic terrorism than the radical Muslim ideology that fuels it. If intelligent people in anything but dire economic straits are inspired to sacrifice their lives as necessary to kill in furtherance of a doctrine — and many jihadists are people of means and educational accomplishment — one might think that doctrine rather important. Yet, from a purely legal standpoint — that is, using the prism through which we choose to analyze such things — it is much more critical to the case against an indicted bomber that his exertions have somehow affected interstate commerce than that he was motivated by a Salafist construction of Islam. Or that he may have been abetted by a rogue nation.

An effect on commerce is an essential element of a federal bombing prosecution. On the contrary, there is no legal requirement that a defendant’s motivation be proved or that every conspirator identified. To be sure, motivation and accomplices do tend to play a role in the proof. Trials, after all, are conducted before juries. Unlike legal elites, jurors tend to be down-to-earth folk possessed of common sense, who want to be satisfied, before finding someone guilty of a serious crime, that they understand why and with whom the accused acted. Those facts and circumstances, nevertheless, are collateral to what makes the prosecutor’s case legally “sufficient.”

Imagine if, on a clean slate, you were tasked to design a security system for banks. Undoubtedly, you would consult experts, study diagrams, catalogue the bank’s vulnerabilities, marshal its protective assets, assess trends in security technology, and plan accordingly. You would not limit your study to the quirky details of a single bank robbery, or even a string of such robberies, no matter how infamous. You would not conclude that by addressing whatever flaws had led to one robbery, you had perforce addressed the bank’s overall security challenges.

Yet, that is precisely what we did with Islamic terrorism after the World Trade Center bombing. The investigative energy was substantially channeled into designing cases that stood the best chance of convicting the operatives who were apprehended. Transcendent national security questions were subordinated to transient legal ones. What buildings were in interstate commerce? Which gun had an obliterated serial number? Were identification documents phony because they’d been stolen or forged? Were enough acts undertaken in a planned bombing to establish a legal “attempt,” or were those acts “mere preparation” absent the “substantial step” necessary for conviction? These were the types of issues that got primo scrutiny — as they had to if prosecutions were going to be successful.

Necessarily, that means resources — including some of the best, most knowledgeable minds, during an era when few such minds were engaged in the subject of radical Islam — were diverted from such issues as: How extensive was the terror network? What were its aims? What about rogue-state facilitation? And what do we do about the fact that, as a practical matter, most of an international terror network’s hierarchy outside the United States simply cannot be reached by law enforcement?

The law can answer some of those questions, but not all of them. They are not the law’s principal concern. In a terrorism trial, it is more important to demonstrate that a low-level jihadist has been adequately represented by the court-appointed lawyer with whom he has declined to cooperate than to prove who in Afghanistan might have covertly financed the purchase of the bomb components he was mixing. The jihadist, after all, is here. If you’re going to try him in the criminal justice system, the Constitution’s injunctions must be honored. It is the law. But it is not national security.

The criminal-justice system’s prestige, its algorithms, and its factitious parsing of even the irrelevant paint a tableau of law enforcement energy, attention, and competence. Its adversarial jousting, weighty burdens of proof, and solemn, painstaking verdicts generate the final record: the definitive version of what happened and what is true. The process burnishes resulting convictions with not only a deserved aura of accomplishment but the veneer of security, the confirmation that public safety has truly been advanced.

Sometimes, it’s an illusion. Sometimes there is a bigger picture that is obscured.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was not unpredictable. It shocked the public, but for law enforcement it was a case of evil people doing exactly what they’d been saying they were going to do: terrorize the American people by bombing attacks. Not taking them seriously, we averted our eyes. And when bomber Nidal Ayyad wrote, “we promise you that next time it will be very precise and World Trade Center will continue to be one [of] our targets,” we averted them yet again.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is National Review’s Legal-Affairs Editor and Chairs FDD’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism. This article is excerpted from his best-selling book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).