
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 7, 1994                   TAG: 9403070063
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TERENCE SAMUEL KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

WORLD TERRORISM BEGINS TO HIT AMERICANS CLOSE TO THEIR HOMES

The pictures grew increasingly familiar, but they remained foreign all the same. The bodies, the blood, the chaos and the panic as another deadly act of violence was committed in the name of another political, religious or ideological cause.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the horrifying images always seemed to be of other people in other places - Munich; London; Cairo; Beirut.

Then, on Feb. 26, 1993, 1,200 pounds of explosive chemicals ripped a five-story hole in the World Trade Center, shattering the sense of public security and obliterating for Americans the notion that terrorism was mostly a foreign policy issue.

This time, the frantic screams and the pleas for help were coming from American voices. The soot-covered faces of survivors being carried out were those of the folks next door.

"Every day I come to work, I worry that they are going to do it again," said Vito DeLeo, 33, an engineer at the World Trade Center who saw the fireball of the blast come through a wall at him. On Friday, he was having pizza for lunch in the same parking garage where the bomb went off. He wears a hearing aid in his left ear to compensate for an eardrum ruptured by the blast, which also left him with cuts and bruises.

"The World Trade Center is not what it used to be," he said. "There are so many security checkpoints. It's not any fun. It's not a free society anymore."

Said Raymond W. Kelly, who was New York City's police commissioner at the time: "We used to have a feeling that we were invulnerable to attack, and the World Trade Center changed that."

The bombing posed a series of questions about U.S. susceptibility to terrorist attacks and whether terrorists, in the search for suitable targets, had grown more inclined to exploit that vulnerability.

A year of debate, the uncovering of a second bombing plot last summer and Friday's conviction of four men charged with the Trade Center attack have done little to resolve those larger questions.

And last week's shooting attack on a busload of Hasidic Jews on the Brooklyn Bridge has served only to more urgently restate the questions. The accused is a Lebanese national. Investigators so far have refused to discuss motives for the shooting, but coming four days after a Jewish extremist slaughtered 39 praying Muslims in a West Bank mosque, it looked alarmingly like a response to the violence half a world away.

Kelly, now a professor of public policy at New York University, said that aside from the bus attack, the potential of terrorism was now a fact of life for Americans.

"The central questions are `Are we vulnerable?' and the answer is yes; `Did things change because of the World Trade Center?' and the answer is yes."

Kelly said the ease of travel in the United States made it difficult to eliminate that vulnerability.

And it is hard not to note that Americans can hardly expect to remain immune from international terrorism when Americans contribute to it: While the Brooklyn Bridge suspect was born in Lebanon, the West Bank killer, Baruch Goldstein, was born in Brooklyn.

Any change in U.S. foreign policy to forestall" terrorist attacks would be perceived as giving in to blackmail. Many people, therefore, believe that the extent to which the United States becomes a new theater for acts of terrorism depends on the law enforcement response.

by CNB