Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 20, 1994 TAG: 9402200075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
Motorists need not pop the trunk before entering the Rockefeller Center parking garage, and tourists don't have to line up at metal detectors in the Empire State Building. The Plaza's lobby no longer looks like a Secret Service convention.
The World Trade Center bombing, once regarded as a sign that terrorism had finally crossed the oceans to America, now seems more like a truck backfiring on the Fourth of July - a momentary distraction, soon forgotten amid the general cacophony.
"I don't think very much about it anymore," said Patricia Renton, a paralegal who works at the Trade Center. "There are other things to worry about."
On the afternoon of Feb. 26, 1993, however, there was only the bomb. It shook the nation's two largest office towers, killed six people, injured another 1,000 and closed the complex for weeks.
Eventually, there would be arrests of a group of Islamic fundamentalists, followers of a storefront preacher with a seething contempt for Western modernity; revelations of the suspects' anger over U.S. policy in the Middle East; a long and largely uneventful trial.
But what the nation remembers are the images of Feb. 26 - tens of thousands of office workers streaming into the street, bewildered and exhausted, their faces streaked with smoke, sweat and tears. "We all have that feeling of being violated," said Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Experts warned of more of the same. FBI chief William Sessions said the bombing "could be the harbinger of a new era," and Rand Corp. analyst Bruce Hoffman called it "a watershed. . . . We are incredibly vulnerable. Everyone is going to be looking at us."
Our borders were porous. Our policies were unpopular. "We are in very deep trouble," said terrorism expert Robert Kupperman.
The attack's success was said to have offered encouragement to almost anyone with a grudge and a bomb. If the center's bombers were amateurs, that showed anyone could do it; if they were pros, that meant foreign terrorists were ready to strike the home front.
For years, of course, Americans had been installing metal detectors, closed circuit televisions and car barricades. Now, there were calls for even more security, an unappealing prospect to those already living behind triple-locked doors and window bars.
But a funny thing happened:
Nothing.
The alleged perpetrators were quickly arrested, and, four months later, a related group also was rounded up - before, authorities said, they could blow up the Lincoln Tunnel, the United Nations and other targets.
The FBI increased surveillance of other suspected terrorists, and reportedly told them, in so many words, "Don't even think about it." The State Department started a computerized program to make sure suspected terrorists overseas don't get entry visas. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tightened security requirements for nuclear power plants.
And, mostly without realizing it, Americans declared the Trade Center episode a victory.
Three days after the blast, the president of the United States outlined the rules. The terrorists win half the battle, said Bill Clinton, "if they can get us to change the way we live and what we do."
So the windows were replaced, the soot was washed off and the holes were patched. The nation moved on; the terrorists lost.
"I was extremely pessimistic a year ago," says Robert Kupperman. "Now I'm much less so."
The Trade Center itself still bears many signs of the bombing, including its shuttered underground garage and rooftop restaurant. But elsewhere, "very little has changed," says Philip Stern, a former prosecutor who manages the Fairfax Group, a security service.
"There's no additional security at bridges or tunnels. You can walk into most office building lobbies and get onto an elevator without identification. Very few companies have taken serious security steps."
Terrorism continues to be a problem, but largely a foreign problem. The weekend of the Trade Center blast, there were bombings in Cairo, London and Lima. On two separate days in 1993, Kurdish terrorists attacked about 75 separate Turkish targets around Europe.
The number of global terrorist incidents logged by the State Department increased from 361 in 1992 to 427 last year. But '93 compared favorably to '91, when there were 557 incidents. More than half of those involved U.S. citizens or property, compared to only about 20 percent last year.
Besides time and benign neglect, there was another reason the bombing faded from consciousness: It was an act of violence in what Cuomo, speaking Feb. 28, called "the most violent place in the world - not because they do it to us but because we do it to ourselves."
A year later, the bombing seems nefarious but not remarkable, not in a nation where gunshots kill more than 100 people a day; not in a state where more people die from gunshots than auto accidents; not in a city where gun deaths are so common that one newspaper lists them in a standing column entitled "The Toll."
The Trade Center blast was spectacular, but it was also just one of 30,000 cases of workplace violence last year, just one of 2,200 bombings.
In the weeks and months after Feb. 26, there were plenty of other violent diversions: The catastrophe at the Branch Davidian compound in Texas; the arrest of a Long Island man who allegedly murdered a string of prostitutes; the murder of six people by a gunman who opened fire on a Long Island commuter train at rush hour.
Will what the government calls "the single most devastating terror attack ever committed on American soil" eventually fade from memory? High school students still learn of the "Palmer raid" roundups of suspected subversives in 1920, but not the bomb that killed 30 people on Wall Street in the same year.
"It was like throwing a rock in a pond," says Brian Jenkins of Kroll, the security consulting firm. "A big splash, but the ripples dissipate."
Some, however, still think the Trade Center blast marked a turn for the worse.
"The fact there haven't been any more attacks doesn't mean we're out of the woods," says Bruce Hoffman. "Terrorism doesn't work in a predictable fashion. It may be another year before a new one in the U.S."
The attack, he says, remains a landmark of "the amateurization of terrorism"; it showed that amateurs using ordinary materials could have an extraordinary impact in the United States.
Any terrorism forecast based on the Trade Center is undercut by the fact that, after a four-month trial with 207 prosecution witnesses and 1,003 exhibits, "we still don't know the big picture," says Hoffman.
by CNB