Хогланд (вообще всегда очень разумный):
Before the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland, terrorists usually proudly claimed "credit" for themselves and their causes. They established proof of their responsibility and explained why it was necessary to shock the world with extreme actions.
Now the terrorist style is to remain silent, count on the United States to treat the attack not as an act of war but as a legal matter for world tribunals to resolve (as it did with Pan Am 103) or to launch poorly conceived pinprick responses by cruise missiles (as it did for the 1998 embassy bombings). The hidden hand and those who manipulate it now remain in the shadows to escape direct retaliation.
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There has been a certain complacency in the repeated assurances from officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations that U.S. power has put its openly declared enemies abroad "in a box" from which they were powerless to strike convincingly at U.S. interests. In today's interconnected high-tech world such a box does not exist. There is no wall over which the frustrated, the damaged, or the desperate cannot and will not climb.
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"Eight years of incomplete explanations for the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center left the country vulnerable to this," said author Laurie Mylroie, whose book, "Study of Revenge" is a thorough examination of that attack. "We wasted eight years."
Mylroie puts Ramzi Yussef, an ethnic Baluch from Pakistan traveling on an Iraqi passport, at the center of the 1993 effort to topple the World Trade Center and spread cyanide gas throughout Wall Street. It failed in part because the blast was detonated in a van parked below ground in the twin towers complex. Mylroie points a finger at Iraq's Saddam Hussein as having the most obvious motive to seek revenge on American soil with that attack.
That has yet to be proven conclusively. But Mylroie and others make a convincing case that the technical skills, coordination and resources required for mega-terror operations need the support of hostile intelligence agencies and governments with an overriding need to strike America senseless.
"People like Ramzi Yussef and Osama bin Laden have become fronts for bigger forces who help them and use them," she said. "There can be no question that Iraqi, Sudanese and other intelligence agencies have helped these two, and others. We cannot continue looking past this and treat these as isolated incidents."