TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY terrorists first tried to take down the tallest buildings in America's largest city.
In retaliation against United States' support of Israel and intervention in the Middle East, two men parked a yellow Ryder truck in a public parking garage beneath the World Trade Center and detonated a half-ton bomb. The blast did not topple the towers, as the driver of that truck, Ramzi Yousef, had hoped. But smoke choked the buildings and knocked out its power. Six people died and more than a thousand others were injured. It was the first ever terrorist attack on American soil.
The man whose wire transfer funded that attack, Yousef's uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would mastermind an even larger one eight years later. Both were conducted and planned by men of Middle Eastern descent intent on revenge against the U.S. and Israel's military action in the region.
