The Freedom Tower

The Chicago Tribune says “In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, vice presidential candidate Joe Biden offered an inconvenient prediction: “It will not be six months,” he said, “before the world tests Barack Obama. We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

History is on Biden’s side. In the first year of each of the last two presidents’ terms, Osama bin Laden has claimed the mantle of “tester in chief,” his Al Qaeda operatives conducting lethal strikes on the American homeland. On Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and his national security team were caught unaware. This despite a clear trend from the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, bin Laden’s official declaration of war on the U.S. in 1998, the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Africa and an attack on a U.S. warship in 2000. Holdovers from the previous administration were sounding the alarm. Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke argued repeatedly: “We urgently need a principals [Cabinet] level review of the Al Qaeda threat.” But as the bipartisan commission investigating Sept. 11 found: “No principals committee meeting on Al Qaeda was held until Sept. 4, 2001.”

Similarities between Sept. 11 and the terrorist attack in the first months of President Bill Clinton’s administration are not coincidental. Thirty-seven days after he took office, Al Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef parked a van filled with explosives in the basement of the World Trade Center. Yousef was the nephew of the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. His plan was designed to kill 40,000 people by toppling one tower of the center into a second. Fortunately, the driver failed to park the van at a location that would have had maximum effect. Six people were killed and 1,000 injured.
The newly elected president and vice president are acutely conscious of the threat posed by bin Laden. They know that bin Laden has challenged the Al Qaeda movement to trump Sept. 11. During the campaign, Obama recognized that “the single most important national security threat that we face is nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.” He criticized the Bush administration for taking its eye off the perps who attacked us on Sept. 11 and vowed that he would “find, disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda.”