I remember the first attack on the WTC on February 26th, 1993.  At the time I was working in law enforcement and in the Communications Room when the news came over the TV.    I remember standing there - like a lot of people - and wondering just how vunerable we were, and in many ways still are, to such an attack.

On that day Andy McCarthy remembers:

“On the morning of February 26, 1993, Islamic militants steered a nondescript Ryder van through the winding darkness of the parking garage under the World Trade Center. They had spent years planning this moment in secret meetings at mosques and jailhouses, in rural outposts that served as paramilitary camps, and in safehouses where explosive compounds were mixed in makeshift labs.

Loaded into the van’s rear compartment was a 1,400-pound chemical bomb.

The explosive detonated at a few minutes after noon. The hyper-intensive shockwave bored a six-story canyon into the bowels of the complex. Seven people were killed (one of the six officially listed murder victims having been well along in her pregnancy), over a thousand were injured, and the structural damage would cost nearly a billion dollars to repair.

Amid the terror, the dark cloud that envelops us still 15 years later, was a silver lining. This time, the “battalion of Islam” — as the “blind sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, liked to refer to the cells in his emerging jihad army — had failed.

It had been the intention of the World Trade Center bombers to annihilate tens of thousands of Americans, in addition to rendering the world’s most significant financial district uninhabitable. Detonation was consciously timed for maximum carnage: high noon on a Friday, when as many as 120,000 business professionals, laborers, diners, tourists, and area residents typically swarmed the Twin Towers and their immediate Wall Street environs.

More diabolically, not content with their sophisticated, powerfully combustible urea-nitrate mixture, the jihadists laced the compound with deadly sodium cyanide and attempted to boost the explosion with hydrogen tanks. The aim was a horror virtually unimaginable back then (though it is, today, an omnipresent fear): wide dispersal of a lethal, aerated chemical, killing the thousands too distant to be obliterated by the sheer force of the blast.

The battalion, however, miscalculated. They‚Äôd hoped to place the bomb close enough to primary support structures that one tower, in its decimation, might topple into the second. The van, though, had been parked many yards away from the ideal location. Added to this good fortune, the hydrogen tanks had been destroyed upon detonation, adding nothing but shards to the impact. And another break: The cyanide failed to vaporize ‚Äî simply burning away like the rest of the bomb components. “

As we know it would take seven years but the terrrorist finally succeeded on 9/11/2001.¬†¬† The larger question everyone has is how could we’ve let the door so wide open in the years between 1993 and 2001.

Just after the attack I remember one of my partners said, “Dry run”.¬† I remember nodding, being familiar with terrorism (had friends that died on Pan Am Flight 103).¬† However, I believe most people didn’t look at it as such.¬† We know that the Clinton administration didn’t.¬† It’s well known that they addressed the issue as a “law enforcement issue” and not a terrorism one.¬†¬† We all know about Jamie Gorelick’s wall which prevented critical sharing of data between angencies.

The trouble is now we have the democrats playing the same game with our national security now as they did then.  Simply ignoring the dangers for nothing more than political expediency.

So while we remember, perhaps in November American’s should remember how such incompetence and disregard for their safety led to the deaths of thousands, and vote accordingly.