Terrorist Attacks

I searched for an event during the Clinton Administration that would be significant for a history lesson this week and had to settle for terrorist attacks. In researching for this post, I discovered that the first terrorist attack took place in 1920. On September 16 of that year, a TNT bomb was planted in an unattended horse-drawn wagon in New York City. It exploded on Wall Street opposite the House of Morgan; it killed 35 people and injured hundreds of other people. The crime was never solved, but Bolshevist or anarchist terrorists were believed to be responsible. The next terrorist attack apparently took place in 1975 when a bomb was set off on January 24 in Fraunces Tavern in New York City. This bomb killed 4 people and injured more than 50 other people. A Puerto Rican nationalist group (FALN) claimed to be responsible. Police tied 13 other bombings to the group. In the thirty year period from 1979 when Iranian radical students seized the U.S. Embassy on November 4,took 66 hostages and kept 52 of them prisoners for 444 days until the Christmas Day bomber in 2009, there have been more than 40 separate terrorist attacks or attempted attacks within the United States or against Americans abroad. Most of them were credited to people from the Middle East. I'll elaborate on only those that took place while Bill Clinton was in the White House. On February 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in the basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. It killed 6 people and injured at least 1,040 other people. Militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 other people were convicted on conspiracy charges in 1995. In 1998, the suspected mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, was convicted of the bombing. Al-Qaeda involvement is suspected. On April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City, a car bomb exploded outside the federal office building. Walls and floors collapsed, killing 168 people - including 19 children and 1 person who died in the rescue attempt. More than 220 other buildings received some damage from the bomb. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were later convicted in the anti-government plot to avenge the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, exactly 2 years earlier. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb exploded at U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and killed 5 United States military servicemen. On June 25, 1996, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, a truck bomb exploded outside Khobar Towers military complex. It killed 19 American servicemen and injured hundreds of others. In June 2001, 13 Saudis and a Lebanese, all alleged to be members of Islamic militant group Hezbollah, were indicted on charges relating to the attack. On August 7, 1998, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, truck bombs exploded almost at the same time near 2 United States embassies. These attacks killed 224 people (213 in Kenya and 11 in Tanzania) and injured 4,500. In May 2001, 4 men connected with Al-Qaeda - 2 of them were trained at Al-Qaeda camps inside Afghanistan - were convicted of the killings and later sentenced to life in prison. Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, who remained at large, was one of 22 men indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with the attacks. On October 12, 2000, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole was docked and refueling in the Port of Aden in Yemen when a small boat carrying two men approached the ship. Explosives packed into the small boat were detonated alongside the U.S.S. Cole. The resulting explosion killed 17 sailors on board the destroyer and injured 39 others. It also tore a hole 40 feet high and 40 feet wide in the side of the 505-foot-long vessel. Some international analysts suspected that the bombers were connected to Arabs who were sympathetic to the Palestinian uprising while other analysts thought that the blame for the bombing lay with Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire who was believed by the United States of funding terrorist attacks such as the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was responsible for a pledge to drive the United States military forces out of the Middle East, and his main supporters were Islamist militants from various Arab countries who were referred to as "Arab Afghans." Several Arab Afghans were detained by Yemeni authorities for questioning in the bombing. Investigators for the Yemeni government concluded that the two bombers who were killed in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole had been Arab Afghans from Saudi Arabia. Three to six Yemenis were suspected as being accomplices in the incident. It seemed at the time that President Clinton was not all that interested in pursuing Bin Laden. Maybe the destruction of 9/11 could have been avoided or lessened by concentrating on stopping Bin Laden during the Clinton Administration instead of the investigation about oral sex in the Oval Office.

Bill Clinton

The man that we know as William Jefferson Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946, three months after his father was killed in an automobile accident. His given and family name was William Jefferson Blythe IV after his father. Bill was told by relatives and family members that he resembled his father with his good looks and lively personality. Bill lived with his mother and her parents in Hope, Arkansas, and he stayed with his grandparents while his mother went to New Orleans for a year to become a nurse-anesthetist. Bill was four years old when his mother remarried. He started using his stepfather's last name while still in elementary school and formally changed his name to William Jefferson Clinton when he was 15. Bill was strongly influenced by his mother. She and Bill often enjoyed long conversations about situations one of them thought were unfair. His mother remarried when Bill was four years old, and the family soon moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas. His stepfather was an alcoholic who occasionally abused Mrs. Clinton verbally and/or physically. Bill stood up at least once to protect is mother from his stepfather and credited his troubled family life for his skills at solving disagreements and avoiding conflicts. In spite of occasional problems, Bill was close with his stepfather at the time of the older man's death. Bill, whose family was Baptist, attended a Roman Catholic in Hot Springs for two years in preparation for attending the large public school system. Bill earned good grades and enjoyed schoolwork. Bill was active in a variety of clubs and held many offices in high school where he played tenor saxophone in the band and served as band major while a senior. Clinton showed an early interest in politics. While serving as a delegate to the American Legion Boys Nation in Washington, D.C., he had the opportunity to meet and shake hands with President John F. Kennedy. This meeting convinced him to pursue a career in politics. After high school graduation in 1964, Bill attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., majoring in international affairs. He served as president of his freshman and sophomore classes. He studied hard and helped pay his expenses by a job with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His was strongly influenced by black Americans' fight for social justice in the civil rights movement. After graduating from Georgetown, Bill entered Oxford University in Oxford, England, as a Rhodes Scholar, a scholarship he won during his senior year at Georgetown. After two years at Oxford, Bill entered Yale Law School in 1970. He paid his expenses there with a scholarship and holding part-time jobs. Bill met fellow law student Hillary Rodham from Illinois. They began dating in 1971 and married on October 11, 1975. The Clintons had one daughter, Chelsea, in 1980. Hillary continued to pursue her own career as an attorney and later became active in public affairs as Hillary Rodham. She adopted the last name of her husband in 1982. After graduating from law school in 1973, Bill took a position with the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville. He ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974 but was defeated. In 1976 he ran unopposed in the general election for attorney general of Arkansas and took office in January 1977. Early in 1978 he became a candidate for governor of Arkansas and was inaugurated in January 1979. He was defeated when he ran for reelection in 1980, but returned to the office in January 1983. He was reelected in 1984 and again in 1986 by wide margins. After Arkansas passed a constitutional amendment in 1984 to change the governor's term of office from two years to four, effective with the 1986 election, Bill was elected to a fifth term in 1990. Bill became the Democratic presidential nominee in July 1992 and later won the presidential election. He had great leadership skills, and the United States enjoyed peace and well-being during his administration. He was re-elected in 1996, becoming the first Democratic President since FDR to win a second term. During his second term as President, he was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for lying under oath about having oral sex with an intern in the Oval Office. He was tried in the Senate but was found not guilty of the charges. He apologized to the nation for his behavior and remained a popular President. As a former President of the United States he is a distinguished Elder Statesman who continues to serve his country whenever called upon. Facts for this post came from an article by Ernest C. Dumas in World Book Encyclopedia, Vol.4, pp 682, a-e.