1. 2/26 and 1/6
Part of the frustration this week is listening to people argue that the January 6 attack on the presidential electoral vote count was NBD. Mona Charen has an excellent roundup of such statements here. It’s depressing.
But is it surprising?
Maybe it shouldn’t be. Because we often suffer from failures of imagination. Let me tell you a story.
On February 26, 1993 Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil parked a rental van in the public garage beneath the World Trade Center. The van was filled with explosives. Yousef lit the fuse and at 12:17 p.m. the bomb exploded.
Yousef’s plan had been to bring down the North Tower and have it crash into the South Tower.
The plan was almost comically stupid: 1,300 lbs. of fertilizer-based explosives was not going to bring down that tower. And even if it could have brought down the building, this was not like felling a tree, where Yousef could precisely angle how one tower fell in order hit the other tower.
Yousef was the idiot ringleader and the cast of characters around him were like something out of a bad movie.
There was a blind fake “sheikh” named Omar Abdel-Rahman.
There was Yousef’s right-hand man, Mohammed Salameh, a dude with a unibrow who failed his driver’s test in America four times and kept getting into car accidents while helping Yousef plan the attack. Salameh drove a 1978 Chevy Nova—which is itself a ludicrous detail—and in one of his accidents Yousef, who was riding shotgun, ..
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