The 1993 World Trade Center Bombing is presented as both a major terrorist plot and a precedent that complicates explanations of the September 11 attacks. In Noam Chomsky’s account, the episode links the World Trade Center’s repeated targeting to militant networks with earlier connections to U.S.-supported forces, while exposing the unequal political use of the word “terrorism.”

The 1993 plot and its targets

Chomsky recalls that the World Trade Center had been attacked in 1993 before it was struck again on September 11, 2001. The earlier plot, as he describes it, extended beyond the tower: it also included plans to destroy the United Nations building, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and other targets. He characterizes it as a large-scale terrorist operation and notes that the World Trade Center bombing was one of several intended attacks.

The account associates the plot with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Citing specialist John Cooley, Chomsky says that CIA agents voluntarily helped Abdel Rahman enter the United States in 1990, although Egypt already wanted him for terrorist acts. Chomsky further states that Abdel Rahman was implicated in the 1993 bombing and was later tried for conspiracy and sentenced to a long prison term. The text establishes these claims as part of Chomsky’s argument about the history of the network; it does not provide a separate reconstruction of the investigation or trial.

Methods and the Afghan connection

Chomsky says that the 1993 operation followed procedures taught in CIA manuals that, it appears, had been supplied to the “Afghans” during the war against Russia. Elsewhere in the discussion, he describes radical Islamist forces as having been organized, armed, and trained with support from the United States, Egypt, France, and Pakistan. He presents the bombing as part of a longer sequence of violence involving forces that had been cultivated for other purposes, rather than as an isolated episode without antecedents.

That history informs his criticism of explanations that attribute attacks on the World Trade Center chiefly to globalization, economic imperialism, or cultural values. Chomsky argues that such explanations do not fit his account of the concerns of Osama bin Laden and other radical Islamists, including those convicted in connection with the 1993 explosions. The attack therefore serves not only as a prior instance of violence at the same site but also as evidence in his dispute over how the motives and political context of such violence should be described.

Terrorism and the politics of definition

Chomsky applies the official U.S. definition of terrorism as the calculated use or threat of violence for political, religious, or ideological purposes, including intimidation, coercion, or the creation of fear. By that definition, he identifies the 1993 attack as a terrorist crime. He also argues that official definitions of terrorism closely resemble those used to describe “low-intensity warfare,” and that terrorism, so defined, can be a component of state policy rather than solely an “weapon of the weak.”

The bombing helps make visible the distinction he draws between a literal definition and a propagandistic one. In the latter usage, “terrorism” commonly names violence committed by enemies against the United States or its allies, while comparable coercive methods used by powerful states are given other labels. Chomsky argues that applying one definition consistently would force scrutiny of state actions as well as non-state attacks. The 1993 plot, in his account, is thus an unequivocal terrorist crime, but its history also raises questions about state involvement, selective attention, and the political language used to classify violence.

Recurrence and wider consequences

Chomsky emphasizes the recurrence of the World Trade Center as a target, but cautions that the reasons for choosing it cannot be confidently reduced to symbolic objections to globalization or cultural influence. He treats the 1993 attack as a point of comparison that challenges accounts of September 11 built around those explanations, not as proof that the two attacks had identical motives or planning.

The comparison also sits within a wider argument about the consequences of September 11. Chomsky says the attacks accelerated pre-existing policies: governments used the counterterrorism framework to intensify repression, while the Bush administration used the climate of fear and patriotism to advance domestic measures and reinforce U.S. military predominance. He links the subsequent establishment of major U.S. bases in Central Asia to strategic influence over regional resources and describes the Afghanistan bombings as a demonstration of U.S. capacity. These later developments are not consequences attributed specifically to the 1993 bombing; they form the larger political setting in which Chomsky revisits it.