The first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, was the opening salvo in radical Islam’s war against the US, yet its importance was missed by almost the entire intelligence and law enforcement communities.

The man behind that attack was Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” well known to law enforcement officials through his hateful sermons. Despite being on a State Department watch list, he was repeatedly granted visas to enter the United States and was not treated as a serious threat to our national security until long after the seeds of radical Islam were planted here.

Andrew McCarthy, the former Assistant United States Attorney who successfully prosecuted Rahman, tells the inside story of the atrocious, almost comical and perhaps criminal missteps, miscues and missed opportunities that allowed the first World Trade Center bombing to take place.

“The war was on,” McCarthy rightly notes, “but we didn’t see it yet. It was still dawn and we were playing catch-up. That we couldn’t see was a problem easily rectified by information. That we wouldn’t see even upon informing ourselves – that was a problem within us.”

Rahman even said it himself – for he, like Osama bin Laden, would go to great lengths to tell us exactly what they are going to do and why. We (particularly the FBI, McCarthy notes) simply didn’t believe him.

“Why do we fear the word terrorist?” the Blind Sheikh asked, while being recorded by the FBI. “If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, then we are terrorists. And if the terrorist is the one who struggles for the sake of God, then we are terrorists. We . . . have been ordered with terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”

McCarthy adds much to the existing post-9/11 literature. He offers details of the informant named Emad Salem, who, at great personal risk, insinuated himself into the Blind Sheikh’s inner circle and, as McCarthy notes, enabled law enforcement to “catch the terrorists in flagrante delicto on videotape, mixing bomb components in a dank Queens safe house.” Of particular note was the mole’s daring efforts to tape what Rahman was saying. We learn of the abysmal record in handling fragile informants, and the stress of maintaining a credible cover story.

Though not shy about flying his partisan (Republican) sympathies, he is not bound by them. “There were two reasons the right thing got done,” McCarthy writes, “two reasons the Blind Sheikh was finally indicted in August 1993 for seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy, attempted bombing, solicitation to attack U.S. military installations . . . their names are Mary Jo White and Janet Reno.”

White was McCarthy’s boss who fought bureaucratic battles on his behalf at the Justice Department. Reno, President Clinton’s oft-maligned attorney general, fought the battles at the highest level of government, convinced the indictment was imperative to national security.

But what makes the book even more important than a simple retrospective is McCarthy’s efforts to place the Blind Sheikh in his proper historical context. Rahman is part of the continuum of radical Islamist thought and action that runs through Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah centuries ago, to Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood to Abdullah Azzam to Rahman to bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.

When Rahman preached and demanded violence and terrorism, he was not a lone man in the wilderness, but part of the chorus of venerated voices who, throughout the history of Islam, have defined jihad as an act of war, terror and conquest, driven by the divine right to subdue the infidel by force. These voices cite the Koran and its accompanying texts, called hadiths, to “fight those of the disbelievers who are near you,” and “fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them,” McCarthy concludes that “this is the jihad of Islamic scripture.”

One can disagree with the generalization, but its clear that this was the jihad of the Blind Sheikh and his ideological forefathers and progeny.

It is a lesson worth remembering, though it seems to on the verge of being forgotten already. Radical Islam continues to name the United States almost every day as its primary targets. “We can open our eyes and see it,” McCarthy notes, “or not.”

Douglas Farah, a national security consultant, is the author most recently of “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible.”

Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad

by Andrew C. McCarthy

Encounter Books