2002 State of the Union Address
Bush spoke about the September 11 attacks of the previous year that killed thousands of people in New York City, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda carried out the attack with 19 hijackers that took over four commercial airline flights and crashed them into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York City's Lower Manhattan, and into the Pentagon in Virginia's Arlington County.
1993 World Trade Center bombing
Claims of direct Iraqi involvement come from Dr. Laurie Mylroie of the American Enterprise Institute and former associate professor of the U.S. Naval War College, with the claims rejected by others. CNN reporter Peter Bergen has called her a "crackpot" who claimed that "Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City bombing to September 11 itself." Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes: "The most knowledgeable analysts and investigators at the CIA and at the FBI believe that their work conclusively disproves Mylroie's claims." Dr. Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center comments on the lack of evidence in her work: "Laurie has discovered Saddam's hand in every major attack on US interests since the Persian Gulf War, including U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and even the federal building in Oklahoma City. These allegations have all been definitively refuted by the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and other investigatory bodies..."