Three years ago, when a Manhattan jury held the Port Authority 68 percent lia ble for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, we blasted the verdict as an exercise in 20/20 hindsight that effectively exonerated the terrorists of responsibility.
But a closer look at that verdict, which was unanimously upheld last week by a five-judge Appellate Division panel, suggests the Port Authority shouldn’t be let off the hook quite so quickly.
Indeed, the agency is lucky it was only held 68 percent responsible.
As Justice Jonathan Lippman noted in his appropriately blistering decision, the Port Authority – beginning nearly a decade before their first terrorist attack – commissioned no fewer than five reports from its own security consultants and outside experts.
And all five reached the same conclusion: Because of the public garage located directly beneath the towers, the World Trade Center site was vulnerable to a “catastrophic” terrorist attack that was not only likely but, in fact, “probable.”
Indeed, Lippman wrote, these reports all detailed “with exact prescience, the manner by which the . . . garage vulnerability could be exploited” – to the point of laying out the exact scenario the terrorists would later follow.
The reports, noting that “the car bomb is fast becoming the weapon of choice for European terrorists,” urged the PA to eliminate all of its on-site parking – as other identified “high risk” target buildings were doing.
So how did the PA respond?
Within weeks, it flatly rejected the recommendations – because they’d have meant “inconvenience and unacceptable revenue loss.”
That’s outrageous.
What the agency did, in effect, was to place a giant bullseye on the World Trade Center inviting terrorists to attack, without taking the slightest precaution to deter them.
Which is why there’s more to this than the usual targeting of a big government agency because it – unlike the criminals – has the deep pockets to pay out millions in damages (albeit with public money).
None of this, as the panel noted, should be taken as absolving the terrorists.
Ultimately, they’re the ones who rented the truck, filled it with explosives, drove it to the garage and exploded it – killing six and injuring hundreds.
And it may well be, even had the PA acted on the experts’ recommendations, determined terrorists would have found a way to perpetrate an attack.
But, as the judges wrote, in the attack that actually did take place, “all that remained between the bombers and their nefarious objective were tasks rendered horrifyingly and embarrassingly simple” by the Port Authority’s negligence.
Which is why the agency now is on the hook for a vast sum of money.
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