What would "challenge" the evidence?
I have not read the book but Richard Clarke's book is quoted by a few columnists thus, "Ramzi Yousef and [Terry] Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days.... Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American?... We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States."
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mylroie200404050847.asp
Though Clarke is hardly reliable I nevertheless wonder why he's straying from covering for Clinton. Why would he include something in his book that raises questions about the the lone "ditto-head" bombers, McVeigh and Nichols?
One mainstream source says, "Clarke says he could never disprove a conspiracy theory linking Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda operatives who helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Terry Nichols, one of the organizers of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-03-28-clarke-book_x.htm
I say again. Patriots endured years of abuse, ridicule, and threats before we got serious investigations of Ruby Ridge and Waco.
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was supposed to be the ultimate retaliation by Saddam Hussein for the first Gulf War. But it failed; the bomb was not powerful enough to bring down the towers. Still determined to bring down the towers, Saddam and his Al Qaeda henchmen had to come up with some new plans, and these had to be tested.
1. First, they needed to see if they could build a more powerful bomb. But this could not be tried out on the WTC itelf because of the possibility of failure and arrest again. So they went to a place the Americans would least expect, a place where there were already a lot of Iraqis and they could blend into the landscape while they plotted their test. Oklahoma City. They already knew Terry Nichols, and it was easy for Nichols to recruit his friend Tim McVeigh to do the dirty work. While that bomb did kill lots of people, it still was not powerful enough to bring down the WTC towers. So truck bombs were abandoned.
2. Ramzi Yousef (the Iraqi) and friends had been fantasizing for a long time about crashing airliners into buildings such as the CIA. At some point, they put two and two together and started thinking about crashing planes into the WTC towers as the best way to bring them down.
3. This time, they knew the plot had to work or they were through. They could not afford to fail again. In order to ensure that the plot would succeed, they needed to know the explosive power of a fully-loaded jumbo jet. So they blew up TWA 800. They got the data they needed, right out of the newspapers that reported every detail of the explosion and the size and spread of the debris. They knew their plan would work. All they needed was time to find the men who would learn to fly the jets and train for the hijackings.
Bill Clinton did nothing about any of this because it was "the economy, stupid" and a war on terror was just not in his game plan. He had the lily-livered Warren Christopher as Secretary of State who would not have supported committing troops if Washington, D.C, itself was being bombed. Plus he got the added bonus of being able to pin McVeigh as a right-wing militia nut, which helped him get reelected. He had to squelch the TWA 800 investigation because it led right back to OKC and to the first WTC bombing.