The FBI tried to bring down the WTC back in 1993, but wasn't able to park the van filled with explosives close enough to a support column because the parking spaces next to it were already taken (they actually went so far as to take down the barriers around one of the support columns in advance so as to facilitate this). None of this would be known today if it were not for the FBI's undercover agent Emad Salem taping his conversations with his FBI handlers (unbeknownst to them). Salem thought that the FBI might try to pin it on him so he took measures to protect himself. Indeed, without the FBI the '93 WTC bombing would never have happened, as it was agent Salem who taught the other would-be Muslim "terrorists" how to make the bomb. Salem wanted to use fake ingredients for the "bomb" but the FBI ordered him to make a real one. When the making of the bomb was complete Salem told the FBI that they could now arrest the would-be terrorists, but the FBI told Salem that the bombing is to go forward. After agent Salem went public with his tapes in a news conference the FBI found it necessary to pay him over a million dollars just to shut him up. See the October 28, 1993 New York Times article "Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast":
