Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

EAST AFRICAN U.S. EMBASSY ATTACKS • 157December 1999 ELF burned a Boise Cascade office in Monmouth,Oregon, with damages of $15,000. On 21 July 2000 the ELF destroyedthousands of poplar trees being grown at the U.S. ForestService research station in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, on the pretextthat the trees were being bioengineered, causing damages of $1million. On 11 September 2005 the ELF vandalized about 12 largemachines at a public landfill in West Old Town, Maine, causingdamages in excess of $10,000.In many of these attacks, ELF activists also left extensive spraypaintedgraffiti with obscenities and slogans denouncing U.S. corporations,private property, and, beginning in 2003, the U.S.-led warin Iraq.EAST AFRICAN U.S. EMBASSY ATTACKS. On 7 August 1998 theU.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, werestruck by near-simultaneous truck bombings believed to have beencarried out by members of Osama bin Laden’s al Qa’eda group. Theattack in Dar es Salaam involved a gasoline truck that exploded as itentered the embassy compound, killing 10 Tanzanians, seven of whomwere embassy employees, and injuring 77 others, one of whom was anAmerican. A few minutes later, at 10:30 a.m., a truck bomb in Nairobiwas exploded outside the U.S. embassy. After being denied entry bya guard to the front parking lot of the embassy, which would havepositioned the bomb close to the ambassador’s office, the terroristsdrove the truck to the rear entrance of the building where one terroristthrew a grenade at parked cars, causing the guard to flee. When thebomb exploded there, it killed 291 people and injured more than 5,000.Twelve U.S. citizens were killed and six injured in this attack, whilethe remaining casualties were mainly Kenyan citizens.After the U.S. government obtained information implicating Osamabin Laden in the attacks, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order12947 on 20 August 1998 adding bin Laden and his key aides inthe al Qa’eda organization to the list of known terrorist groups andordering the freezing of their financial assets in U.S. banks and otherproperties. On the same day, the United States launched cruise missilesat three al Qa’eda bases outside Khost in Afghanistan and an AlShifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan originally thought to have beenassociated with bin Laden.