Hello and welcome to this day an esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day August 8th, 1998, the world's attention is on Nairobi, Kenya, and Darislam, Tanzania,

where the day before August 7th, which is the day we're actually talking about here. August 7th a coordinated truck bomb

explosions had rocked the US embassies in those two East African countries.

224 people died in the blasts including 12 Americans more than 4,500 people were wounded.

Fairly quickly these bombings were linked to Al Qaeda and most notably Osama bin Laden.

Al Qaeda and bin Laden were certainly on the intelligence

community's radar but I think it's safe to say less on the public's radar and

this was a notable moment in the rise of al Qaeda which of course culminated in many ways in the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9-11 three years later.

So here to discuss all that context and the 1998 East African embassy bombings are as always Nicole Hammer of

Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello Jody.

Hey there. And our special guest for this episode is Karen Greenberg, one of my favorite writers and

scholars on all things terrorism and security.

She is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of

Law and among other things, host of the podcast vital interests.

Karen, welcome to the show.

Thanks for doing this.

Thanks so much for having me.

And I will also plug your new book coming out soon.

It's called Subtle Tools,

The Dismandling of American democracy from the war on

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