Right Wing Nut House

This is one of the more curious stories I’ve seen in a while. Did you know that the Italians arrested 3 terrorists with connections to al Qaeda who may have been planning an attack on America that would have dwarfed 9/11?

Three Algerians arrested in an anti-terrorist operation in southern Italy are suspected of being linked to a planned new series of attacks in the United States, Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said Friday.

The attacks would have targeted ships, stadiums or railway stations in a bid to outdo the September 11, 2001 strikes by Al-Qaeda in New York and Washington which killed some 2,700 people, Pisanu said.

The Algerians, suspected of belonging to a cell established by an Al-Qaeda-linked Algerian extremist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), were named as Achour Rabah, Tartaq Sami and Yasmine Bouhrama.

(HT: Red State)

AJ Strata has been on this story since Friday but I was unable to confirm that the terrorists were targeting America. In fact, according to this Google search that AJ made, the farthest that the big wire services would go on that score was that the attacks would have taken place “outside of Italy.”

Why would even the Italian press bury the remarks of their own Interior Minister about the potential target of the attacks?

We have one of two possibilities here. Either Turkish Press has misquoted the Italian Interior Minister or they have extrapolated facts from his statement that aren’t there. In fact, what may be likely is that Turkish Press heard the Minister’s comparison to 9/11 and may have jumped to the conclusion that the target was America. I make this assumption based on the fact that AP, UPI, Reuters, and even RAI do not mention America specifically as a target.

However, the size and scope of this planned attack is so massive that it certainly should have been reported and commented on in America. Why?

The three Algerians detained on Tuesday in the Italian cities of Brescia and Naples were planning a massive terror attack - “on a ship as big as the Titanic, packed with explosives” - that aimed to kill “at least 10,000 people”, as well as an attack on “Italian citizens and interests” in Tunisia, according phone conversations between the three men, which Italian anti-terror police say they intercepted after al-Qaeda’s deadly 7 July attacks on London and on the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh

A “ship as big as the Titanic” could very well be an oil tanker.

Anyone want to guess how many people would die if a docked oil tanker in Houston or some other coastal American city were to suddenly blow up? The number 10,000 sounds about right.

And it wouldn’t have to be an oil tanker. The accidental explosion in Texas City of a ship carrying ammonium nitrate in 1947 killed 600 people - and that number would have been many times higher except for the fact that the ship had been on fire for nearly 24 hours before the explosion. I daresay that al Qaeda would not vouchsafe us 24 hours warning before detonating a floating bomb like an oil tanker or chemical ship.

It is too much to say that the media is deliberately burying this story. Rather, they have made a collective determination that we do not need to know about this - and other stories of a similar nature. To the gatekeepers, this is just one more terrorism story in a far away place that Americans have no interest in knowing about. Terrorists are arrested all the time. That is not news. Terrorists are targeting America. That is not news. So goes the reasoning of our information minders.

What would be news, of course, is if they succeeded. Then and only then would we hear of arrests in Italy and Britain and other European countries. Then these kinds of stories give context to the attack.

If media coverage in the days and weeks following 9/11 is any guide, this is exactly what transpired on the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other media outlets. This website - while full of conspiracy theories and other idiocies about 9/11 - has links to literally dozens of stories in the American press following the attacks of arrests and hints from foreign intelligence sources that were in the foreign press weeks, months, and even years before September 11.

Rather than seeing a conspiracy of silence on the part of the press I believe that what we have is a culture of arrogance in our media that sees the American people as a bunch of ignorant children that must be spoon fed news - information that these gatekeepers determine we need to know.

If Jeff Jarvis is right, this culture of arrogance will be the death of the old media. For our own safety and security, let’s hope that day comes sooner rather than later.