Friday, May 11, 2007

What if they gave a terrorist attack and no one came?

Remember a couple of months ago, when an ill-advised marketing campaign left strange electrical devices around Boston, causing local authorities to think they could have been bombs? It made the news for days. This week's arrest of five men accused of planning to attack Fort Dix has similarly garnered a great deal of attention, even though the men had not even started planning any attack.

Would it come as a surprise to you if I'd told you there had been an actual terrorist attack in the US two weeks ago? Doesn't it seem odd that this has barely made a blip on the news? This wasn't an theoretical attack in the pre-planning stages, this was an actual bomb, placed where it would kill many civilians, with shrapnel added to maximize casualties. The bomb squad had to detonate it in place.

I suspect it was because the alleged bomber wasn't a swarthy Muslim immigrant, but a white Christian man. I certainly hope it was not because the target of his wrath was a family planning clinic and thus his near-victims were somehow less "innocent."

This isn't the only case. While the Fort Dix arrests have been plastered all over the news, this case of a group of men allegedly planning a machine gun attack also hasn't been widely publicized. They had fabricated about 200 explosive devices.

David Niewert over at Orcinus writes:

Of course, acknowledging that this is the case would require a major readjustment of the media's constructed narrative about the "war on terror." So it continues to turn a blind eye, and in the process it profoundly misinforms the public.

And yet Ann Coulter still gets to complain about terrorists being "ragheads."

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