The Anchoress

I still remember the day so vividly, and President Clinton’s promise that the attack would not go unanswered…which it did.

Some excellent blogging on it, today:

Michelle Malkin - of course - is the go to spot for up-to-the-minute links. I like her piece up at Townhall which remembers the Cole and her sailors:

Too many of us were blind in 2000 — unable or unwilling or simply too uninterested to connect such blood-stained dots as al Qaeda’s 1993 World Trade Center bombing attack, the 1996 Khobar Tower bombings, the 1998 African embassy bombings, and the attack on the Cole. After Sept. 11, 2001, all of our eyes should have been pried wide open to the evils of Muslim extremism that exist among us in both organized and freelance form….The watchdogs in the national press, however, insist on clouding our vision.

It remains very troubling, indeed, that all this time and energy later, we see the press still reluctant to report on suspicious happenings.

Remember how we kept hearing people in the press call President Bush “incurious?”
Here’s Jack Kelly talking about a story in which we find the press remarkably incurious:

On Oct. 1st, Joel Henry Hinrichs, 21, an engineering student at the University of Oklahoma, died when an explosive device he was wearing detonated while he was sitting on a park bench 100 yards away from the stadium where 84,000 fans were watching Oklahoma’s football team play Kansas State.

Because the death is considered a suicide, it has attracted little attention beyond Oklahoma. A Nexis search for “Joel Hinrichs” the day of this writing produced just 41 mentions.
..

Hinrichs used considerably more explosive than was required to kill just himself:

“The explosion that killed Hinrichs also burned a large area around the bench,” reported Mick Hinton of the Tulsa World…”A tree near the detonation site exhibits numerous small round holes that look like those that would be made by a ball bearing or a nailhead, both of which are routinely used by Middle Eastern terrorist bombers,” said Tapscott…

The FBI found more explosives in the apartment Hinrichs shared with a Pakistani student, Fazil Cheema. The apartment is a couple of blocks from the mosque where “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui worshipped when he was attending flight school in Norman.

The FBI also reportedly found Islamist literature and a ticket to Algeria in the apartment, but journalists can’t confirm this, because the FBI has had the search warrant sealed, something not typically done in cases of suspected suicide.
…
The FBI did confirm that “dangerous materials” were removed from the apartment, and subsequently destroyed at the police range in Norman.

Whatever those “dangerous materials” were, they apparently weren’t enough for Hinrichs, because he tried to buy ammonium nitrate fertilizer — the key ingredient in the bomb that leveled the Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995 — at the Ellison Feed and Seed two days before his death.
…
OU senior Adam Smith told reporters a ticket taker at Gate 6 told him a young man had tried to gain entrance to the stadium, but sprinted away when the ticket taker went to search his backpack. The ticket taker refused comment when reporter Jayna Davis asked him about the alleged incident.
…
OU Professor Stephen Sloan, a terrorism expert, told the Tulsa World’s Hinton the size and timing of the explosion that killed Hinrichs “make it logical to think he was trying to get into the stadium.”
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Three bombs contained in plastic bottles were found in a courtyard on the campus of Georgia Tech Oct. 10th. One of them exploded, injuring the custodian who found them.

The Friday before, a bomb was found on the campus of UCLA. That night, a Muslim student shot himself after police surrounded his apartment near the San Diego campus of the University of California. A chemical lab was found in the bathroom.

These may be just remarkable coincidences. But the news media are remarkably incurious about them. Or about what we plan to do about them.

Hmph….CBS’s blog The Public Eye is wondering about the lack of coverage, too: “…no major media outlets appear to have picked up the story yet. We asked CBS News national editor Bill Felling, who told us the network is looking into the story. Let’s hope so, it’s one worth airing, whatever the facts are.”

Indeed.

Will we ever get the whole story on the Oklahoma bombing of the Murrah building and that second John Doe and Jose Padilla? Why not? Even if the press isn’t interested…why isn’t our government telling us more?

says we’re still finding our feet.

Alan Grey (via baldilocks
Smash