In journalism and in
life, it is best to admit it when you’re wrong, and I was wrong last
week. In my haste to write something timely about the triumphant return
of Occupy Wall Street to the front lines of protest on May 1, I assumed
that Fox Five New York and the NYPD were uniquely stupid as they
colluded on a story about the possibility of Arab terrorists secreting
bombs in their “cavities,” as the reporter referred to certain familiar
orifices that are usually unmentioned on television.
Fox Five led their
10:00 pm newscast with the story and I, in my cynicism, thought that
only the minions of Rupert Murdoch could lead the news with an imaginary
explosion of fecal matter and viscera on a day when Occupy Wall Street
had tied up traffic all over Manhattan.
Boy, was I naive.
ABC,
CBS, CNN, BBC, MSNBC, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Guardian,
Christian Science Monitor, Daily Mail, Los Angeles Times, Huffington
Post and hordes of other corporate media also played up the imaginary
explosions of fecal matter and viscera.
Corporate News Executive a/k/a Islamo-Ass Man |
My mistake was googling only
“cavity bomb,” which was the intense focus of Fox Five. What I should
have done was google “body bomb,” “implanted bomb,” “breast implant
bomb” and “belly bomb.” Those kind of bombs were everywhere.
In a typical report on
April 30, Diane Sawyer, solemn and furrowed, announced on ABC World
News that as a nation we had reached the eve of the anniversary of Osama
bin Laden’s assassination. “US authorities,” she said, were “studying a
new terror threat tonight” and chief investigative correspondent Brian
Ross would tell us of “heightened concern in the air and on the ground.”
Ross then reiterated
that unnamed authorities were afraid of body bombs that would “target
Americans.” The idea was “not far fetched” because “medical experts”
said there was plenty of room in the gut for “surgically implanted
explosives.”
“The surgeon would
open the abdominal cavity and literally implant the explosive device in
and amongst the internal organs,” said medical expert Dr. Mark Melrose,
standing in front of a dark, ominous anatomical painting of the human
gut.
“Right in there?” Ross asked incisively.
“Right in between the intestines, the liver, and the stomach,” said Melrose.
Then Ross showed a
picture of a sullen, swarthy Arab terrorist-looking guy, Ibrahim
al-Asiri, who was al Qaeda’s “master bomb maker” in Yemen. He was
thought to be “designing body bombs with no metal parts to get past
airport security.” John Brennan, “White House counter terrorism expert,”
had that very day announced in a speech that al Qaeda in Yemen was “the
greatest threat” to the US...
For the rest of this article by CHARLES M. YOUNG in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.
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