[GiovannaNicoletta]

bookmark

[PGalt]

Thanks. BTTT!

[airborne]

After Tom Ridge played the color coded cha-cha every week, now that we have a credible threat, nothing!

Our government is not protecting us! Keep your powder dry folks!

[petercooper]

Excellent read!

[TexasCajun]

Can you pls start a new thread in Breaking News if you can get Jayna online with us?
...and maybe a time?

(You could be onto something here, guest Freepers.)

-Thanks-

[Lexington Green]

Here's a story from the NY Daily News (Jan 2004) that applies to the current MEDIA BLACKOUT of the OU Bombing. ... and how MEDIA BLACKOUTS came about. We're witnessing one now. The fact that there is an obvious blackout indicates that there IS a Homeland Security aspect to this event.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:pVl6F5cGjQAJ:www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/155031p-136286c.html+new+york+apartment+media+terror+terrorism+jennings&hl=en

How does Steven Brill manage to maneuver himself into the white-hot center of nearly everything?
The answer is doubtless too grand and full of nuance for a mere gossip column.

Suffice it to say that that on Tuesday night the 53-year-old Brill - journalist, media mogul and national I.D. card entrepreneur - hosted a summit between Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and the major television network news divisions.

Sitting around the dinner table with Ridge at Brill's Fifth Ave. apartment - to hash over terrorism scenarios, government-to-media communications and other pressing issues - were NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings (along with news President David Westin), CBS News President Andrew Heyward, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and CNN's Aaron Brown.

Dan Rather, recovering from facial surgery, couldn't make it, but Brill's wife, Cynthia, and two of their children listened and learned.

"The dinner was a wide-ranging discussion about international terrorism and domestic security," Jennings told me. "The topics included the challenge for the networks if, God forbid, there was ever another catastrophe similar to 9/11."

Fox News' Ailes said: "I think we got a little better understanding of their process and how they make their decisions of what they're going to announce to the public. Anytime you have conversations about homeland security, it's always interesting."

I'm told that Brill, who befriended Ridge while working on his post-9/11 book "After," engineered the off-the-record government-media exchange out of a belief that "thousands of lives can be saved depending on the kind of information that is on television in the first hour after an event."

Last year, Brill founded a nonprofit group to address the challenges of homeland security.

The dinner, said Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, was "one of a number of ongoing efforts to have a continuing dialogue with the media to determine how we can best work together

[doug from upland]

Check your FReepmail.

[doug from upland]

Jayna Davis is working hard on this case. When she has something new and definitive for us, she will join us on a FreeRepublic thread to answer questions. I'll put it in breaking news so you don't miss it. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to create or manage a ping list on this one.

Why isn't Mary Mapes on this story? Oh, that's right. She has spent six years on a National Guard story.

[OESY]

Why Aren't We Being Told More Facts About the Oklahoma Suicide Bomber?
What are the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force Investigating?


University of Oklahoma President David Boren seems determined to have everybody believe Joel Henry Hinrichs III was merely a disturbed young man who decided to commit suicide by blowing himself up within 100 yards of a stadium containing 84,000 screaming fans of Sooner football.

Sorry, I don't buy it, at least not yet. Here's why: First, The Daily Oklahoman is reporting authorities found a large cache of bomb-making materials in Hinrichs' apartment. The cache is so big that the Oklahoman reported one of the officials on the scene estimated a full 24 hours would be required to cart away all of the material.

Suicide victims don't normally accumulate a large amount of bomb-making material in their homes. People intent on blowing up other people do.

Second, the proximity to the stadium suggests Hinrichs' target was the crowd, perhaps as people were leaving the game. But being an OU student, he presumably would have access to the student seating section and could have gone from that area to anywhere else in the crowd he chose.

What better place to detonate a bomb guaranteed to both kill and maim many, as well as incite terror and possibly a stampede that would kill and injure more people? My guess is Hinrichs was kept from reaching his target by a premature detonation. Add the proximty of the Micro-Biology building and you may have the potential for a kind of bio-bomb that could have guaranteed utter chaos in and around the stadium.

Third, why was Boren sufficiently familiar with Hinrichs to so quickly issue an opinion about his motive in the bombing? When he resigned in November 1994 as an Oklahoma senator, Boren was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He left the Senate just after the Democrats lost their majority in the GOP sweep of 1994.

Add to his Senate years the presence of an active and long-established Muslim student presence on the OU campus stemming in great part from the school's excellent Petroleum Engineering program, and it stands to reason that Boren has been privy to intelligence briefings as head of the school. He almost certainly has maintained excellent contacts within the U.S. intelligence community made during his tenure as chairman of the Senate committee. Is that how he knew so quickly of Hinrichs?

Fourth, in one of the photos appearing in the media, Hinrichs appears to have a fresh beard, which is characteristic of new Muslim male converts. His father told The Oklahoman his son was a quiet, intellectual type, but he had no idea what might have incited him to take his own life. We can only assume the father also didn't know of the bomb-making material in his son's apartment. Perhaps we are dealing with a recent or a secret convert?

Finally, if Hinrichs was just a disturbed guy who decided to kill himself with a bomb 100 yards from a crowd of 84,000 people instead of simply putting a bullet through his temple, slashing his wrists or some other traditional way of doing away with himself, why is the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force now the lead agency in the investigation?

Go here to read the latest dispatch from The Oklahoman.

-- Mark Tapscott, http://tapscottscopydesk.blogspot.com/2005/10/why-arent-we-being-told-more-facts.html

[longtermmemmory]

1. I think the Propaganda Media is working overtime to intentionally not cover this story because it WILL be seen as another 9/11 attack.

They don't want to be shown wrong until the DNC talking point is lined up.

2. I wonder if this adds credibility to the "theory" that Clinton Administration covered up Iraqi links to the Oklahoma city courthouse bombing.

[dljordan]

I saw from the interview with his family that he was being treated for depression. I'm wondering if he was taking one of the "usual suspects" such as Zoloft or Paxil?

[doug from upland]

THE THIRD TERRORIST, pages 33-34 -----

A series of sobering facts that were leaked to the media within the first forty-eight hours underscored the government's early inclination to seek out suspects of Arab origin embedded in the homeland. The stack of telling clues included sensitive military communications in which the FBI urgently requested on April 19 that the Pentagon provide ten Army linguists proficient in Arabic to assist in monitoring radical Islamic sects in several major metropolitan areas. Within days, the mission quickly evolved from analyzing recordings of FBI wiretaps of suspected Middle Eastern extremist groups to listening and translating live conversations.

The Department of the Army Headquarters Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia, issued a memorandum on April 22, 1995, asserting that federal law strictly prohibited military involvement of this enormity and scope in a domestic criminal investigation, except under the rare circumstance where the president' life was imperiled. Such a danger was not only deemed to be real, but imminent. In a unique correspondence, the FBI director contacted the secretary of defense to request the Army Arabic linguists continue to monitor live wiretaps in an effort to "protect the president from possible attack during his attendance of the memorial service in Oklahoma City on Sunday, April 23."

By this time, the chief culprits had been profiled as right-wing fanatics, ostracized by their own kind. Not even the citizen militia movement, which spawned from paranoia over government encroachment upon civil liberties, embraced McVeigh and Nichols's brand of extremeism. Therefore, if a duo of rogue domestic terrorists was solely to blame, why was the Department of Justice so intent on obtaining such an unusual waiver of federal law? Without it, the Army linguists would be ordered to cease translating intercepted "chatter" between Middle East terrorists ondomestic soil, leaving Bill Clinton vulnerable to a potential foreign assassination attempt during his forthcoming trip to Oklahoma City. What did two disgrunted malcontents and radical Islamists have in common? Plenty. And the FBI, CIA, DIA, and all other organs of the U.S. law enforcement community were collectively acting on far more than an educated hunch.

[Antoninus]

He's obviously just working part time as an Abe Lincoln historical re-enactor.

[OKSooner]

This is just popping up everywhere, which is a good thing.

[SerpentDove]

The first thing I noticed was the Islamist beard, hairdo and lack of mustache that is the same style Nick Berg had. I hadn't noticed Nick Berg's beard being Islamist until another FReeper pointed it out, on a thread shortly after his beheading.