Posted on 1/16/2006, 9:37:51 PM by conservativecorner
CBN.com – WASHINGTON - In November, three Algerian men were arrested in Italy and charged with planning major attacks on U.S. targets.
The arrests were front page news in Europe, but not in the U.S.
America may just have dodged a major bullet. The three Algerian men planned to carry out attacks on ships, stadiums, and railway stations in the U.S. according to Italian authorities; their goal was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11.
The three men described July terror attacks in London and Egypt, which killed over 140 people and injured hundreds more, as "highdays and holidays." They also spoke of making "war on the infidel" and throwing a "bigger party" than the July 7 London bombings.
One of the men talked about finding a ship like the Titanic, filling it with explosives, and killing 10,000 people in Italy.
So how did Italian authorities obtain this potentially life-saving information?
“The Italian authorities, incidentally, found out about it through wiretaps--eavesdropping--the same kind of tactic that President Bush is using to fight the war on terror, and for which he is being heavily criticized, and even threatened with impeachment,” said Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, a conservative media watchdog group in Washington.
Kincaid said the reason the Italian arrests have gone widely unreported by the U.S. media is that they back up Bush's argument that wiretaps are essential for monitoring suspected terrorists.
Why are the media so intent on playing down the ongoing threats to our country and our people? Because if they remind us that the threat exists, then that tends to support the position of the President, that he has to have the power to stop and monitor and thwart these al-Qaeda operations on American soil.
Terrorism expert Rich Miniter is the author of Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror.
“I think the news judgment of the news directors and editors at major broadcast outlets and newspapers is profoundly blinkered by politics,” Miniter said. “They think of this war on terror as Bush's war, not America's war.”
Miniter said wiretaps in the U.S. don't randomly target American citizens--as some critics have suggested. Rather, he says, they target people whose phone numbers have been found inside the cell phones or mobile phones of captured al-Qaeda leaders.
“These people are talking to the enemy—directly,” Miniter explained. “Don't we want to know what they're saying? The failure to wiretap is essentially a suicide pact--we stop wiretapping, we are committing ourselves to being defeated in the war on terror.”
Miniter said the Italian arrests are proof of a much larger problem: how Western Europe has become a launching pad for radical psalmists to plan and carry out terrorist attacks--with the U.S. as their preferred target.
Wow! Freudian, or what?
I think the MSM would rather see the war on terrorism fail than to see Bush succeed in his efforts to combat it, and I really mean that, I loathe them!
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/012808.php
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