By Charles M. Young
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. 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.net/node/1155
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