I was messing around on the Internet Christmas day, reading international political blogs, when I stumbled across a headline that dropped my jaw.
“US terror attacks ‘foiled,'” it read.
At first, I was confused. I’d already combed American newspapers that day, and I’d read nothing about it. Surely American newspapers would have reported this. Had I somehow misunderstood the headline?
As it turns out, I didn’t. There had been a major terrorist bust in Italy, the Sunday Times of London reported.
On December 23, Italian authorities announced that they had used domestic wiretaps to uncover a conspiracy to conduct a series of terrorist attacks inside the US.
Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and railway stations. The terrorists’ goal, he said, was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11.
After the terrorist bombings in London in July, the Italians stepped up all of their internal surveillance programs. Because Italian authorities feared that the Winter Olympics, which will be held in Italy in February, could be targeted by terrorists, the country had been monitoring the conversations of suspected Islamic terrorists through domestic wiretapping and eavesdropping.
Their efforts paid off after they picked up phone conversations by Algerian Yamine Bouhrama that discussed terrorist attacks in Italy and abroad.
The Italians say Bouhrama and his two alleged co-conspirators, Achour Rabah and Tartaq Sami, are members of an Italian cell of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an Al-Qaeda-linked Algerian extremist organization.
A search of Lexis-Nexis, a subscriber service that allows users access to virtually every article written around the world over the last two decades, revealed another shocker. This story wasn’t some afterthought newsbit picked up by the Times. It had made headlines around the world.
“Three Algerians arrested in Italy over plot targeting US,” read the headline on the Agence France Presse’s version of the story. Newspapers from China to Australia — even those in Turkey — all carried a similar version of the story.
But in US papers, there was almost nothing. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a 99-word story headlined “Italy charges 3 Algerians” that referred to attacks planned by the group in Iraq and Italy, but made no mention of the plot against America — or that the men were nabbed by a domestic spy program that targeted the phone conversations of suspected terrorists. The Inquirer was the only paper that covered the story.
How could this be? Had the American media, which was in the midst of a frenzy over the president’s use of unauthorized phone conversation surveillance, blacked out news of an international terrorist plot against the US foiled by the same kind of spying?
For the last month I’ve been obsessed, checking Lexis-Nexis daily, waiting for someone to report the story. And I’m no longer the only one who has noticed.
Last week, Investor’s Business Daily questioned why the full story hasn’t seen the light of day in American newspapers in an editorial.
Part of the answer — and the blame — may lie with the Associated Press. Many American daily newspapers that once kept reporters in bustling foreign bureaus now rely upon the AP wire service for foreign news. That means that in many cases, one lone reporter reports what the whole country reads about that happens abroad, rather than several reporters from different publications competing against each other. And that gives that lone reporter, and the AP, a tremendous amount of control over what we know and don’t know about what goes on in the world.
After the Italian terrorist bust, reporters and wire services in virtually every country but this one thought that the US terror plot angle was so important that they led their stories with it and referenced it in their headlines.
But the American wire story by the AP contained references only to the GSPC’s planned terrorist activities in Iraq and Italy, not those in the US. The AP never followed up on its initial story. So far, the organization has not responded to my request for comment on this matter.
Given that the AP has been smack in the middle of the American media frenzy over whether the president has been illegally spying on terrorists using similar methods, and given the media’s insistence that the practice hasn’t led to a noteworthy terrorist capture here, it’s enough to make one more than a little paranoid.
Let’s fact it, a successful wiretap terrorist bust would have made an awkward sidebar to the domestic surveillance story for the media, particularly after the blogosphere got hold of it.
But maybe it was just some sort of bizarre oversight, some fortuitously timed cosmic glitch in the American media machine. Surely there is a logical explanation that makes sense.
When I come up with it, I’ll get back to you.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2006.
