Evidence Of Absence

The (sic) internets, or specifically posted comments at various web sites, have been buzzing about a suicide bombing that happened outside a packed Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on October 2nd.


Suicide bomber Joel Hinrichs III

On that particular Saturday afternoon I was reading the blogs when I noticed a freshly posted comment describing the sound of a large explosion outside Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, a stadium packed with Oklahoma State University and Kansas State fans watching their Sooners and Wildcats battling over a football.
Turning on the television expecting breathless live reporting, I found nothing on the alleged news channels.
The story, since, has received minimal to zero coverage by what passes for America’s mainstream media.
Long past my bedtime last evening, AmericaBlog posted links to an Oklahoma TV news report and a terrific blog containing information about the bombing.
FanBlogs.com presents a superb roundup of a most curious, and getting curiouser as coverage dwindles, story of potentially America’s first suicide bombing.
The bomber, 21 year-old Joel Hinrichs III, was a mechanical engineering junior, a National Merit Scholar, and a member of Triangle fraternity, an organization of engineers, architects, and scientists.


Sign outside Hinrichs mosque

Oklahoma TV station News9 reports Hinrichs shared an apartment with a “Pakistani student” employed “with the [OSU] Athletic Department”, recently tried to purchase a “large quantity of Ammonium nitrate” from a Norman, OK feed store and attended the Norman Mosque, once the mosque frequented by the 20th 911 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui.


Bomb disposal unit leaving Hinrichs apartment with an explosive device

The Northeast Intelligence Network at HomelandSecurityUS.com, in reports based on information from “reliable law enforcement sources”, states that Hinrichs' backpack bomb was made of triacetone triperoxide or TATP, the highly explosive compound used recently in the London bombings and by the infamous shoe bomber Richard Reid.
Additionally, the Northeast Intelligence Network is reporting that police confiscated “a significant amount” of Islamist Jihad literature in Hinrichs apartment and that “other un-detonated explosive devices were found in the area cordoned off by police and federal officials”.

Shouldn't even the most jaded cynic have to admit that this bombing story is strange enough to deserve mainstream media coverage?
"No strings or connected dots here, folks. Move along" the media, by this absence of evidence, seems to be suggesting.
Oklahoma is likely rural enough to afford federal agents fairly easy information containment, when necessary, and has enough terror/bombing antecedents to make the corporate media and Washington very nervous about even minimal news coverage of information stemming from this October 2nd suicide bombing.


Former Vice President Gore framing a key electoral issue yesterday in New York

Former Vice President Al Gore said yesterday, in a widely unreported keynote speech delivered to the Media Center’s We The Media conference at the Associated Press headquarters in New York City, that we must "notice what is not on" our televisions:

News divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part…The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations…Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising.

The absence of newsy proof, in many of these cases, is often the proof of some niggling danger to the present order as precieved by the MSM's corrupt guardians and self-proclaimed arbiters of public safety.
Widespread awareness of the October 2nd Oklahoma bombing, certainly would have cast an unflattering light upon the speech President Bush delivered this morning at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington:

We're determined to prevent the attacks of terrorist networks before they occur…We're reforming our intelligence agencies for the incredibly difficult task of tracking enemy activity…here and abroad.

Noticing what isn't reflecting in the mirror is a difficult skill to master for us human animals...but master it we must if the current established order manages, by hook, crook and the absence of news, to continue the maintenance of its present iron information grip.

Images: AP, Lamphere Productions
- posted by Sean @ 2:09 PM