1,500 would have died, but the media don't seem to care

By Tom Gross, NationalReview Online

The "martyrdom videos" played to a London court and shown onBritish TV today are just chilling.

The eight men on trial (all are radical British Muslims) arecharged with plotting to detonate bombs aboard civilian airliners bound for the United States and Canada using explosives concealed in soft drink bottles. Prosecutors say they were close to carrying out their plan when they were arrested.

More than 1,500 passengers and crew would have been killed had the bombs gone off.

Yet none of the videos - so far as I can tell from some quite close scrutiny of the channels - are so far being aired on American networks even though they were made public many hours ago. As for the web, the only major American news site carrying one of the videos is ABC News.

It's not on the websites of CNN or MSNBC. CNN does cover thestory, but only with a watered-down article from the AP; there's no clip of it being covered on TV.

You can read this Times of London article and watch the video here.

I wrote and published the item above yesterday. Today Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger writes more extensively in much the same vein and you might want to read his piece here.

Among the videos not shown by many American and other TV networks, the British citizens who almost succeeded in carrying out the worst airline terrorism ever, other then 9/11:

Abdullah Ahmed Ali was caught on a wiretap telling his wife that he wished to bring his baby son along on the suicide mission. She resists. His suicide video, intended to become public after the planes blew up and shown at trial, promises "floods of martyr operations against you" and "your people's body parts decorating the streets."

Waheed Zaman studied biomedical science at London Metropolitan University. In his video Zaman says, "I have been educated to a high standard. I could have lived a life of ease but instead chose to fight for the sake of Allah's Deen [religion]."