Someone wanted to set off a bomb at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington. Luckily the suspicious bag holding the bomb was spotted, which likely saved lives.  As the Washington Post reported today:

"The device appeared to be operational, it appeared to be deadly, and it was intended to inflict multiple casualties,'' said Special Agent Frederick Gutt, a spokesman for the FBI's Seattle field office.

Law enforcement sources familiar with the device, which is being analyzed at the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., said it had a remote detonator and was positioned so that any blast would have been directed at the crowd of marchers.

Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News wonders why the story hasn't received more media attention, particularly as a case of what would appear to be domestic terrorism. He writes:

When it emerged that alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner was an almost certainly mentally ill 22-year-old who seemed to follow some bizarre conspiracy theories but not the political rhetoric of Palin or the Tea Party, there was massive pushback from conservatives who accused the mainstream media of jumping to unfair conclusions. Most famously, Palin herself emerged to call this a "blood libel." The former GOP veep nominee was savaged for using that charged term, but you have to wonder now if the pushback from Palin is actually a case of "mission accomplished."

That's because with this new episode in Spokane, not only have the pillars of the mainstream media not raced to any conclusions, but they seem to be in a competition as to who can most ignore the story altogether. But there's no need to jump to unwarranted conclusions here; the actual facts have been laid out by the nation's preeminent law enforcement agency, the FBI -- that we are dealing with a case of "domestic terrorism," that the sophisticated device along the King Day parade route was capable of causing mass casualties, and the target was American citizens celebrating an icon of the progressive movement, Dr. King.

Maybe the implications are just a little too frightening for the mainstream media to want to deal with.

There's a fairly well-documented history of media playing down domestic terror threats that don't involve Arab or Muslim conspirators.  Those that do are treated differently; there are plenty of cases where law enforcement stepped in long before such plans were operational-- and yet much of the media coverage would still refer to them as a form of terrorism. The attempted Times Square bombing might be the closest analogy, and that received widespread media coverage, much of which called it an attempted terrorist attack.

In this case, it doesn't seem like the media want to call it terrorism-- or even news, for that matter. NBC Nightly News did a segment on the bomb plot yesterday, but anchor Brian Williams said this at the end of the report:

All right, Pete Williams on what could have been a major news story out in Spokane. Pete, thanks.

Could have been?

Blogger and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch has a review (Attytood, 5/11/09) of how, "by late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of greatest peril to the U.S. Constitution in modern memory":

It was widely known in 2008, for example, that Yoo had argued for presidential powers far beyond anything either real or implied in the Constitution--that the commander-in-chief could trample the powers of Congress or a free press in an endless undeclared war, or that the 4th Amendment barring unreasonable search and seizure didn't apply in fighting what Yoo called domestic terrorism.

Most famously, Yoo was known as the author of the infamous "torture memos" that in 2002 and 2003 gave the Bush and Cheney the legal cover to violate the human rights of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, based on the now mostly ridiculed claim that international and U.S. laws against such torture practices did not apply. Working closely with Dick Cheney, Cheney's staff and others, Yoo set into motion the brutal actions that left a deep, indelible stain on the American soul.

Bunch notifies us that, despite all this, his "colleagues upstairs at the Philadelphia Inquirer--with none of the fanfare that might normally accompany such a move"--decided "to sign a contract with Yoo in late 2008 to give him a regular monthly column." Bunch explains that the paper "thus handed Yoo a loud megaphone on what was once a hallowed piece of real estate in American journalism--to write on the very subjects that have now led Justice Department investigators to reportedly recommend disbarment proceedings against Yoo."