Thursday, May 20, 2004 11:49 p.m. EDTReporters have spent the last six months suggesting that President Bush missed clear evidence that the 9/11 attacks were coming.
But now that new evidence is mounting that al Qaida is preparing a spectacular chemical weapons strike on the U.S., the news is being greeted with yawns in newsrooms across America, with reporters obsessing instead the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Since Monday, when weapons of mass destruction in the form of Sarin gas were discovered in Iraq, there have been 525 media reports on the development, a Lexis Nexis search shows.
In the same four day period, however, the Abu Ghraib scandal has been the subject of 2,342 news reports - despite the fact that the story is three weeks old with no significant new developments driving the coverage.
Meanwhile, evidence that America is being targeted for an even more deadly strike than on 9/11 mounts day after day:
* An FBI terror alert issued Thursday warns police to look for obvious signs of trouble ? people wearing heavy, bulky jackets on warm days, smelling of chemicals, trailing wires from their jackets.
* Five weeks ago Jordanian authorities foiled an al Qaida plot to use three tanker trucks in a chemical weapons attack in Amman that could have killed 80,000 people, according to experts.
* On April 8 an empty 92,000 gallon tanker truck was stolen from a Pensauken, N.J. parking lot and has been missing ever since.
* That same week, five empty suitcases were discovered in New York's subway system in what intelligence experts believe was a dress rehearsal for a Madrid-style railway attack on the U.S.
* Al Qaida WMD specialist Abu Musab al Zarqawi, ringleader of the Jordan plot, has grown increasingly deadly in the last few months. He's recently claimed credit for the Madrid train bombings, the beheading of Nick Berg and Tuesday's assassination of the head of the Iraqi Governing Council, Izzadine Saleem
* Zarqawi is also believed to have been behind an August truck bomb attack on the U.N.'s headquarters in Baghdad, killing 23 people, a car bombing in Najaf that killed more than 85, and a truck bombing of Italy's paramilitary police headquarters in southern city of Nasiriyah that killed more than 30.
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