evolution

Before you read the rest of this post, read the first four posts I made on this subject (I – II – III – IV). Then you can read this post and decide if the other bloggers who posted on this and I are all way off-base.

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There are now articles (see here and here) appearing denouncing the bloggers who talked seriously about this story. Particularly vicious is Cathy Young — here’s a sampling of what she had to say.

As it turns out, the only truth in all this is that Hinrichs had, indeed, inquired about buying ammonium nitrate at a local store two days before his suicide, and had given evasive and suspect answers about why he needed it. Because of a tip about this attempted purchase, he had come to the attention of the FBI, which became involved in investigating the suicide. The other claims were a lot of rumor-mongering and speculation, all firmly denied by both the FBI and the university authorities and often based on laughably far-fetched “clues” (Hinrichs had a Pakistani roommate; he lived — gasp! — within a block of the mosque; he even — wait until you hear this one! — grew a beard!).

The news that the FBI was investigating the case of a man blowing himself up on a major university campus undoubtedly merited some attention. However, the reasonable bloggers quickly realized there was no “there” there. At Instapundit.com on October 6, Glenn Reynolds linked to a couple of blogposts discussing the allegedly suspicious details of the story, but later updated the post to include a link to an excellent post at Caerdroia debunking most of the claims. After that, he didn’t touch the story again, except to link to a cautious post by CBS News blogger Vaughn Ververs saying that the national media needed to look into the story.

By contrast, Michelle Malkin, Powerline, and The Jawa Report flogged the story relentlessly, picking up every sensational detail and railing against the “mainstream media” for ignoring and covering up the story. In a typical passage her October 12 syndicated column, Malkin wrote:

Also, I didn’t count the use of the word “hysteria” and its variants, but it surely must have been a dozen times.

In addition, there is this Wall Street Journal piece which says:

…blogs and local Oklahoma TV stations added several apparent inaccuracies, including: that Mr. Hinrichs was a Muslim and visited the mosque frequently; that he tried to enter the stadium twice but was rebuffed; that he had a one-way airplane ticket to Algeria; that there were nails in the bomb and that Islamic extremist literature was found in his apartment.

Fine. WorldNetDaily is the one that reported the last of these claims; and a lot of people did link to it. I did too. Here is what I said:

WND is reporting (citing second-hand information, I should add — and it’s, well, WND) that “authorities recovered a ’significant amount’ of ‘jihad’ materials, as well as Hinrichs’ computer,” although there is no official confirmation of that. Also, the FBI released a statement saying that there is no evidence so far to indicate connections to terrorist or jihad groups.

I can’t find a single instance where Malkin, Glower Line, et al. linked approvingly to WND regarding this story. (If I missed one and you find it, leave it in the comments.) All but the real conspiracy kooks know what WND really is.

As to the others, it was local media that reported that Hinrichs visited the nearby mosque. I don’t recall anything regarding the frequency of those visits. In my mind, the frequency of the visits doesn’t matter: it’s still a fact worth mentioning. Whether he tried to enter the stadium or not is unknown; some say they saw him, others say he didn’t. Again, the FBI says it has no evidence that he did. Fine. It doesn’t mean he didn’t. Neither Ms. Young nor the WSJ has offered anything to show he didn’t. You may think I am teetering dangerously close to the “prove a negative” fallacy (which certainly doesn’t meet any legal standard of proof), but I don’t think it can be ruled out. Presumably the FBI investigated it; we’ll find out what their conclusions were soon. Finally comes the matter of the plane ticket to Algeria. This rumor is false; the ticket belonged to another resident of Hinrichs’s building.

I do not apologize to anyone for anything I said regarding this case, and I don’t feel that the targets of Ms. Young and the WSJ have anything to apologize for, either. The main problem (that seems to have escaped the WSJ and Ms. Young) is that the vaunted “mainstream media,” with its army of editors and fact-checkers and dedicated servants of the TRUTH(™) were not talking about this story at all.

As always, I leave the issue to you to think about. Some of you have been delinquent in your commenting duties; this would be a good time to open up.

It also must be repeated here that neither the FBI nor Oklahoma University believes that Hinrichs had any connection to any terror groups. The university and his family believe that he suffered from depression and that he simply meant to commit suicide. As I told you about in part IV, a note was discovered on his computer to that effect.

Here’s a round-up of opinion on this issue:

• Cathy Young’s piece
• The Wall Street Journal
• Eric Scheie of Classical Values (read the comments, too)
• Mark Tapscott, who carried a lot of water on this story
• Michelle Malkin
• Caerdroia, which is similar in spirit (but not in tone) to Young

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 14:27 and is filed under terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.