The most insane story from the last couple of weeks isn’t that China had a spy in Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s, D-Calif., office for more than a decade. It’s that 11 children in New Mexico were apparently being trained to become school shooters, according to police.
Amazingly enough, both stories have been overshadowed on network and cable television by the press’ ongoing obsession with the Russia investigation.
The children rescued last Friday in New Mexico, whose ages range from 1- to 11-years-old, were badly malnourished, according to police. Law enforcement officials also found what they believe are the remains of a small child. Three women and two men have been arrested.
The main culprit, Siraj Wahhaj, 39, “was training youngsters to commit school shootings,” the Associated Press reported this week, citing court documents.
He “was conducting weapons training with assault rifles,” the report noted, adding that, “a foster parent of one of the children removed from the compound had told authorities the child had been trained to use an assault rifle in preparation for a school shooting.”
Neighbors say they warned authorities about the compound long before law enforcement officials raided it last week.
“The search at the compound came amid a two-month investigation that included the FBI. Hogrefe said federal agents surveilled the area a few weeks ago but did not find probable cause to search the property,” the AP reported. “That changed when Georgia detectives forwarded a message to the sheriff that he said initially had been sent to a third party, saying: ‘We are starving and need food and water.’”
This story gets weirder: Investigators claim they found evidence Wahhaj “wanted to perform an exorcism on his son because he thought the boy was possessed by the devil.” Also, law enforcement officials noted that Wahhaj’s father, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who heads the Masjid At-Taqwa in Brooklyn, once met with, “Mahmud Abouhalima when he came to the site to raise money for Muslims in Afghanistan.”
Abouhalima was one of the terrorists involved in the original 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Prosecutor Timothy Hasson wrote that the defendant “poses a great danger to the children found on the property as well as a threat to the community as a whole due to the presence of firearms and his intent to use these firearms in a violent and illegal manner.”
Where the Wahhaj and Feinstein incidents find common ground is that network and cable television consider neither to be the biggest stories in their respective news cycles.
This isn’t to say news television has ignored the New Mexico raid like it has ignored the Feinstein spy story. Rather, the issue here is that the Wahhaj story has been overshadowed completely by Russia-related events, including the Paul Manafort trial, which seems absurd. Radio and television reporting and commentary were certainly focused on something between Aug. 3 and Aug. 10, but it wasn’t a compound in New Mexico, according to subject-specific mentions compiled by TVEyes:
You’d think that a compound training 11 would-be school-shooters would be the lead story for at least a week on every cable and network newscast. You’d think this story would prompt yet another national conversation about gun control, school shootings, etc. Maybe not.
