Obvious

CNN, with it's usual inability to grasp what it's actually reporting, breathlessly confides this morning:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI has been covertly monitoring mosques and Muslim homes and businesses in U.S. cities for abnormal radiation levels since 2002, several government officials confirmed Friday.

One government official said the authorities don't obtain warrants because the testing is conducted from outside the buildings on what they consider public property.

My goodness, they're only into the second paragraph and they're already in trouble. The street is now "what they consider public property." (Only in paragraph 5 is it revealed that we're talking about parking lots!) And, of course, note that the energy-laden "covertly" has been dropped into the first paragraph. Presumably, in CNN's world, large signs ought to have been put up:

WARNING! RADIATION MONITORING!
USE A DIFFERENT ROUTE TO TRANSPORT
YOUR STOLEN CESIUM 137

Why isn't this the story:

Since 2002 the FBI has had a program for detection of abnormal radiation levels in U.S. cities. Because funding constraints prevent 100% coverage, the Government has concentrated its efforts on monitoring mosques and other places Muslims congregate, such as homes and businesses.

The Government explained that because the detection devices are placed on public property, no warrants are necessary. "It's the same thing as if a bad guy is carrying a gun in plain sight," one FBI official said.

But wait. It gets worse.

In this world, one might expect the reporter to then go on to remind readers of the ease of construction of radiological (rather than atomic) weapons, the fact that al Queda has sought such weapons, and the fact that no material number of Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, Shintoists, animists or Wiccans have attacked the United States. Implicit approval of FBI resource allocation might result.

But in CNN's world, guess where they went? Yes indeed, they did:

A Muslim advocacy group has said that the program is "misguided" and targets "the wrong people."

"It is a waste of time, it is a waste of resources and it is causing us to be concerned about our citizenship, our constitutional rights," Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told CNN.

And, of course, there is no explanation of the fact that CAIR is the center of al Queda and bin Laden apologetics in the United States.

So the CNN story has the news we'd like to hear (the FBI is on the job), but they certainly go out of their way to make it hard to sift through the propaganda.

No one thinks that the writers or editors at CNN are consciously and purposefully anti-American. But as information gatekeepers, we cannot help but wonder what collateral effects there might be from the same disability that results in their own failure to recognize the bizarre nature of stories reported like this one.

Story LINK. At least as originally posted, the CNN story was accompanied not by a picture of FBI agents, or of the monitoring equipment itself, but instead a head-shot of the al Queda fellow traveler from CAIR.