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Germany grabbed the lead spot on both ABC and NBC even though the headline hardly amounted to much. Police claimed to have saved Frankfurt Airport and Ramstein Air Force Base from destruction by arresting a trio of suspected bombers--even though the hydrogen peroxide they allegedly bought to make their homemade carbombs to attack the facilities had already been switched with inert chemicals. So their alleged conspiracy posed no actual danger after all. CBS covered the supposed plot too but led for the third straight day with anchor Katie Couric's Road Ahead trip to Iraq. CBS' extended feature coverage again made the war there the Story of the Day.

NBC's Michelle Kosinski covered the arrests from Ramstein itself, while CBS had Richard Roth narrate the details from London and ABC used Brian Ross in New York. Ross linked the trio of suspects to an Exclusive he filed in June about Taliban training of German-bound suicide bombers--only in this update Ross changed the camp's affiliation from Taliban to al-Qaeda. NBC's Kosinski came up with a third group, the Islamic Jihad Union, based in Uzbekhistan as responsible for training the suspects. NBC's terrorism analyst Roger Cressey asserted that the trio, two Germans and a Turk, were not members of "al-Qaeda Central" but a "broader network."

Anyway there was a disconnect between the damage the alleged cell was supposed to be threatening--both NBC's Kosinski and CBS' Roth warned of "massive" and "imminent" attacks--and the incompetent details of their operation. ABC's Ross reported that they had been under constant police watch since New Year's Eve last year when they were spotted snooping around a US military base in Germany. NBC's Kosinski called the three twentysomethings "unemployed and on welfare" and pointed out that tight police surveillance had enabled investigators to switch their chemicals.

Andrew Tyndall 9/14/07 3:27:32 pm

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