The Counterrrorism Blog is scooping the MSM with its coverage.

Morocco arrested last week nine people in connection with an Al Qaeda/GSPC linked cell headed by a Tunisian individual named Mohamed Belhadi Messahel.
Among the targets of that group were the Milan and Paris metro, the Bologna San Petronio basilica and the DST headquarters (French equivalent to the FBI). Also according to the Moroccan paper Aujourd’hui Le Maroc, the US embassy in Rabat was also a potential target.

The link to the GSPC was actually established when it was learned that three of the members of this cell had travelled to Algeria at the end of February to meet with GSPC leaders regarding their future actions against Italy, France and Morocco.

Basilica of San Petronio, Bologna

Guiseppe Pisanu, Interior Minister of Italy, announced that security forces prevented two Islamic terrorist attacks, scheduled to occur directly prior to the upcoming Italian elections. One attack targeted the Milan subway system; the second was aimed at Bologna’s 14th century Basilica of San Petronio, whose circa 1415 fresco of The Last Judgement by Giovanni da Modena

visualizes an uncomplimentary final fate for the Prophet Mohammed: bound to a rock in Hell, being clawed by demons.

Mahound has been getting what’s coming to him in Bologna for nearly six centuries so far, whether his infatuated and fanatical disciples like it or not, and it seems that the artists of Christendom, in Italy at least (if not in Borders) will continue to be able to express their opinions of the prophet for some time to come.———————————We previously published another image of the painting. And we too have consigned Mohammed to Hell (Ã la Dante and Gustave Doré), just go to our right column button links and click:

Captured along with three other Italians working in Iraq as private security guards, then murdered by terrorists in April of 2004, Fabrizio Quattrocchi ruined the video his executioners were recording. Instead of allowing himself to be put to death cowering like a sheep, Quattrocchi pulled the hood from his face, faced the video camera, and said defiantly: Adesso (or ora) vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano! [Now I will show you how an Italian dies!].

He was shot in the back of the neck, but Al Jazeera never broadcast the video, claiming hypocritically that it was “too gruesome.” His fellow hostages were liberated by US forces.

Fabrizio Quattrocchi behaved in reality the way we only expect to see human beings today behave on stage, in plays like Lion in Winter:

Richard: He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.

Geoffrey: Why, you chivalric fool, as if the way one fell down mattered.

Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

On March 20, 2006, Fabrizio Quattrochi was awarded posthumously the Medaglia d’Oro al Valor Civile [Gold Medal for Valor by a Civilian] by the Italian Govenment.————————————————Hat tip to Winds of Change via Pajamas Media.

Ezio Capizzano

The British Telegraph reports:

A 70-year-old Italian law professor has discovered a new career writing erotic memoirs after losing his university job following accusations that he offered students high marks for sex.

Ezio Capizzano, a former law teacher at Camerino University in central Italy, gives detailed accounts of his amorous “tutorials” in the book, The Last Baron In A Campus of Tulips, published this week.

When it emerged in 2002 that he had video-taped his “one-to-one” tutorials he became a household name in Italy and a role model for ageing Casanovas. Far from condemning him, the media lauded Prof Capizzano.

The respected Corriere della Sera newspaper described him as “Italy’s answer to Sean Connery”.

In 2004 he was acquitted of any wrongdoing after the court accepted his claim that the students had all given their full consent.

And Anza.it predicts Video sex romp account set for best-seller list :

Camerino, January 10 – A university lecturer sacked for secretly filming sex sessions with students has told all in his first book .

Law professor Ezio Capizzano, dubbed ‘the porno prof’ by the Italian media, gives lavish details of his amorous encounters in the book, which he has called The Last Baron In A Campus of Tulips .

In Italian, ‘barone’ means a tenured professor with a lot of clout .

The book, which looks set for the best-seller lists, also contains excerpts of letters from students as well as Capizzano’s musings on philosophy and religion .

The lecturer in agrarian and commercial law lost his job in this small Marche town after his sex videos found their way onto newsstands, sparking a nationwide scandal. Despite the apparent evidence against him, Capizzano was cleared in June 2004 of obtaining sexual favours in exchange for boosting grades .

“I’d do it all again,” he said after the judgement came down .

John Hinderaker at Power Line quotes the article below, containing news you won’t find in the New York Times.

The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. – because it would tend to support President Bush’s use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups.

News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported in the American media.

Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S.

Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and railway stations, and the terrorists’ goal, he said, was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11.

Italian authorities stepped up their internal surveillance programs after July’s terrorist bombings in London. Their domestic wiretaps picked up phone conversations by Algerian Yamine Bouhrama that discussed terrorist attacks in Italy and abroad.

Italian authorities arrested Bouhrama on November 15 and he remains in prison. Authorities later arrested two other men, Achour Rabah and Tartaq Sami, who are believed to be Bouhrama’s chief aides in planning the attacks.

The arrests were a major coup for Italian anti-terror forces, and the story was carried in most major newspapers from Europe to China.

“U.S. terror attacks foiled,” read the headline in England’s Sunday Times. In France, a headline from Agence France Presse proclaimed, “Three Algerians arrested in Italy over plot targeting U.S.”

Curiously, what was deemed worthy of a worldwide media blitz abroad was virtually ignored by the U.S. media, and conservative media watchdog groups are saying that is no accident.

“My impression is that the major media want to use the NSA story to try and impeach the president,” says Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy in Media Report published by the grassroots Accuracy in Media organization.

“If you remind people that terrorists actually are planning to kill us, that tends to support the case made by President Bush. They will ignore any issue that shows that this kind of [wiretapping] tactic can work in the war on terror.”

“The mainstream media have framed the story as one of the nefarious President Bush ‘spying on U.S. citizens,’ where the average American is a victim not a beneficiary,” commented Brent Baker, vice president of the Media Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to encouraging balanced news coverage, “so journalists have little interest in any evidence that the program has helped save lives by uncovering terrorist plans.”

The Associated Press version of the story did not disclose that the men planned to target the U.S. Nor did it report that the evidence against the suspects was gathered via a wiretapping surveillance operation.

Furthermore, only one American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is known to have published the story that the AP distributed. It ran on page A-6 under the headline “Italy Charges 3 Algerians.” The Inquirer report also made no mention of the plot to target the U.S. – although foreign publications included this information in the headlines and lead sentences of their stories. Nor did it advise readers that domestic wiretaps played a key role in nabbing the suspected terrorists.

One obvious question media critics are now raising: Did the American media intentionally ignore an important story because it didn’t fit into their agenda of attacking President George Bush for using wiretapping to spy on potential terrorists in the U.S.?

“It’s clear to me,” says AIM’s Kincaid, “that they’re trying their best to make this NSA program to be an impeachable offense, saying it is directed at ordinary Americans. That’s why they keep referring to this as a ‘program of spying on Americans’ – whereas the president keeps pointing out it’s a program designed to uncover al-Qaida operations on American soil.”