Later that day, Obama administration officials began publicly touting the group, when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned starkly: "In terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State." Then followed an avalanche of uncritical media reports detailing this Supreme Threat, excitingly citing anonymous officials as though they had uncovered a big secret the government was trying to conceal.
On September 20, The New York Times devoted a long article to strongly hyping the Khorasan Group. Headlined "U.S. Suspects More Direct Threats Beyond ISIS," the article began by announcing that U.S. officials believe a different group other than ISIS "posed a more direct threat to America and Europe." Specifically:
"American officials said that the group called Khorasan had emerged in the past year as the cell in Syria that may be the most intent on hitting the United States or its installations overseas with a terror attack. The officials said that the group is led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a senior Qaeda operative who, according to the State Department, was so close to Bin Laden that he was among a small group of people who knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks before they were launched."
Again, the threat they posed reached all the way to the U.S.: "Members of the cell are said to be particularly interested in devising terror plots using concealed explosives."
This Khorasan-attacking-Americans alarm spread quickly and explosively in the landscape of U.S. national security reporting. The Daily Beast's Eli Lake warned on September 23 -- the day after the first U.S. bombs fell in Syria -- that "American analysts had pieced together detailed information on a pending attack from an outfit that informally called itself 'the Khorasan Group' to use hard-to-detect explosives on American and European airliners." He added even more ominously: "The planning from the Khorasan Group ... suggests at least an aspiration to launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001" (days later, Lake, along with Josh Rogin, actually claimed that "Iran has long been harboring senior al Qaeda, al Nusra, and so-called Khorasan Group leaders as part of its complicated strategy to influence the region").
On the day of the bombing campaign, NBC News' Richard Engel tweeted this:
That tweet linked to an NBC Nightly News report in which anchor Brian Williams introduced Khorasan with a graphic declaring it "The New Enemy," and Engel went on to explain that the group is "considered a threat to the U.S. because, U.S. intelligence officials say, it wants to bring down airplanes with explosives."
Once the bombing campaign was underway, ISIS -- the original theme of the attack -- largely faded into the background, as Obama officials and media allies aggressively touted attacks on Khorasan leaders and the disruption of its American-targeting plots. On the first day of the bombing, The Washington Post announced that "the United States also pounded a little-known but well-resourced al-Qaeda cell that some American officials fear could pose a direct threat to the United States." It explained:
"The Pentagon said in a statement early Tuesday that the United States conducted eight strikes west of Aleppo against the cell, called the Khorasan Group, targeting its 'training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communications building and command and control facilities.'"
The same day, CNN claimed that "among the targets of U.S. strikes across Syria early Tuesday was the Khorasan Group." The bombing campaign in Syria was thus magically transformed into an act of pure self-defense, given that "the group was actively plotting against a U.S. homeland target and Western targets, a senior U.S. official told CNN on Tuesday." The bevy of anonymous sources cited by CNN had a hard time keep their stories straight:
"The official said the group posed an 'imminent' threat. Another U.S. official later said the threat was not imminent in the sense that there were no known targets or attacks expected in the next few weeks.
"The plots were believed to be in an advanced stage, the second U.S. official said. There were indications that the militants had obtained materials and were working on new improvised explosive devices that would be hard to detect, including common hand-held electronic devices and airplane carry-on items such as toiletries."
Nonetheless, what was clear was that this group had to be bombed in Syria to save American lives, as the terrorist group even planned to conceal explosive devices in toothpaste or flammable clothing as a means to target U.S. airliners. The day following the first bombings, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed: "We hit them last night out of a concern that they were getting close to an execution date of some of the plans that we have seen."
CNN's supremely stenographic Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr, went on air as videos of shiny new American fighter jets and the Syria bombing were shown and explained that this was all necessary to stop a Khorasan attack very close to being carried out against the west:
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