The September 11 suicide attack you probably never heard about …

If you read the right-wing blogs -- and you have my sincere sympathies if you do -- you know that the hot story right now is about a free speech trial in france. The war-bloggers are a little too excited about it to give their readers much background, but it's got something to do with the controversial killing of Mohammed al Durah by Israeli troops (or not) that helped fire up the second Palestinian Intifada. (I'd link you to the Wikipedia article but, unsurprisingly, its neutrality and factual accuracy are disputed -- Israel/Palestine is the ultimate postmodern conflict, where no reality exists that's not subject to passionate dispute.)

A common theme of the right's breathless "coverage" of the trial -- also unsurprisingly -- is that the biased liberal media just refuse to give this momentous case the attention that it's due, despite the obvious fact that libel trials in France have long been a source of fascination for Americans of all backgrounds. Beer, boobs, football, French libel trials -- you know what captures our imaginations.

Anyway, while waiting to do a radio show (which you can catch tomorrow, if you care to, at 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30 pm EST on one of these fine stations), there was a story that I had completely missed about an attempted suicide bombing right here in the US of A on September 11 of all days.

What? I had missed an attempted suicide bombing -- a car bombing, no less -- on September 11? How could that have happened?

It became clear after a little Googling turned up this piece by Jennifer Pozner, which appeared almost a month after the fact in New York Newsday: