Although the “journalist” is unnamed, this is the standard operating procedure across corporate so-called “newsrooms.”
Nafeez Ahmed:
“I spoke to a major national newspaper here in the U.K. and what was interesting was they were quite sympathetic to the line of inquiry, but just felt like they couldn’t cover it. And it wasn’t that they were told they couldn’t cover it. The journalist that I spoke to who is a senior journalist that I have a lot of respect for was very sympathetic to what I was saying. He literally said to me look – I actually could sense that there was this fear that I shouldn’t be talking about this, this is going to far – is the document really strong enough? He didn’t feel confident.
“There is almost like an unspoken recognition I think in the mainstream media that there are certain things we are not allowed to say. The idea that something as despicable as ISIS could actually been foreseen or facilitated deliberately, which is really what is implied by this report quite clearly.
“It’s almost too much,” he said. “It goes against the grain of so much we take for granted. So many assumptions about not just American, but Western kind of supremacy and the benevolence of our government that we would never do anything like this … it’s a big kind of leap.
“On the one hand I think that journalists are scared and worried about pushing boundaries to that extent. It does raise a concern that there is an absolute silence on this issue, especially in the English speaking media. It raises real questions about what is behind that silence?”