June 19, 2016
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch revealed Sunday that the government will release the transcripts of the 911 calls made by the Orlando terrorist during the attack last Sunday — scrubbed of any references to Islam or the Islamic State (ISIS).
She told Chuck Todd on NBC News’ Meet the Press that the “FBI is releasing a partial [printed] transcript of the killer’s calls with law enforcement, from inside the club,” but added: “What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda.”
Todd responded, incredulously: “We’re not going to hear him talk about those things?”
Lynch added: “We will hear him talk about some of those things, but we are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance and that.”
It is widely known that the terrorist, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State — also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — during the attack.
CNN reported last Sunday, citing a U.S. official: “Mateen called [911] dispatchers about 20 minutes into the attack, pledging allegiance to ISIS and mentioning the Boston Marathon bombers.”
Last week, the Washington Post reported that Mateen had called a local news station and said: “I did it for ISIS” and “I did it for the Islamic State.”
President Barack Obama himself has acknowledged that Mateen referred to ISIS (or “ISIL,” as the Obama administration insists on calling the group, swapping “Levant” for “Syria” for unknown reasons). However, he has insisted that Mateen likely was a “lone wolf,” and that any connection between the terror attack and radical Islam is either false or unhelpful to identify.
He defended his refusal to use the phrase “radical Islam,” saying that “there is no magic to the phrase “radical Islam.” He argued that connecting terrorists to Islam only furthered the interests of groups like the Islamic State, which wish to foment a war between the Islamic world and the West.
Lynch appears to be carrying out that instruction to an absurd extreme. While she claimed that “we’re trying to get as much information about this investigation out as possible,” she and the rest of the administration are deliberately suppressing any evidentiary link between Mateen and radical Islam, even though she has acknowledged that he did not mention other purported motives, such as prejudice against gays.
President Obama has also insisted that the culprit in Orlando was weak gun control laws — and, indirectly, the Republican Party, which has resisted further infringements on the Second Amendment.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, will be published by Regnery on July 25 and is available for pre-order through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
No comments:
Post a Comment