The attack on a gay club in Orlando in which 50 people were killed and more than 50 wounded — now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history — demonstrates how potential threats are escaping the FBI’s vast counterterrorism dragnet.
While it’s unclear whether gunman Omar Mateen’s inspiration was hatred of gays, the Islamic State, or something else, attackers like him are the intended targets of the FBI’s post-9/11 prevention program. Federal law enforcement’s top priority today is to stop the attacker of tomorrow.
But Mateen’s mass shooting is an example of how dangerous men slip past the FBI’s watch while federal agents focus on targets of questionable capacity.
Born in the United States to parents from Afghanistan, Mateen was reportedly a “known quantity” to the FBI.
According to the Daily Beast, whose reporter quoted an unnamed “senior law enforcement source,” Mateen was a person of interest to the FBI in 2013 and again in 2014. The Intercept has been unable confirm independently from sources that Mateen had been under FBI investigation during those years.
If the FBI had in fact investigated Mateen, his capacity for violence would have been easily verified: He had a state firearms license.
With connections to homes in Martin and St. Lucie counties, Mateen would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the FBI’s Miami office, which has been among the bureau’s most active and aggressive counterterrorism units.
The Miami FBI investigated the so-called Liberty City 7 in one of the earliest and most controversial post-9/11 counterterrorism stings, and prosecutors in Florida’s Southern District have prosecuted dozens on terrorism-related charges in the last 15 years.
The Miami FBI has not responded to a request to comment on whether it has investigated Mateen.
For more than a year ending in April — a time during which investigators will now be looking for any clues from Mateen that might have been missed — the FBI in Miami focused on a counterterrorism sting that targeted James Medina, a homeless man with mental problems.
An FBI informant recorded conversations with Medina in which he expressed interest in attacking a Jewish community center. Medina did not have weapons or connections to international terrorists. In fact, he was known in homeless circles, not terrorism ones.
“C’mon, man, no terrorist is homeless,” Rick Wallace, who volunteered to serve lunch to homeless people in South Florida, told Local 10 ABC investigative reporter Bob Norman. “Who did he not threaten? He was insane.”
According to the FBI’s affidavit, the informant, not Medina, came up with the idea of crediting the planned attack to the Islamic State.
“You can do all that,” Medina told the informant. “Yeah, we can print up or something and make it look like it’s ISIS here in America. Just like that.”
Nearly a year before Medina’s arrest, the FBI’s Miami office arrested another supposed terrorist, 23-year-old Cuban-American Harlem Suarez, also known as Almlak Benitez, whom former co-workers described as “a little slow.” The government alleged that Suarez conspired with an FBI informant to bomb a beach in Key West in support of the Islamic State. The FBI provided a fake backpack bomb.
Does the FBI’s focus on men like Medina and Suarez — questionable targets of questionable mental fitness — prevent agents from identifying and investigating armed and dangerous men like the one behind what is now America’s worst mass shooting?
It’s a question the FBI, which has faced little congressional scrutiny over its counterterrorism program, has never been forced to answer.
The Orlando shooting isn’t the first case to raise this question. In 2011, when the FBI investigated Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, agents did not deem him a threat.
Instead, at about the same time, the Boston FBI started a nine-month sting operation against Rezwan Ferdaus, who had no weapons and no connections to international terrorists, and whose mental wellness had deteriorated so much that he was wearing adult diapers at the time of his arrest on terrorism charges.
Happy National Tatti Day?!!
YESSSSSSs
happy national tatti day!! :)
Hi Trevor, curious to read your thoughts about other info in the Daily Beast article you cite. It states that Mateen was a follower of the Orlando-based First Islamic Knowledge Seminary, run by Marcus Robertson, the former bodyguard for Abdel Rahman. Robertson is said to have extensive intelligence ties. What do you make of this?
Musashi ? Sufi Muslim
In another post, you asked me to comment on this post of yours.
Please re-read what you wrote and tell me if it makes any sense.
The following are the mistakes you are making in it:
1. You are stereotyping and generalizing the Muslims, as if we are one monolithic group and, like toys on an assembly line, we have the same shape and form and behave the same way like robots.
2. After stereotyping us, you are making a false claim: that ALL of us do not like Western culture and freedoms. Western freedoms have allowed many Muslims to challenge the Muslim orthodoxy on many issues in order to reform aspects of the Islamic Law that we find to be very troubling. This is something the Muslims cannot do in Muslim majority countries, for they will be harmed.
3. You then stated: “[We] have thousands of years of a dangerous theocracy indoctrinated directly into their DNA…” Do you not see the mistakes in it? You are referring to the Muslims. Are you suggesting that the Muslims of today have a history of THOUSANDS of years? Moreover, you are charging us of being robots who have in their DNA certain things that make it impossible for us to think for ourselves and behave as individuals in diverse ways. Do you not see how wrong you are? If you cannot see how wrong you are, I’m afraid I can’t do anything.
http://www.zahrapublications.com
Musashi ? Sufi Muslim
June 14 2016, 8:26 a.m.
1. You are sharing your own personal experience, and that’s fine. I respect that. Muslims are an extremely diverse people; they are a mosaic of a fairly large numbers of cultures, languages, traditions, and interpretations of Islam. I myself am aware of some Muslims who live in Muslim majority countries who question why young Muslim people would go to the West and practice some or most of the religions. But they do not question the intentions of them.
2. Your classification that the Muslims are guests refer only to those Muslims who either visit the West or go there to study or work and are not the citizens of those countries. Once they acquire residency, they become legal residence of the Western country they are in. And when they acquire citizenship, they become citizens after taking an oath to abide by its constitution and laws, which is like a personal treaty which, according to the Quran, they must abide by, even if there are things that go against their religion. (This applies to the non-citizens too; they must also abide by the conditions of their visas and the laws of the land). An oath trumps everything else. If they don’t like something that conflicts with their beliefs, they are free to move out, again, as per the Quran, which enjoins people to leave the place where they feel that they cannot practice their paths if they have the capacity to do so.
3. You are ignoring those Muslims who were born in the West. Those Muslims are not guests. The Western countries they live in are their countries, with equal rights and responsibilities as the non-Muslims. Moreover, there were many Muslim slaves who were brought to America a few hundred years ago. Many were forced to convert out of Islam. There are many African American Muslim converts whose families were brought to America as slaves, but they may or may not be Muslims originally. They have lived in America much longer than many non-Muslims.
Another example, when I was living in Tokyo, I used to spend my weekends at the clubs in the international district of Roppongi. It was a fun area, but you needed to watch yourself because there were always “incidences.” Can you guess which group was the most dangerous? Yes, you’re correct, Muslim men. Why? Because, in my opinion, they cannot handle alcohol because it’s not apart their culture (e.g., Omar Mateen), plus they do not understand what chivalry is. They were always fighting, always verbally or physically abusing women at the bar, and always the most obnoxious. My Japanese friend who owns a club there was so disgusted with them he put a sign on his bar door that said “No Muslims.” (Yes, you can get away with this in Japan.) When September 11th happened, I was in a bar in Roppongi, Tokyo. When the first scenes of the towers were coming down there were cheers in the bar from the Muslim men. Later, I witnessed several fights in the streets between Americans and Muslims. This stuck with me all this time. I thought how strange–here are these Muslim men enjoying Western alcoholic beverages, Western music, Western type club culture, but they cheer when they see one of our countries destroyed in horrific acts of terrorism. If the shoe was on the other foot, would we Americans cheer if we saw other American terrorists killing innocent civilians in their country? No we would not. As a matter of fact, this is why I despise the Obama administration because they get away with it every single day, and I know many others who feel the same. Muslims on the other hand, they feel absolutely zero sympathy when these acts of terror happen–few if any even condemn them, and as we have seen, none try to stop them from happening.
” If the shoe was on the other foot, would we Americans cheer if we saw other American terrorists killing innocent civilians in their country?”
Yeah, you would, and yeah, you have.
Obama, like other Prezzies before him, kills innocent civilians almost daily, and then lie about it.
No, not me, pal. I voted for Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012. The blood is on the hands of everyone else who didn’t do the same. Moreover, a vote for Clinton is a vote for more blood, more insane globalization, more Goldman Sachs, and more decimation of local communities and economies.
Sufi Muslim: By the way, I know my examples are anecdotal at best, but sometimes anecdotal evidence has very unique and an often raw and surprisingly truthful perspective. I have lived outside America’s borders for 20+ years in many different cultures, religions and landscapes. I’m also agnostic in regards to religion, philosophy, and politics. But from my experiences, my beliefs, and fields of study I do feel that the West clashes with many cultures and religions and I don’t feel it’s necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think forced cultural blending is going to solve the world’s problems, nor do I feel humanity needs to embrace and become one large bland ball of mass corporatism just to get along. It’s perfectly fine if Middle Eastern cultures disagree with Western cultures, it’s what makes the world such a brilliant and beautiful place. This current agenda that these crazed globalist liberal leaders are on is very dangerous and could take many generations to normalize. But in the end… will the ends justify the means? And what of these ends? To me, the ends mean culture and religion squeezed and diluted down so much that our only choices left are between Coke and Pepsi. I believe this is the ultimate goal too, and it’s quite sad and hopeless….
To Doug Salzmann,
I do not understand the absence of news and other coverage of this, alleged, HUMONGOUS event, other than the “yapping” of MSM presstitude whores (I do not get television/cable), who occupy the airtime with shit.
Where is the coverage of helicopters, ambulances, etc..? Where are the piles of bodies? Where are the more than 53 injured?
I need some credible evidence to even begin a rational dialogue of what is going on.
Doug – keep asking….
Just to begin!
Love you Doug….
As for the “subject of interest to the FBI” stories:
I can’s say I’m pleased to discover that others are beginning to raise the same questions about police response as I have, but I’m at least a little relieved:
You sound like fucking Donald Trump saying he was right about Muslim terrorists …
take your whataboutery and shove it.
As of late everybody, as well as their shadows and dreams, are “of interest to the FBI”. Aren’t you? I am. This is the letter I received as reply to a job application by the U.S. Census Bureau:
https://hsymbolicus.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/fbi_bad_nigger02.pdf
Do you know why did they blacklisted me in the FBI criminal index? Nor, do I! But it doesn’t really matter.
Well, they need to justify salaries and as they say: “you can make sense or money”
Trevor, this trend of “terrorism by freedom-hating lowlifes” who hate us for “being freedom-loving, morally guided individuals who have a free media, …” will never end. You may continue back and forthing with USG on that question. At some point we will have to see the general pattern and analyze it from a higher order. When the U.S. military invaded Noriega in Panama, their “responsible”, @ss-licking media in Latin America reported about Noriega’s reading preferences, personal objects, “communist leanings” … I think it was a journalist from Chile the one that took the time to look up what had been published each time USG invaded a Latin American country suggesting to them to be a little more imaginative as part of being “responsible”.
Something somewhat unexpected, yet “interesting” about all those never ending wars and the Orwellian times in which we all, the world at large, live now, is that we have all moved to “‘New’ Tel Aviv” for some time already and we don’t even seem to be conscious of it (great achievement by the “chosen ones”!) or see an end to constant wars and destabilization of people we “freedom-lovingly” start without seeing a timely, moral, or “logical” end to them.
We don’t seem to notice that those conflicts are self-feeding (great to the MIC!). I wonder when will “terrorist” “take it to the next level” and attack a nuclear facility in their own countries (they have already committed their lives to Alah, right?). I hear some (most?, almost all?) of you saying: “Great they would be taking care of themselves!”, without realizing that once one of those goes off it doesn’t really matter where it is, we will all be engulfed in it. So, after we all moved to “‘New’ Tel Aviv” we will all end up in in Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Who would have thought that “globalization” would bring us to that point! In a sense, even poetically, we have started this mess together and together shall we end it.
In the same sense that the speed of light is “innocent” about it being used to “freedom-lovingly” kill “unsuspecting”, innocent people on the other side of the globe using drones. Physics doesn’t give a sh!t about us or “our Gods” (Now it won’t matter how well coffee smelled in the morning, how much you love your grandchildren, that all you have done is watching TV, …). If we can’t morally find a way out of madness, can’t help but compulsively, feraly play ourselves into techno sh!t, “freedom-loving”, “progress” … Physics certainly will find a stop for it all for us.
truth and peace and love,
RCL
Nice article, very nice!
The FBI interviewed the Sunni shooter, Omar Moteen, several times by some news accounts, three times by other news reports — and Omar traveled to Saudi Arabia on at least several occasions (sound familiar?) — but judged him to pose no threat!
Body Count: 49 murdered, 53 wounded
The FBI was tipped off several times by the Russians about Tsarnaev (the older brother in the Boston Marathon bombing) and the FBI investigated him at least several times, but judged him to pose no threat!
Body Count: 5 murdered, 264 wounded
The FBI did indeed entice, then entrap, some kids from Liberty City (Miami, Florida), claiming they were terrorists!?
Body Count: 0 murdered, 0 wounded
The FBI did ignore the plans for the first attack on the World Trade Center, when they confiscated the files of the assassin of conservative Rabbi, Meir Kahane, and said plans for the 1993 bombing were found among those files.
Several FBI senior agents were forced to resign when they allowed a Chinese intelligence agent to compromise a national security investigation (nuclear leaks at Lawrence Livermore facility) as they two FBI agents were partaking of sex with the female Chinese agent — the two agents should have been indicted and tried under the Espionage Act!
Prior to the horrendous attacks on 9/11/01, FBI field agents in Arizona, Florida and Minnesote repeatedly attempted to warn FBI HQ (specifically, managers Frasca and Maltbie) about Sunni Arabs who were taking flying lessons, but not interested in landings or take-offs — one agent in Arizona was specific: “. . . it’s as if they are training to fly planes into the Twin Towers!”
Those FBI managers who ignored them, Frasca and Maltbie, were later promoted!
A retired diabetic FBI money laundering expert (and Jewish-American) allowed the CIA to dispatch him to Iran, where he was promptly captured — his family was later paid $2 million by the CIA to keep quiet about this, although they did go public on the matter. (What could this retired FBI fellow have been thinking????? Untrained in spycraft, a Jewish-American, infiltrating into Iran???)
So when a DIA analyst, Julie Sirrs, attempts to warn her superiors about al Qaeda and the Taliban, she is treated in a most incredibly shoddy manner and forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
When honest and pastriotic NSA employees attempt to warn of “wasted billions” (actually, stolen billions) under NSA director, Gen. Hayden, the FBI target them as criminals and move in on Thomas Drake, William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Edward Loomis and Senate staffer, Diane Roark — and end up destroying Thomas Drake’s marriage and career!
When it comes to real terrorists and real foreign intelligence agents, the FBI has proven time and again they simply aren’t up to the task.
Time for a massive personnel audit with the logical massive reduction in force!
Recommended Reading:
Tiger Trap, by David Wise
Recommended Viewing:
Prof. Nader Hashemi on ISIS and the broken politics of the Middle East
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzX9uM2cUjg
Hillary Clinton announced her solution on MJ
http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/clinton-we-have-to-stand-up-against-hate-704404547515
Mika. Would you support stronger measures to track behavior on line to try and sort of get a jump on behavior like this?
Hillary: “Yes. I would. I’ve been calling for that for some time now. We’ve got to tackle this problem of self radicalisation. I would set up a team dedicated to detecting and preventing loan wolf attacks. And that will mean providing more resources, creating more integration of information, among and between all our law enforcement agencies strengthing our communication and working with our tech companies to prevent online ah, radicalisation. We’ve got to get law enforcement the tools they need while also staying true to who we are and that requires rooting out radicalisation in a strong and smart way – way not turning on one another, not being devisive, coming together, denying jihadists virtual territory just as we worked to deny them actual territory, contest online space, including websites and chatrooms where jihadists communicate. And then do a better job of co-ordinating and keep hitting this thread at it’s source in Iraq Syria Afghanistan and across the arc of instability.”
Wow…I guess that makes Dylan Roof a jihadist.
The Islamophobic right very much wants this atrocity to be all about, and only about, the religion of the murderer. That most especially includes Zionists, who traffic in anti-Muslim propaganda as a matter of “defending” their own depraved policies and behavior vis-a-vis Palestinians.
Former Israeli ambassador to the US — and now a member of Israel’s parliament –, Michael Oren, actually touted how Donald Trump can use this tragedy to his benefit:
The right, including Zionists, doesn’t want Omar Mateen to be a mentally unstable, steroid-taking wife-beater who hated everybody from blacks to gays, who had easy access to weapons the rest of the Western world prohibits, and whose worldview was incoherent. All they want people to focus on is: Muslim.
And you, in turn, only want it to be about homophobia as per your unsubstantiated declaration that “Fifty people were killed, and more than another 50 wounded. Because they were LGBT.”
Again, I challenge you to provide proof of your own assertions by answering these questions:
1. How do you know that every person that was killed and wounded was gay?
2. How do you know what Mateen’s state of mind was at the time of the attack?
3. How do you know what Mateen’s motivation was at the time of the attack?
4. How do you know that Mateen was not insane at the time of the attack?
5. How do you know that Mateen was acting with agency at the time of the attack?
Absent that proof, you are no different from those alleged “Islamaphobes” you now hypocritically fault.
No, I don’t. And my writing has made that clear. That I do absolutely insist that this atrocity is very much about homophobia does not mean I credit no other relevant factors, which I’ve cited, including mental illness and access to heinous weapons.
As for this list of questions you so fancy, Baldie McEagle dismissed them as “infantile.” I’d say they’re more just moronic, but either works. I’ll substantively address them when hell freezes over, and am quite willing to let that fact speak to all reasonable readers for them to conclude as they will.
The facts have already spoken and they say that you are a lying, hypocritical coward.
What I wrote is true. It’s also not the only sentence I wrote.
Really, Karl, you wouldn’t recognize actual lies and hypocrisy if they bit you in your authoritarian ass.
Claims of truth require objective proof. If your current statement that:
is true then it should be no problem for you to provide verifiable substantiation for your position. Absent that substantiation, the charge that you are a “lying, hypocritical coward” remains uncontested.
In your head, and the heads of any other people who might pretend to agree with you just because it’s me. I don’t care about you or them, or what you think or say about me.
When somebody travels a long distance to a well-known gay club and starts killing people, he doesn’t have to verify the sexual orientation of each individual victim to show that he was targeting gays. Maybe Mona should have said that “Fifty people were killed, and more than another 50 wounded. Because they were presumed to be LGBT.” But is her failure to make that obvious refinement of her assertion evidence of a character fault? No, but your hostility to her shows not a fault, but a chasm, in your character.
Thank you. It’s so fucking obvious.
Karl’s actual problem is that he, too, is a homophobe, and is greatly unhappy with the sympathy for LGBT people — and the focus on homophobia — that this incident has generated.
You can attempt to hide behind the manufactured opinions of 100 sock puppets Mona and isn’t going to change the fact that you have repeatedly failed to substantiate you claim that “Fifty people were killed, and more than another 50 wounded.”when challenged.
I do not use socks. With one exception, when conducting an experiment, and afterwards revealed that I had done so. (This was in Greenwald’s comments at The Guardian.)
My writing style is quite distinctive, and easily spotted. The energy it would take to disguise it is nothing I care to summon.
In any event, I am done in this thread. I’ve moved on to Glenn’s fine column on exploiting the plight of LGBTs to promote Islamophobia.
OK, Hypatia.
(It was some time ago; blogspot days)
That wasn’t a sock. It was a pseudonym, which I used for about a year when Glenn first began blogging — and which I only used there. I adopted it because I didn’t want people thinking I thought I was special because of my relationship with Glenn, and it wasn’t hard to learn that he had a former law partner named “Mona.”
But my style is quite distinctive, and eventually someone who was reading me elsewhere guessed, outed me, and I didn’t deny it. I changed my moniker to Mona, and have been only that ever since, with the one exception I detailed.
I suppose I should add that when I comment at a site thru Disquis or Google it lists me as Hypatia. That’s because of a joke gmail account I made that those softwares automatically use.
I just haven’t tried to figure out how to change that.
Who’s trying to hold the FBI accountable? Who asks these questions, unless somebody circulates a petition.
Aren’t you glad that Sec’y Clinton announced the need for more resources to uncover lone wolves?
He’ll no. This would increase the Organized Stalking of innocent civilians by greedy STASI Agency scum. We’ve lost the 4th, next the 2nd.
Zion Media is exploiting this tragedy to push it’s agenda…a corrupt police state.
Remember when the owners of some pilot training schools called the fbi to report some students that were only interested in take-offs? And they got no response.
This article illuminates a trend and why picking on the weak to justify illegal programs and productivity sounds like a “bully’s” philosophy to me…read the article. Only a perspective, but the facts are what they are. When you have such a big list, you have to justify why you are going to take away a target’s rights when the time comes to enforce actions for placing the target(s) under increased scrutiny. Problem is, when there are so many targets based on both fabricated and innocuos data (articles), quite possibly created by law enforcement and/or flat out embarassing inclusion criteria standards, providing a “legal” explanation for the reason the target is even on the list, let alone being under increased scrutiny and potentially being refused the right to, for example, get a certain job, enter a country, board a plane or purchase something, is impossible to do without being held accountable for the facts that support inclusion on the list. The best solution would be transparency and accountability, in order to assure only legitimate targets are included on any list, and resources are not wasted on good people. Finding a needle in a haystack is the cliche that is brought up in regards to this issue.
Definition:
Them: Who turn to violence.
Us: Who don’t.
Well . . .
“Us: Who, when we do, are righteous and justified.”
Many surviving Stasi Zersetzung targets are wondering if a journalist will serendipitously trip over G4S’s likely involvement in domestic torture, then have the courage to do something about it.
No one stable is wondering that. Only people like these unfortunates.
Comey must be very proud of you mona.
Oh, yeah, Jimmy and Mona: best buds. He’s always sending flowers and candy, penning personal notes thanking her for her writings supporting the agency and its important work in Keeping America Safe . . .
I heard their families even vacation together. ;^)
stalked562-
Do you have any links to this “Mona,” your discussions with her, and any other identifying data?
I would like to research her, as it offends me that anyone would dismiss the valid link between nefarious illegal activity by the law enfarcement, the NSA and its collusion with the FBI, and community groups like the LEIU et ass to cloak individualized their terror campaigns against American citizens in the shroud of dismissive ‘mental illness’ labels.
And: It’s hard/ impossible to believe that said person Mona-if in fact she/it is/was affiliated with law practice, journalism, or in any way shared space with Greenwald, would or could dismiss organized stalking as the twittering of crazy people.
I am a newcomer here- but I smell agency troll, with a hotline to the Intercept’s mainframe.
Based on hard circumstantial evidence Stan is very likely 100% accurate and stable.
Many if, not most, of those investigated after 9/11 were targeted for non-terrorism and non-crimes. In my view, based on circumstantial evidence, that number is probably around 90% non-terrorists and non-criminals.
Stasi and Zersetzung are exactly the correct labels here. The United States no longer has federal law enforcement agencies and constitutional intelligence agencies – we have an American Stasi that polices First Amendment activities.
The American Stasi is diverting so much manpower and resources to policing First Amendment activities (aka: Thought Police) that they missed the real bad guys.
Every state in the United States has at least one “Fusion Center” (blacklisting centers) that focus on non-terrorists and non-criminals trolling Facebook and social media.
Anyone that disagrees can file “Freedom of Information Act” requests with your state and federal agencies. Simply ask in your FOIA request: “What percentage of their blacklists (they call them watchlists) possess ‘probable cause or reasonable suspicion’ of a past crime?” The real number is probably about 90% without any criminal basis at all. For example: Virginia’s Fusion Center (operated by the Virginia State Police) once listed 100% of all African-American college students at all-black colleges as the basis for being watchlsited.
That’s a Stasi, not law enforcement nor intelligence!
Stan is a very sick man. He’s one of these. Neither Glenn Greenwald, nor (as far as I know), any of the other staff at The Intercpet have any use for these poor unfortunates.
I’ve discussed these dangerous, deluded people with several prominent people in the privacy community, people who write and speak in public on NSA/natsec issues. These “Targeted Individuals” frequently show up to harangue and harass and demand that the speaker address these unhinged beliefs.
Security has had to be called more than once.
Yes RB, I have have been accurate and precise about Zersetzung experiences I have posted here, to Mona’s chagrin, and stable through it all. But she’s absolutely right about Greenwald. He has no need to sell any NSA docs that could shed light on this particular style of American torture, or investigate it. He’s doing just fine.
Between the two of us, who do you think seems more desperate and unhinged, Mona or myself? (And she’s the comfortable party!)
So spews a nasty bucket of raw sewage again, now citing one of the most disreputable purveyors of disinfo in the world. She and Craig have much in common: their infatuation with routine torture along with the typical American Fuckwits’ Explanation: “It Doesn’t Happen Here”.
One of the many aspects of COINTELPRO 2.0 the NY Times ‘hit piece’ doesn’t touch on is the fact that many targets’ homes are repeatedly broken into and vandalized, and their possessions are also vandalized, altered and stolen. I have documented such vandalism/property damage and theft with the police; but even though many of them know I’m being targeted by someone or some group with some technical skills and tools to circumvent alarm and video systems, they don’t have the resources to investigate (which I’m guessing might be different if I was the mayor or someone influential with a lot of money).
Recently, someone urinated all over my apartment (about 20 large drenched stains all over the carpet connected by hundreds of droplets stains that reeked of urine and now reek even more). It’s really hard to deny something like that — as much as I would have liked to have pretended it didn’t happen — after you put your hand in it and have to take a whiff, and then spend a couple hours trying to sop it up. And I’m dirt poor, so there’s no chance of replacing the carpet, padding and sub-flooring the urine seeped into any time soon.
I don’t know why someone or groups has/have scribbled all over my walls, made 5″ x 5″ holes in my walls, destroyed dozens of articles of clothing with thousands of holes, or stolen dozens of important medical and other documents; but even skeptical neighbors know all the vandalism is 100 percent undeniable after they saw the vandalism and damage first-hand.
The neighbors who have seen the vandalism and property damage are scared, because they know something horrific is happening to me, and they don’t understand why the police are dragging their feet.
With approximately 3,300 government organizations and private companies working in homeland defense, national security and domestic intelligence, how could anyone claim to know what these ‘entities’ are doing or not doing.
Many targets may not be “special” at all and may simply be ‘low hanging fruit’ or easy targets to use as target practice to hone techniques to destroy a person’s psyche. This is absolutely nothing new. What’s new is there are thousands of entities that could conceal these types of black/psyops to prevent exposure.
Mona- do you really dismiss all victims of organized stalking as unstable persons? Or is that just your agency party line?
Or, maybe you are plainly too stupid to sort the verifiable schizo’s and other agency disinfo trolls from the white noise surrounding important stories that have yet to find the way to the light of day?
Well, Stan, to the extent that G4S is involved in the prison-corrections-security-industrial complex (which is very, very extensively), it is certainly part of a system that engages in a certain form of torture.
If you have something more specific in mind, perhaps you’ll share.
<blockquote.If you have something more specific in mind, perhaps you’ll share.
In the past year or so, Stan and his fellow sufferers have been quite specific. Some of them persisted in over-running comments with some of the most-wild-eyed craziness this side of an LSD trip, and finally started getting banned for crapflooding the comments with all this nuttiness.
One I especially recall was “Pat,” who claimed she was being remotely tortured by “them” in such a manner that she felt as if her whole body was on fire, and as a consequence she sleeps in a bed of ice.
I feel a bit guilty for having made enormous fun of these people, because I now realize they are extremely troubled and most of them are severely mentally ill. For many or most, they actually believe these things are being done to them, and are genuinely suffering. Just not for the (literally incredible) reasons they give.
I guess I didn’t recognize that Stan is among the “gangstalked.”
I’ve only slowly become aware of this mass psychosis. I’ll have to read the NY Times article . . . and consider the extent to which the Internet drives the wide and rapid spread of the contagion — and its persistence, as with 9/11 “truth.”
The Internet has permitted all of these pitiful souls to find each other and create a rather large large network of believers. Anyone suffering from paranoid delusions can google, run across zillions of these Targeted Individual/gangstalking sites and find an “explanation” for the symptoms they experience.
That this is so has raised an interesting issue for mental health professionals, who have carved out an exception for religion and other non-rational belief systems that are adhered to by many and are often mainstream. Belief that virgins have babies, the dead rise to life, and that one talks to invisible supernatural entities such as a god or saints, is all exempt from a diagnosis of mental illness — because it is all widely believed.
So what to do, then, when tens of thousands of (often) psychotic people, form all over the world, claim a common explanation for their experiences?
Yes Doug, read the Grey Thing because it is credible on this and so many other torture and war related subjects. And follow Mona because she knows everything about it too.
“9/11 truth” has, from the get-go, probably been infiltrated (or externally inundated) by agents of organizations that want to discredit exposure of their involvement by burying real information in a swamp of false hypotheses. And, of course, there are some honestly nutty people in the mix. The best approach to 9/11 is to point out the things that the government and associated forces are being secretive and/or clearly lying about, rather than insisting on any particular interpretation of what actually happened.
It might be helpful for such individuals to contemplate the difference between:
Petit mal conspiracy theory: The FBI is actually the biggest conspiracy theorist in the United States; every indictment they hand down generally involves a ‘conspiracy to commit mail fraud’. For example, a Mafia crime family is such a conspiracy; notably only a handful of individuals are ever fully cognizant of all the details of the criminal operation. This is also seen in covert government agencies who obsess over ‘compartmentalization’ and ‘need to know’, but who nevertheless are unable to keep their secrets from spilling into the public domain on a regular basis.
and
Grand mal conspiracy theory. Generally speaking, this is a kind of fundamentalist religious vision of all-powerful all-knowing entities watching everything you do at all times; paranoid schizophrenia or devout religious belief? UFOs, possession by Satan, Bilderberger mania, all fall into this category. Commonly promoted by various manipulative individuals as a means of gaining control over other’s financial resources (cult leaders), or for suppressing dissent (government propagandists), etc.
Superbly explained by Douglas Rushkoff:
https://arthurmag.com/2007/09/20/rushkoff-on-911-conspiracy-theorists/
That seems a useful framework with which to analyze the “conspiracy theory” concept. (And yes, the use of the U.S. mail has been incorporated into multiple criminbal statutes to make it easier to prosecute and convict for actions that often should not be criminal.)
There’s also the distinction between “warranted” and “unwarranted” conspiracy theories. The hallmarks of the latter include special pleading for a lack of any concrete evidence, including any leaks from credible participant-sources.
“The hallmarks of the latter include special pleading for a lack of any concrete evidence, including any leaks from credible participant-sources.”
Mona, nice stab at a red herring, but there was no grain of truth in it. Is this the sort of thing you learned in law school?
You never knew, or conveniently forgot for the purposes of your post, COINTELPRO activities were exposed by a small group of people grabbing all the documents they could from a Media, Penn. FBI office they broke into in 1971. There were no COINTELPRO leaks by so called credible participant-sources.
What these documents showed was the existence of a federal program to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” people the FBI simply did not like. Today, your beloved Stasi is doing the same thing (and more) to people you and it simply do not like, and still, from 1971 up until this second, no participant-source has come forward to confess or leak anything about these crimes. It’s just not in the nature of the sort of people in this line of work. But you knew that.
There is nothing “un-American” about the criminal activities of the rich and powerful. In fact, they are as American as slavery, genocide, and perpetual war.
That’s funny; I thought slavery, genocide and perpetual war were invented by European empire-builders. . . or was that the Roman empire-builders. . . ? Or can we blame it all on Genghis Khan? And I don’t think ‘the criminal activities of the rich and powerful’ are strictly an American phenomenon, either.
It is a work in progress, I will admit. . . but democracy is still a better idea than monarchy.
I don’t know who you are except that you spend a lot of time here and have expressed an affinity for Mona’s viewpoint on the subject of routine domestic torture in the US.
Anyway…
If I described some of the specific criminal activities I witnessed between June 2012 and November 2015 , along with the name (and LinkedIN page) of the head of a private security outfit working in San Jose who led his criminal team members (one of which was an Iraq vet who committed suicide), TI would delete the post. Convenient, isn’t it? I know I know… I’m just not credible to you. But of course, you are. Right?
I’m talking over you now… The Stasi’s goons are trained and paid to be careful not to leave evidence because they are cowards; they know that they are engaged in terrorism and have a nation’s image to worry about. (Too late, it is already as shitty as the dead DDR’s.) But I do have evidence in the form of digital photographs and videos. Additionally, one person — another quite sane person of outstanding character — admits to being a witness to two separate stalking incidents involving the same goon, and witnessing another incident involving two other stalkers (also recorded on video). I also have evidence in the form of email and even a business letter from a rather careless Zersetzung worker wallowing in his or her impunity. Now, Mona would look at this evidence and pull context out of her exceptional American ass, being the dismantled and anachronistic attorney she is, and call it something else. But she was not there. Nor was she present during hundreds of other incidents ranging from death threats and physical assaults to the childish pranks of overgrown seven year olds. Nor is her vocation useful anymore in a country without law, and her loathsome opinions on such matters weigh nothing to reasoning people no longer under the influence.
Finally, about the irritation that comes through some of my posts: if you had been stalked and tortured for more than a decade and did not get angry from time to time many reasonable people would conclude you are a completely broken human being.
I’ve said this before, but here it is again:
The root cause of violence is the human self, which reflects a spectrum of qualities and attributes from the lowest to the highest.
The lower qualities include hatred, anger, vengeance, ignorance, selfishness, attachments, desires for power, control and resources, seeing otherness, arrogance, doing unto others what one doesn’t want done unto one, etc., while the higher qualities are the opposites of these, and include qualities, such as love, peace, forgiveness, knowledge, selflessness, detachments, no desires for power, control and resources, sharing, seeing no otherness, serving others with no expectations, not doing unto others what one doesn’t want done unto one, generosity, humility, etc.
Grooming the self so that it reflects the higher is what is needed, and this process transcends religious, non-religious, cultural and racial boundaries.
If a path doesn’t help the self to reflect the higher then it’s useless, regardless of the label we’ve given it.
Good points on individual acts of violence, but note that the most devasting acts of violence are always organized by states, with many knock-on effects – and why do states turn to violence?
“Reason says that institutions are created to provide service to humanity, not to advance the personal interests of those mandated to serve. . . [but] this can happen in any domain of organized activity, of which national government is a highly visible and consequential example.” – Mastering the Art of War, Zhuje Liang & Liu Ji
If we look at the events leading up to Orlando, where should we begin? With the birth of the Cold War at the end of WWII, driven by the greed and ambition of a few world leaders who sought to dominate the planet? With the Middle East conflict betwen proxy groups, USSR-supported Marxists and US-supported Islamists, the motivation being greed for control of oil? How the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. turned Afghanistan into their ideological battleground, leaving over a million dead behind them? How the U.S. declared victory over the USSR, rushing to grab the spoils and leaving Afghanistan to fester? How Pakistan and the Saudis then financed the Taliban in an effort to take over Afghanistan? How radical Islamic leaders then turned on the Saudis and Americans who had sponsored them for so long against the USSR, in their own ambitious quest for power and control? Leading to the global jihad terrorism that culminated in 9/11? How the Bush Administration, swollen with power and ambition, leveraged the attacks into the Iraq War, another greedy quest for control of oil? How the disaster they created in Iraq, the killing and torture, then opened the door for more terrorist groups, full of ambition, who established themselves as ISIS and, again with covert support from the Saudis, CIA, etc. sought to overthrow Syria and establish their ‘caliphate’ with more calls for global jihad? How disaffected and angry young Muslims all around the world bought into their propaganda, including one man in Orlando Florida?
When it comes to state-sponsored violence and its knock-on effects (of which Orlando was merely one of many), it seems that greed, personal ambition and the thirst for power are the most common themes. . . which notably visible characteristics of both candidates in this year’s U.S. Presidential election, I might add.
States, and non-state groups, are run and led by human beings. It’s usually their leaders who set directions for them.
Imagine if these groups and states are governed and led by those who reflect the higher self!
When our political systems produce those who reflect the lower (to a varying degree), something isn’t right.
It’s a nice thought, and wouldn’t that be great?
However, the pragmatic approach adopted by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, to create three separate-but-equal branches of government that would act to check each other’s excesses and ambitions, still seems like the only workable long-term option, since human beings have this (apparently) indestructable tendency to want to act like alpha-dominant chimpanzees within their social groupings – as seen in the persistent efforts by various U.S. politicians to overthrow the Constitution and replace it with “Unilateral Executive Power”.
Perhaps it’s not ‘human nature,’ just the consequence of a deeply flawed society that rewards alpha-chimp dominance-type competitive behavior over rational-empathetic cooperative behavior?
Behaviors that do not reflect the higher self (as described by you) have become the standard mean in American culture. Americans are now being conditioned from birth to believe that the acquisition of material wealth is essential to their sense of self and well-being. To this end they are being systematically inculcated with a set of exclusively rational values that intentionally deemphasize the innate impulse to aspire to the “higher,” or, if you prefer, to nurture those non-rational aspects of being that bear witness to those defining aspects of the Infinite to which you refer. Although all religious belief systems are the finite product of the human mind, they at least aspire to giving voice to the presence of the infinite within the human psyche with the intention of encouraging and preserving that which is most worthy of nurturing in human nature. It is in this context that we can begin to understand the clash of secular (Lockean or rational) and religious (non-rational) values that informed the great awakening during the nineteenth century. Emerging from that clash was a protestant sensibility that valued free will, individual sovereignty, and the innate dignity of all men. The emancipation of slaves and women’s suffrage were both informed and fueled by the unique blend of rational and non-rational values that defined protestant culture within American society at that time.
When one fast forwards to twenty-first century American culture, one is immediately struck by the degree to which a secular emphasis on reason alone has re-shaped its moral landscape. We now live in a world where the mean by which American values are exported to the rest of the world is solely measured in terms of economy and political efficacy. The debate over extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, torture, regime change, extralegal assassinations, forced migration, state sponsored terror, pacification, indoctrination, and cultural annihilation has been won by those who pragmatically argue that, when fully realized, successful political ends can always justify the means by which they are accomplished. From the bombing of entire civilian populations in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to the precision targeting of alleged terrorists with cruise missiles and smart bombs, policy makers have employed reason as the sole arbiter of that which is morally justifiable. Ironically, an African American president is now the embodiment of America’s reason-centrist ethos.
Given the fact that the inculcated mindset of the average American has no conscious awareness of its own transcendental (non-rational and eternal) nature, the road to ones “higher self” will always be interpreted, at best, as a reason biased argument. In this context, the measure of ones material well being will always be the standard by which the “good” of ones actions are measured.
Almost everyone believes the ends justifies the means, even if they don’t see it, much less admit it.
Largest shooting by one man. There have been much larger massacres.
Agree or disagree, right or wrong, but this is what Dr. Juan Cole has to say:
“Omar Mateen and Rightwing Homophobia: Hate Crime or Domestic Terrorism?”, at:
http://www.juancole.com/2016/06/rightwing-homophobia-terrorism.html
Excerpt:
Fully agree, we need to focus on the gun owners in this country as the key to the solution.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/executive-order-requiring-mandatory-surveillance-gun-owners
Sign the petition, lets turn the FBI and the Intelligence apparatus into a tool to really make our country safe.
Wrong. You apparently missed Sufi.Muslim’s next post. It focuses on changing the person.
You must work for government if your solution to this is MORE SURVEILLANCE of private citizens. It’s precisely BECAUSE law enforcement is overwhelmed with useless data that they MISSED something right under their noses.
Wow. Really? Expanding the scope of the surveillance regime we currently “enjoy” is an asinine plan. On so many levels. Implementation; how would YOU do it? Constitutionality; how many of those pesky amendments would need to be stricken? Funding; well, enough said.
The right-wing xenophobes are no doubt conflicted over this event: on the one hand, it plays well into the anti-Muslim rhetoric, but on the other the victims were mainly Latino (immigrants stealing our jobs!) and gay. Right-wing Christian fundamentalism is closely aligned with Wahhabi Sunni Islamic fundamentalism when it comes to homophobic hatred and repression.
Regardless, you can be sure their focus is on exploiting this tragedy to serve their own personal ambitions, not on remembering the victims or looking too deeply into the contributing factors, from easy access to guns to intolerance and hatred to misguided investigative priorities to the disastrous U.S. foreign policy in Syria. Will they want to look into how the effort to crack down on whistleblowers and spy on journalists and political dissidents is sucking up too many FBI resources? I doubt it.
This is tediously common opportunistic behavior among the U.S. political class, regardless of parety affiliation – look at Bill Clinton and Barak Obama’s rushing to pay tribute to Muhammad Ali, while glossing over his opposition to Zionist Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians, in a pathetically transparent attempt to whip up minority support for Hillary Clinton. Never mind the fact that the Vietnam-era American foreign policy that Ali opposed is back in full swing in the Middle East, either.
What about the domestic liberal progressive take on Orlando? There seems to be a push to treat this solely as a hate crime, an LGBT domestic community issue with minimal connections to international terrorism, which glosses over issues such as Obama and Clinton’s close ties to Saudi Arabia, linked to arms sales and oil deals, that U.S. foreign policy aided the rise of ISIS, and that the Saudi government is as violently homophobic as the Orlando killer; the liberal progressives will justify this approach as “not promoting Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry” – but what about Saudi law? A comment from Clinton and Trump on this issue is in order; will the corporate media ask it?
Not an issue? Most American journalists are incredibly adept at avoiding another central issue in the terrorism story, namely how the U.S. and Britain and local allies played such a central role in the rise of ISIS and al Qaeda in Syria, where over 250,000 people have been killed in a civil war in which radical Islamic groups have been supported and armed by the CIA, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Israeli defense minister Ya’alon publicly hoped that ISIS would overrun Syria (since they weren’t Iran). Thousands of people have been massacred by ISIS across Syria and Iraq since 2011, and without extensive support from the above actors, ISIS would never have controlled so much territory, nor become a global terrorist group capable of launching and inspiring attacks everywhere from Europe to the United States to the Philippines:
https://levantreport.com/2016/03/01/protecting-al-qaeda-guest-analysis-by-steven-chovanec/
The third player, the neoliberal/neoconservative propaganda machine (aka “the corporate media”) is trying to figure out how to spin this in order to disconnect the violence engendered by American foreign policy (recall Iraq: 4,000+ dead U.S. soldiers, 150,000+ dead Iraqis, the low count, which opened the door to al Qaeda and, later, ISIS in Iraq) from the domestic violence seen in Orlando. Can we blame it all on lax U.S. gun laws? On a mentally unstable violently homophobic racist – who wanted to be a police officer? Hmmm. . . tricky – don’t want to go too deeply into the terrorism angle, either. So, go with a strictly emotive angle, tears and an outpouring of grief, while ignoring all the contributing factors to the tragedy?
Yes, it’s deeply tragic that 50 people were killed; but ignoring some or all of the contributing factors because they don’t fit with the agenda of the liberal progressive wing, or of the conservative xenophobic wing, or of the corporate media wing, is doing the victims a great disservice.
Spot on.
Pretty damned good long read.
Except it’s ‘party affiliation’, not ‘parety affiliation.’
It’s odd, though, when one spends any time looking at conflicts around the world, 50 people just seems like a tiny drop in a big bucket. Still, what a senseless waste of life. I think I need some sunlight, water, growing plants . . .
I disagree the intersectional conflict here seems to be entirely on the Left. As Muslims are at the pinnacle of the Left’s victim hierarchy, the real tragedy of the event wasn’t so much the people who died, as the fact that their deaths might lead to criticism of Islam. This why there has been so much hand-waving about T-Shirts and other such nonsense.
Muslims are at the “pinnacle” of the despised minority hierarchy. Hence, those you dismiss as “the Left” are especially vigilant in countering the right’s anti-Muslim demonetization campaigns.
Yup, same hierarchy, different names.
http://www.pravdareport.com/opinion/columnists/13-06-2016/134703-united_states_paranoia-0/
The NY Times does a hit-piece and Pravda publishes the truth (albeit in the form of an opinion piece). Meanwhile, The Intercept censors.
And you call yourselves journalists.
And you call your link journalism …
…no, it certainly isn’t the kind of “journalism” practiced around these parts.
Once upon a time ago Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”
(… but now McLuhan’s assessment only rings true when “public” is replaced by “journalistic”)
The Intercept does not “censor.”
Great find anon!
Also see the excellent June 12 rebuttal to the NYT article at http://www.fightgangstalking.com
“Does the FBI’s focus on men like Medina and Suarez — questionable targets of questionable mental fitness — prevent agents from identifying and investigating armed and dangerous men like the one behind what is now America’s worst mass shooting?”
Sure it does, and that is the point. A frightened population is more likely to fall in line with the neo-liberal agenda: keeping us ‘safe’. The FBI makes up some fake stings and lets the few real nutjobs go wild. Scary!
Incidentally, I object to the label ‘ America’s worst mass shooting’. It may have been the largest, in terms of sheer numbers, but I think that blowing away a classroom of 6-year-olds is far worse than any murders involving adults. Nothing happened to gun laws from that; perhaps America’s strongest political lobby will be able to change that.
On December 29th, 1890 over 150 Lakota men, women and children were massacred at Wounded Knee by the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment. I would count that as the worst mass shooting in its history. Even the U.S. Park Service described the “action more resembles a massacre than a battle. For 20th Century American, it serves as an example of national guilt for the mistreatment of the Indians” – National Park Service.
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2014/01/02/wounded-knee-1890-1973-photos/6496/
Thanks, William, for pointing out what most Americans are blissfully unaware of, or just don’t give a shit about. We’re always told how this is a nation of laws, yet how did anyone get clear title to the land. There was no title. We just made them up. The indigenous people had no concept of legal title to the land. They thought we were nuts for claiming ownership of land. Our whole form of government is based on genocide, thievery, and subjugation, and there’s no indication we’ve changed our ways.
That mass murder did come to mind, but at the time, ‘redskins’ were regarded as little better than animals. I stayed with 21st century massacres, because the victims, with the possible exception of Muslims, are considered human.
We Shall Remain
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9PuEnfDSBDtgWZNVKa2mKg
The USG needs to bring about a formal Apology…of all their wrongs to the Natives…on their sacred land. All of their double dealings, lies, and massacres need to be addressed and atoned for. Just a beginning of a LONG LIST of assorted crimes ever since the land witnessed newcomers…occupiers…and treachery. Money isn’t the answer…even though it helps to buy back what was stolen…but it is the acknowledgement of doing them wrong that matters. I have done this personally and received forgiveness. The Almighty requires it.
175 murders in Chicago for the first four months of 2016. Every victim felt they were the victim of terrorism, because they were terrified, before being shot.
NRA will pay all bills and expenses, hospital, longterm care, all funerals, family expenses, etc to guarantee ypu right to die by gsw! No wellregulated militia? No. Sad. No one needs assault weapons unless you want to do this, obvous to all except NRA
>…his capacity for violence would have been easily verified: He had a state firearms license.
Are you kidding me?! So, let’s run with this logical fallacy. Do you have a drivers license? Well then I know your capacity for reckless driving. Oh, you’ve been to a bar once before? Well then we know your capacity for being a reckless DRUNK driver.
This article lost all credibility with that statement and I stopped reading. Judging by comments, I’d say I didn’t miss out on much.
+1
Are we going to have to start calling this site “The Guardian Jr.”-?
In response to my questioning the actions of the police on the scene of this massacre (which nobody else seems to want to consider), the always-obnoxious General Hercules told me, inter alia:
The little detail that General Asshole missed, or decided not to share, is that, at the end of that three hours, the son referred to (his name was Eddie) was dead.
I still want to know why three armed officers engaged the gunman outside a club known to be occupied by hundreds of (almost certainly) helpless people, didn’t pursue him when he reentered, and then stayed outside with dozens of other cops for hours, only to finally storm the place and find the carnage that we know now about.
And I wonder why no one is asking these questions. Because our “brave guys in uniform” certainly didn’t do a very good job of keeping the people at the Pulse club safe.
Well questioned… (as usual Doug)
It made me reminiscent of some of the coverage of the mass school shooting at Columbine: where I saw the video coverage of a terribly wounded/bloodied student climbing out of an upper-story window toward a police person below. As the student fell, the police person just stepped aside to let the student drop, rather than try to catch and break his fall. Just stepped aside…
Again, well-armed police, SWAT etc., just stayed outside for hours while people inside the school perished from their wounds (i.e., bleeding to death) or being shot.
I too need credible answers to these questions of a 3-hour response!
“Well questioned… (as usual Doug)”
So is that another sock-puppet, Doug?
But then she’s aghast that the police officer didn’t try to use his back to break the fall of a student …
Another there’s a difference between intelligence and education moment, apparently.
“So is that another sock-puppet, Doug?”
What is your personal problem with Doug Salzmann? You obviously have no clue what I saw re Columbine, or you wouldn’t have made such a mistakenly, irrelevant comment: it had nothing to do with someone’s “back.”
“nuf said” doesn’t practice his/her namesake.
I do not know what you think you saw but your reflexive support for Doug’s people want to know! bullshit speaks to your emotional, rather than intellectual, way of viewing the world.
Catching a falling baby is one thing but catching anyone approaching adult weight would risk breaking the officer’s back.
There is nothing “irrelevant” in avoiding the risk of paralysis when the student might receive a broken leg as that injury is relatively easy to fix.
‘nuf’ is fun backwards.
are we having nuf yet?
Have a nicer day.
I apologize. I never intended to engage with a 10 year-old.
“I apologize. I never intended to engage with a 10 year-old.”
No worries, you’re not the only one responding to Doug Salzmann.
It’s not some much as engaging Doug; it’s like popping bubble-wrap.
And why it took over 5 days to deliver H2O to the people suffering Katrina! I could have driven cross-country and done it myself in shorter time.
Seems like there is a backlog of case in Orange county where police officers undergo an investigation if they discharge their weapon. This article cites a 24 month backlog on 3 officers and hints at police officer become hesitant to use their weapons. Albeit, this article is 2007. I’m looking for more substantive information.
articles.orlandosentinel.com/2007-11-18/news/copshoot18_1_osceola-sentinel-deadly-force
Here is another more recent short blurb from a local florida news agency stating that police investigations of officer shootings have doubled in the past year. This was March 2015.
.wftv.com/news/local/records-fdle-investigations-officer-involved-shoot/69414319
You may not agree with this…
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/06/12/orlando/ Orlando Nightclub Shooting: Yet Another False Flag? Dr. Kevin Barrett
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com/2016/06/orlando-shooting-false-flag.html
Orlando Shooting False Flag. Interesting and informative comments to glean from.
I don’t, certainly, agree with the unstated assumptions or the certainty that the attack was a false flag.
I definitely agree that the story we have been told so far has huge and disturbing holes and inconsistencies.
And it’s very hard to understand, based upon official reports to date, why this could not and should not have been halted long before 100 people were shot.
“And it’s very hard to understand, based upon official reports to date, why this could not and should not have been halted long before 100 people were shot.”
You’re like a dog with a bone …
i guess it’s too soon for this
You’re Much More Likely to Be Killed By Deer, Cows, Dogs, Brain-Eating Parasites, Toddlers, Lightning, Falling Out of Bed, Alcoholism, Food Poisoning, Choking On Your Meal, a Financial Crash, Obesity, Medical Errors or “Autoerotic Asphyxiation” than by Terrorists
wait a couple of weeks
More to the point — what’s the difference between 650,000 dead of AIDS and 50 dead by an Islamic lunatic? Republicans care about the lunatic.
when death is caused directly and intentionally by another human or humans we feel outrage and anger. we don’t when the cause of death is natural or accidental. that’s our nature and it’s also reasonable
Moreover, Republicans did jack shit about AIDS under Reagan — thus the “Silence = Death” campaign.
the lack of response was clearly attributable to deep-seated homophobia often expressed explicitly in religious terms, so morally outrageous. otherwise we differentiate morally between intentionally causing harm and declining to help. the former case is much clearer
Well, I hope we can presume that the decisions not to immediately pursue and engage the shooter and to wait around for three hours before the rescue attempt were not related to deep-seated homophobia.
So, what was it? Something we don’t know about, yet? Bad judgment? Or, just maybe an example of the increasing willingness of our law enforcement authorities to risk the lives and safety of others, but not their own?
48 hours of shock and grief and then on to the next one, and there will be another one with people like this out there: https://goo.gl/81pfy0
This is a sick country and we lack the will to do anything about it.
https://goo.gl/81pfyO
This article, poorly conceived as it is, allows us to individually assess our positions on what the FBI should be doing. Even yesterday it was widely reported that the shooter had twice previously been investigated by the FBI, and that on both occasions they assessed that his actions did not warrant an arrest. On one side, we can point fingers at the FBI for not having arrested him, but then we cannot criticize the FBI for trolling for potential terrorists and conducting widespread surveillance of the general population. Either we want the FBI to exercise draconian powers, watching everything and incarcerating people on the slightest suspicion, or we want them to respect our individual freedom and not preemptively arrest people.
In this particular case, it is clear to me that had the shooter been subjected to mental screening as a precondition for purchasing an assault rifle, it may have happened that he’d have been denied the right to purchase the weapon. But the strict interpretation of the 2nd Amendment does not allow crazy people to be denied access to guns. My conclusion is that as long as we have the universal right to arm ourselves as we wish mass killings in the US will only escalate. Why escalate? Because of the ever increasingly potent firearms available, and the ever more shrill call of irrational elements, whether they be ideological or pseudo-religious.
There is nothing, NOTHING effective — that would be acceptable to the people, the courts, the Constitution, or the reality of three hundred million weapons already in private hands (that we know about) — that can be done to make it difficult for anyone in America to obtain a powerful firearm.
People who don’t understand this don’t understand where we live, and the yammering about “gun control” is just that: yammering.
Former FBI Agent, Michael German, who specialized in domestic terrorism for almost two decades disagrees with his former employer, the FBI, on how to fight theocratic terrorism.
German said publicly in 2014 (on http://www.vice.com) that essentially making the “haystack” of suspects too large makes it harder to find the real bad guys or “needles in the haystack” (not verbatim).
German’s constitutional strategy to fighting theocratic terrorism likely would have prevented the Orlando tragedy altogether. His strategy would have focused more resources onto the more dangerous “needles in the haystack”, instead of targeting citizens merely exercising their First Amendment rights – which is what today’s system does.
German resigned from the FBI years ago, telling the ACLU essentially that he couldn’t keep his oath of office to the U.S. Constitution while working there after 9/11. German then worked for the ACLU and Brennan Center following his government service.
It should be noted that every American government official from the FBI to the CIA takes a supreme loyalty oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution as a condition of having authority over their fellow citizens.
Right, and if you look through my earlier posts, it is also what I have been saying all along. Incidentally, only last week the GCHQ more or less admitted that their strategy of expansive collection is not working. Also interesting is the attitude of some within the US IC: Last fall a senior official told the attendees at a conference at George Washington University that their problem was no longer finding a needle in a haystack, but rather finding a needle in a stack of needles. Which I took as meaning that 1984 has come to be true: we are all considered to be potential enemies of the state.
During an interview, the late Admiral Hyman Rickover was asked what he would do to increase the effectiveness of our military, and he answered that he would line all the Pentagon workers in the halls and fire every third person. Analogously, I am convinced that the best way to improve our intelligence gathering, evaluation and response system is to halve the budgets of each and every one of the intelligence services. That would force them to concentrate on credible threats rather than manufacturing them, and would encourage them to work together rather than engaging in their perpetual turf wars.
“Theocracy” mindsets are one of the root causes here (that the Press rarely talks about). Theocracy is the polar opposite of religious freedom. Religious freedom respects individual choice – as long as one’s religion doesn’t harm another’s rights and freedoms.
Theocracy is where an individual or group tries to IMPOSE their religious interpretation onto other people, instead of respecting another person’s right to a different religious interpretation or no religion at all.
While we tend to mostly focus on foreign theocratic groups, we have very dangerous homegrown theocrats as well. Even the non-violent wing of American theocrats provide “oxygen” or legitimacy to the violent theocrats.
The Southern Poverty Law Center actually designates domestic Christian theocratic groups are more dangerous than foreign theocrats attacking inside the United States.
There are also two great documentaries to watch, for those serious about solving violent theocracy:
1) “No End In Sight” – about how ISIS was really created , starring former Bush
Administration officials on how to improve American
foreign policy.
2) “Why We Fight” – starring John McCain and other national security experts
on the lessons of Dwight D. Eisenhower in regards to the
Middle East.
For some reason, few Press/Media organizations (except The Intercept) have kept voters informed of these facts in the so-called “War on a Tactic”.
But our theocrats are not mass murderers nor violent terrorists.
The elephant in the room is all the Muslims living in the West who have decided not to assimilate, but rather bring their theocracy with them and try to enforce their laws on moderate or non-practicing Muslims. And yes, this is happening everywhere and at ever increasing rates.
And why not? Places like the USA are no longer “dream places” to end up. There are no decent jobs, entrepreneurship has been crushed by Corporatism, hard work is only for “fools” now, communities of all types are having their souls ripped from them by the regressive Left and war mongering Neo-Cons, and pop culture is disgustingly toxic now–it took Hulk Hogan and a billionaire just to win won small battle for decency.
How will 2nd, 3rd generation immigrants from strict Muslim countries ever assimilate in this environment? This Omar murdering psychopath is a perfect example. He should be a shining example of the globalist’s agenda–parents move to the USA from war torn Afghanistan, Omar raised in freedom-loving America, indoctrinated in the public school system, reaches college, chases his dream of being an armed and trained guard… but then what happens? Thousands of years of DNA pops off like fire crackers inside of him–he starts beating and verbally abusing his wife, takes an interest in radicals within his religion, and then goes and slaughters 50 “infidels.”
What I want to know is, when is someone on the regressive Left going to stand up and finally say, “Hey, enough is enough! We don’t want these people here! They don’t like our freedom, they don’t like our culture, they have thousands of years of a dangerous theocracy indoctrinated directly into their DNA–sometimes it skips a generation, sometimes not–we are not going to change them over night, or a hundred years in the future… it’s time to build some walls!”
Where to begin, …….. sometimes, mere silence is worth a thousand words.
I’m an American living in a Muslim country, please tell me how I’m wrong. My Muslim friends agree with me. They think it’s absolutely ridiculous when they see local girls running off to college in the U.S. wearing their hijab. They wonder, “Is it to seek attention or sympathy?” This is just one small example, but I think an important one. Muslims are proving to be poor guests and if we aren’t careful they will start destroying the host.
Don’t use the word “informant”. The FBI has paid numerous “Provocateurs” (One report stated $100,000 for each case) to entice and cajole mostly gullible young men in swearing allegiance to Al-Qaida or other terrorist groups. These bozos didn’t have either the intent or the wherewithal to do any terrorist acts until the provocateurs arrived. The paid provocateur even provided the fake bomb. The FBI then gleefully announced that they had saved the US from another terrorist attack. Even worse is that they always find an compliant federal judge who will ignore that the elaborate sting operation was a case of entrapping really stupid young men and the show trial is completed. This has happened dozens of times and no member of Congress will ask WHY?
Comments not posting?
Cointelpro-style activities are driving some of this violence. While — without evidence — one can’t know for certain, it’s time to take a closer look at the stalking and harassment of law-abiding U.S. citizens by a coast-to-coast Stasi-like apparatus, directed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
I am struck by the similarity of hate and mental instability of the Charleston church shooter and this shooter. You can blame a religion, blame guns, blame rhetoric or blame the stars. It takes a pretty insane, alienated, hateful person to do such an act of mass murder. A measure of individual blame and responsibility is in order here.
Have you ever heard of mental health issues? Steroid use leading to mental instability? Religious and political brainwasing? DNA?
A lot of drugs and experiences can screw a person up. If they already have “issues” and a few loose control rods this is greatly compounded.
there is a recipe for this sort of thing and it’s real simple
160 pounds flesh
1 cup of anger
4 oz of fantasy
1 gun
2 dozen bullets, suit to taste
shaken and stirred
without the gun, you got a guy pacing his room and hollering at the walls.
There is a flip side to this coin. You end up in a room with chained doors at you back and a madman armed to the teeth killing many people in front of the only exit. I am for cancelled carry but against handing it out Carte blanche to everyone with no police record and a heartbeat. In these times, I think a Federal concealed carry issued much like a pilot’s license degree of carry commensurate with skill, fitness and training by licensed instructor. To carry in a crowd would be at the highest level class A license requiring maximum instruction, range time police and psychological interview, updated regularly. If a sober designated driver or employee with class A license was in the bar the shooter would be caught between the police and another train-up person. One will place shoot could have stopped the carnage.
“a Federal concealed carry issued much like a pilot’s license degree of carry commensurate with skill, fitness and training by licensed instructor. To carry in a crowd would be at the highest level class A license requiring maximum instruction, range time police and psychological interview, updated regularly.”
The question begs to be asked: why not have this type of requirement for ALL individuals purchasing a gun? Not just concealed carry. This country is awash in guns and honestly, I don’t understand the need for anyone to have a semi-automatic gun. For what?
Your right the country is awash with guns of all descriptions, semi-automatic just one mechanism, millions of them. This is not going to change any time soon. Gun and other laws such as murder are not obeyed by criminals or the insane. Suicide is against the law but this does not stop the determined.
I live in Maryland strict gun and concealed carry laws and within 3 miles of the Pennsylvania boarder with very opposite gun laws. There is very little difference in gun crime, guns in the hands of the law-abiding makes little difference, If all guns were banned for a few thousand dollars any determined criminal or crazy person could get one of any type on the black-market and work their will on a disarm population. We just got a lesson in what happens when a bad man with a gun confronts the innocent unarmed.
The training I am talking about is far beyond what is need to target shoot, hunt or defend your home, although I urge all gun owners to train-up to the maximum in both safety and skill. Confronting an armed opponent in a crowded room without harming innocent bystanders is serious business. Sadly, the shooter had skill on the flip-side of this coin.
sounds reasonable!
and well thought out.
thanks.
Release the names of the law enforcement officers that interview this mass murder and let him go. We have spent billions of dollars and we are still no safer. Pure incompetence.
Not the agents so much as the supervisory staff.
So I guess this is just another terrorist action known about and allowed to happen for other means.
NYT:
Well, Gilroy was also accused in a couple of reports of making it all up. He had no real evidence to back up his statement.
until the lawsuit hits G4S. That woozing sound you hear is the shredding machine. And all that clicking noise? the mouse going delete-delete-delete.
Do have any links to substantiate your claim?
Accused by whom? And what would constitute “real evidence?” Perhaps Mateen’s wife-beating and strong view that her ex was “mentally ill and unstable?” I’d say Gilroy, and the ex, had the right of it, rather obviously.
No way in hell Gilroy was the only person hearing all that unhinged crap. No way.
Not that I am a fan of Comey, but they substantiated Gilroy’s complaints as fact. Would love to hear about your “source”.
Tops, mona.
So this guy is a pitbull with rabies, no muzzle, no leash. Perfect for the job. Just what America needs, give that man a gun. CIA would have promoted him. Great for the enhanced interrogation program.
He expressed a measure of regret for not having pressed G4S to take more action. Apparently he did press G4S for some action.
found on google
May 16, 2014 – 38 posts – ?21 authors
G4S only fucked up the Olympics security and then committed fraud with it’s tagging services, so third time’s the …. G4S hires some real nutjobs.
probably a solid review
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/04/g4s-global-security-company
We can fairly put down G4S for letting Mateen harass Gilroy out of a job, but beyond that, I don’t see how to find fault. The problem is, most of us here (or at least me) are pro-freedom. We don’t want people being rounded up and sent off to jail because they talked about killing or said the jihadists aren’t all bad. This is why we need to seriously consider some sanitized variant of Trump’s moratorium (my suggestion would be to disallow high-priority immigration for people from countries where apostasy is illegal who are not apostates or holders of minority, un”protected” religious opinions). We want Americans to be allowed to be Americans, to think far and wide, to feel safe to be unpopular, and if that means being cautious about where the immigrants come from, it’s a vastly smaller price to pay than giving up freedom of expression.
There’s an old saying…the freedom to swing your fist ends at another’s nose.
Your freedom to express yourself by packing heat at a town hall meeting is nothing but intimidation. It utters a silent threat.
No.
No “we” don’t. I want to live in a country where all enjoy civil liberties, including free speech. I want that for the world, and especially for the Internet. It’s not specific to “Americans.”
And the last thing I want is an illiberal policy of banning immigrants on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
if certain guns arent the problem, explain this.
nuttin’ up ma hands
nuttin’ up ma sleeve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pME3F7dRSB8
oh that –
The Daily Beast:
The story reports Mateen’s ex-wife saying he used steroids and was deeply unstable. Moreover, he once was friends with people he knew were LGBT. He was not very active at his local mosque.
Which now calls into question your earlier unsubstantiated claim that “Fifty people were killed, and more than another 50 wounded. Because they were LGBT.”
Um, no. Maybe this is news to you, but angry unstable people have been known to be angry and unstable about gays.
Jesus, how stoopid are you?
You initially made the unequivocal statement that “Fifty people were killed, and more than another 50 wounded. Because they were LGBT.” And now you are claiming that Mateen’s steroid driven rage and instability are the cause of his violence directed toward Gays.
Answer these questions Mona and show us how much brighter you are then the rest of us:
1. How do you know that every person that was killed and wounded was gay?
2. How do you know what Mateen’s state of mind was at the time of the attack?
3. How do you know what Mateen’s motivation was at the time of the attack?
4. How do you know that Mateen was not insane at the time of the attack?
5. How do you know that Mateen was acting with agency at the time of the shooting?
C’mom Mona, show me how “stoopid” I am?
This is an infantile line of questioning. By your logic, maybe he shot them because they were not in bed at 2 in the morning. How do we know he wasn’t a bedtime fanatic?
For that matter, how do we know he wasn’t being controlled by aliens? You bring the stoopid every day—it hardly needs to be pointed out.
Yes, but then Karl is a rightwing authoritarian, and that’s how they roll.
He’s unhappy that the shooting caused a huge outpouring of sympathy for LGBT people, and wants the only issue to be that the shooter was Muslim.
Using the manufactured opinion of a sock puppet to deflect legitimate criticism is exactly what I expect of a cowardly liar like yourself. It does not take a great exercise in logic to see that your claims about Masteen completely lack merit. Again, the only reason that I engage you and your sock puppets at all is to allow others to more clearly understand what the nature of your game is. Thanks for being so transparent.
Fifty people were killed, and more than another 50 wounded. Because they were LGBT. That’s an outrage and a horror.
But how the shooter could be who he was, with bis background, is deeply troubling. Something is missing.
Omar Mateen for ten years was an employee of a mercenary, private prison company, G4S. G4S trains mercenaries to kill Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mateen fetishized the NYPD, which is justly denounced by CAIR and other civil liberties organizations for their Islamophobia. He was deeply racist and distressed co-workers with his use of the word “nigger.”
Whatever Omar Mateen was, the stereotypical “jihadi” he was not. Muslims don’t learn to hate black people, and they don’t worship the NYPD, nor do jihadis survive vetting by organizations like G4S.
This is a very bizarre situation with a lot of questions to be answered.
Two things are also troubling me.
1) Did he shout any Allahuakbars? I have not come across this in any of the news items.
2) Was he wearing a suicide vest? If so, why did he not explode it?
Mancharian Candidate?
The Manchurian Candidate wasn’t real.
Manchurian Candidates One and All.
The depiction in the films about “Manchurian Candidates” has no basis in fact. As that fiction has the concept, there is no such thing as “brainwashing.” It’s a myth. See Lipton, Robert, J.
thanks much for the detail, Mona
the US media musta justa wanteda keepa secret from the people as usual.
wallstreet media has this sorta illness, an allergic reaction to the trutha
yet another creation of the USG.
by god our reputation on the planet must be somewhere between hell and the mezazine.
unbelievable.
By golly, he sounds just like a typical angry, racist, gun-loving, murderous American crackpot. Don’t give ISIS any credit for this one; they don’t deserve it; this boy is one of ours! USA! USA!
Condolences to the victims and their loved ones.
It’s always a pathetic experience perusing TI and its comments after these tragedies: Charlie Hebdo, Paris, Brussels, now Orlando. A bunch of windbags dispassionately speculating on everything. characterizing this as”blowback” (since all civilians are fair game due to the sins of others?). immediately blaming Islam and saying it was “impossible” to be non-religious. Those who do the opposite, calling others reactionaries for blaming Islam while they themselves act as if a religious motive couldn’t possibly exist. Conspiracy theories. Claims that the FBI doesn’t care about gays since the FBI is comprised of fiends and not human beings. Speculation about the police response, about ties to Israel or the Saudis. Claims of what the “real reason” was for the action – American gun culture, drones, etc. Strangely, only a handful of people indicate that they actually give a damn about these victims and aren’t just here to argue.
Do yourselves a favor and just STFU. Your fact-devoid guesses do nothing other than turn this tragedy into a selfish exercise on attacking or defending opponents’ or your ideology, respectively.
At least have the courtesy to wait a week or so for real journalists (Trevor, this article is abysmal) to uncover some facts.
Nate, I’m not going to engage you more now than I usually do — which is always very little. You’re just too much the fuckwit to waste much time on.
But dear Nate, if you want to sermonize to people for speculating and politicizing this event, I suggest you email CNN. Not that I torture myself by watching it, but revolted people have been reporting about that “news” station’s bullshit virtually since this event was made known. So, get thee hence.
Why would I e-mail CNN when it hasn’t been a reliable source for a decade? They’re the low hanging fruit of journalism.
Also, you couldn’t avoid me or the others you loathe if you tried. Your defense of Glenn and TI is pathological, you have no self control. So don’t delude yourself Mona, by pretending otherwise.
Nate, for you to accuse another of being “deluded” is to set cosmic records for irony. You’re a stoopid person, and a mindless contrarian, a combination that is especially tedious.
And with that, I revert to scrolling right on past your drivel.
Do you have any dignity at all? Unless you are part of TI staff there is absolutely no rationale in being so pathologically defensive of somebody’s crap. You cannot even look at yourself in the mirror and notice how stupid you have become.
Hiya lenk. How’re they hangin’?
lol. real journalists?
there aint none no more in the “real media”.
that is to say the real media being the fake media.
thereforing real journalists do inherit the fakery.
bill maher also has an opinion of the real journalists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qGK2e7OCbI
hint: when you watch the real journalism of real media, have your pooper scooper handy
If free speech bothers you, Mr. Control-Freak, then simply don’t listen nor read.
Translation: Allow the corporate media (‘the real journalists’) to construct an appropriate propaganda narrative without any distractions, would you please?
Nate’s ideology is called promoting corporate media brainwashing, and is on full display in this post; it is indeed “a selfish exercise” in defending his ideology while attacking anyone opposed to it. But anyone who looks at the corporate media in the United States today quickly realizes it is nothing but a pack of PR monkeys and talking heads, loyally following orders from the CEOs of a few huge media conglomerates – from NPR, the NYTimes and MSNBC to FOX, CBS and the WSJ, it’s just Wall Street’s version of the Soviet Pravda-Tass system.
“Pravda and TASS were news agencies in the U.S.S.R designed to keep the Russian public ignorant.” (wiki)
” now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history — demonstrates how potential threats are escaping the FBI’s vast counterterrorism dragnet”
The reason why the FBI’s dragnet will continue to fail …
“when I speak of “predispositions” or “propensities” what I mean is that, with the exception of many criminals, bullies, and other people who have already behaved violently or abusively, the majority of psychologically normal people are “sleepers”-that is, they are dispositionally inclined, when the situation is right, to aggression and destructiveness. Their patterns of thought and behavior are to be understood dispositionally, that is, in the conditional sense that, if an adequately provoking situation arises, then the behavior that results will tend to be malignant: they have a pathogenic willingness to inflict harm, which remains latent until an appropriate situation arises. Such a situation may, for example, come in the form of war, ideological conflict, unrestricted power over others (as in an inadequately supervised prison), narcissistic injury, or in many other ways”
Steven James Bartlett. Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health Kindle Edition.
Correct. “We all have ‘it’ in us.”
i really hate to say it but i must.
all the emphasis on this guiness book record for the American Wipeout is going to look like a contest to the next-comer.
the country is coming apart.
I feel dirty making political points on this awful day – which didn’t stop me. So, I want to exit by highlighting a genuinely magnanimous response:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/12/lets-not-give-in-to-fear-after-the-orlando-shooting-florida
Maybe not, but you will use it to showcase Thrasher’s smarmy exploitation of the event in service to his own self-serving agenda.
Hey Karl-The-Bigot!
What’s wrong with Thrasher’s hope that LGBT people might enjoy their freedoms like the rest of us?
You are not to bright, are you Tom? We were talking about exploiting tragic circumstance to one’s own political advantage – WHATEVER that may be. This having been said, let me congratulate you on your unnecessary use of hyphens – you will make some third wave SJW a nice bride someday.
There’s not anything at all unseemly about Thrasher’s excellent reflections, or in posting it. It’s completely true that LGBTs have sought sanctuary in clubs and bars where they could create accepting family in times and places where they otherwise had none.
Really, that’s not “politicizing” what happened. It’s personalizing it. So, except to the extent that the personal is political….
Is this information from the same AP that reported that Hillary was the Democratic Party nominee based on ONE Superdelegate’s preference? How could they possibly accurately sort out a mass hate crime involving FBIs, guns, Gays, young people and people of color, all of whom the AP has no coherent idea about. They are a corrupt news agency, almost as bad as Lyin’ Brian on MSNBC.
That’s very likely to win the award as the dumbest fucking post of the day. Associated Press is one of the world’s oldest (founded 1846), most respected and most honored (more than 50 Pulitzers, alone) news organizations. You can charge them with being mainstream (that’s true), but to call them incompetent or corrupt just demonstrates your own abysmal ignorance.
Spam for AP.
Another fucking ignoramus.
These threads have been dominated by such for a long time.
Getting very boring.
The organization is run by people, not their history, so it’s not impossible they can be well respected and make mistakes due to incompetence or engage in corruption.
I haven’t seen any proof, but I do find their actions prior to the CA primary suspect.
And the fact that many who run the organization are Hillary donors doesn’t help.
AP’s ability to report on this story is wholly unrelated to their nomination story though, and their track record is quite good, but I think there are other posts that would eke out the win for the award.
I hope a tone of respectful disagreement is apparent in there.
http:www.businessinsider.de/fbi-is-manufacturing-terrorism-cases-2016-6/?r=US&IR=T
Americans need to become aware of the fact that the Coup d’etat already happened with the implementation of the Patriot Act in October 2001. America’s 9/11 is the equivalence of the Nazi Germany “Reichtagsbrand”, a false flag operation. The Patriot Act is the equivalence of the Nazi Germany “Enabling Act” in 1933 which consequently transformed Germany into a surveillance state dictatorship. The U.S. Constitution may be flawed but it is still the only Constitution on this planet that guarantees its people liberty, freedom, and most of all protection for the individual. This Document was written by people who experienced oppression and stood up against it. Their wisdom and foresight is mirrored in “We The People”. It is time to honor their courage and defend the Constitution against those in power who’s goal is a totalitarian system of ultimate control.
My heart goes out to those murdered in Orlando, to their friends and families. At the same time I cannot look away and pretend that all of this is not part of the bigger agenda that favors the enslavement of people. Wake up, America!
And the three officers did what? Allowed the shooter to go back into a club filled with hundreds of people while they, and then dozens more cops and other LEOs, planned their next moves for three hours or so?
And nobody questions this story?
No, such questions would be frivolous, not being properly aware of all the circumstances and events.
Have you read Don Quixote?
Last response to you for the time being (cuz you’re really a jerk):
It would be frivolous to ask questions because we don’t know answers?
SMDH
It’s all here in case you care to read before asking presumptuous questions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/us/orlando-nightclub-shooting.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-abc-region®ion=span-abc-region&WT.nav=span-abc-region
QUOTE:
A three-hour standoff followed the initial assault, with people inside effectively held hostage until around 5 a.m., when law enforcement officials led by a SWAT team raided the club, using an armored vehicle and explosives designed to disorient and distract. Over a dozen police officers and sheriff’s deputies engaged in a shootout with Mr. Mateen, leaving him dead and an officer wounded, his life saved by a Kevlar helmet that deflected a bullet.
UNQUOTE
Instead of appreciating the bravery of our policemen you are calling them cowards and hiding from action. Shame on an old fellow like you!!
And this is what happens to presumptuous blokes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/13/hes-coming-im-gonna-die-heartbreaking-final-texts-from-orlando-victim-to-his-mom/
QUOTE:
Unbeknownst to mother and son, however, police were outside the club but delaying their assault because of the hostage situation, a senior U.S. law enforcement official told The Washington Post. For three hours, the gunman was on the phone with police and no shots were fired.
UNQUOTE
Please remember that you and your loved ones are safe only because our brave guys in uniform keep you that way.
All the cable news channels are abuzz about this shooting.
On O’Reilly -just an hour or two ago, some Jack ass was whinning that “I wonder how Tim Cook feels about cracking terrorists’ IPhones now.”
Just more knee jerk reactions -without the knee.
So, I posted a comment earlier ridiculing this article and how the Intercept finds it necessary to engage in armchair analysis with the benefit of hindsight, never missing an opportunity to criticize those working to protect this country. I called this sort of activity disgraceful and unworthy journalism. Amazingly, my post gets deleted. I guess these comments are only open for those in lockstep with this news outlet.
I wanted to let you know that we have approved your comments. We have a system that sets aside comments to be approved by a moderator to try to keep harassment and abuse to a minimum. We don’t have the resources to moderate 24/7, so comments made after work hours sometimes have to wait until the next day to be approved.
We do not block comments that are critical of The Intercept, as long as the comments aren’t abusive or threatening. As your comments did not break our guidelines, they were approved.
Americans remain convinced that they can stay safe in their own country while creating wrack and ruin in other people’s countries.
What we are not hearing yet is the term Blowback.
indeed.
A gorilla stealing a zika baby would have been preferable news for sure.
The speculation, exploitation, unsupported conclusions and wild theories just don’t make me want to go shopping.
The more we learn, the less it seems that radical Islam was the core issue here. Although, between bipolar swings, ‘roid rages, gym sessions, the security job and wife beating, Mateen may have found a few spare hours to believe he was an ISIS follower.
Most of the radicalized Islamist folks have lost their mental balance, so much so that it’s difficult to determine which is the cause and which is the effect.
One sure sign of the onset of this malaise is useless research into useless dead folks.
You’re so utterly desperate to blame Islam that you’ll try to find a way to twist and torture absolutely any set of facts to suit your preconceived notions.
It would be funny, if it weren’t both tragic and dangerous.
Everybody’s looking for a solution. Here’s mine -the Connecticut solution : in Connecticut, to get a concealed weapons permit, you have to have 3 people who have known you for at least 10 years vouch for your character.
If this would have been done for this maniac, he probably never would have been able to buy a gun. Much less got a permit by the state
“. . . he probably never would have been able to buy a gun.”
Why do you think that? Do you have any evidence that he was so unbalanced, perhaps years ago, that he couldn’t find three friends to vouch for him? I very much doubt it.
Also, there are nearly as many guns in private hands in the US as there are people. There is no chance, NONE, that any law we could enact would even make it particularly difficult to get a weapon, much less make it impossible.
If you think otherwise, you just don’t understand where you live.
Today we will grieve for the scores of people and the families of those killed or injured during the Florida massacre, which is already being reported as of a terroristic/jihadist nature.
The fear and war mongers will make the most of this tragedy for days to come. They will do their best to place us in a state of fright, which will have us looking for Muslims in the back seat of our cars, around every corner, and under our covers as we enter or beds.
This will be fuel for our war hawk candidates to call for bombs galore, boots on the ground, along with sympathy and justification for the apartheid of Israel. The corporate media will cover little else. Tragedies like this line up perfectly with the schema of the corporate media, which is the trinity of; lie, distract, and set the masses up for the next big lie.
The blame will all be laid upon the philosophy of jihad while ignoring the violence that exists within the pages of our own Judeo Christian spiritual books, one of which actually happens to end with a curse. Nothing will be mentioned about the fact that each of a vast number of our bombs, which wounds or takes the lives of innocents, is simply a source of creating hatred and revenge that, has far more to do with rage created out of injustice rather than religion.
Nothing will be mentioned about our complicity in overthrowing legitimate Middle Eastern governments such as Mohammad Mosaddeq’s of Iran in the early 1950’s, and replacing him with the Shaw of Iran a most cruel despot. This example and the many others are significant factors in creating international aversion to US foreign policy. And it certainly did not endear us to the hearts of the world when Henry Kissinger, most internationally famous for his war criminal status, announced to the world that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”.
Yes, this terrible loss of life and the many related injuries to our fellow citizens will be used to keep the focus on the enemy without created by a demonic foreign policy of empire, rather than the true enemy within ever increasing its oppression upon the masses.
Hi Fellow Citizen…
Thank you for your thoughtful insight. While reading it I couldn’t help be reminded of a Nova program (http://www.pbs.org/video/2365423149/ Colosseum: Roman Death Trap). The revelations of the hideous Roman Empire,and what was done at the Colosseum is still very much a reality in today’s human condition(s), except with modern clothes and slick language…the curious violence and inhumanity is the same. The worst part in the remaking of this historical brutality…was the exuberance in it. That I found sickening…because it still exists. Thank you.
Yes 24/7 sports and when they are not showing sports they are discussing it. Recently they actually replaced seven news slots with sports talk shows. I guess they were afraid that the news shows would not be able to figure out enough ways to distract us, and may have accidentally covered something that may inform us, or make us think about something worthwhile.
Had the FBI arrested him prior to the attacks in a sting operation, the Intercept would no doubt have painted him as a harmless sucker being set up by over-aggressive feds. It’s only after an attack is successful that the Intercept finds a way to accuse the FBI of not taking a threat seriously enough.
“Does the FBI’s focus on men like Medina and Suarez…prevent agents from identifying…dangerous men like Omar Mateen?”
Not at all. The FBI trained this guy omar pretty well – just look at the results.
If the FBI allowed real terrorists to succeed, through deliberate indifference or active assistance, and framed innocent people to keep the threat of terrorism in the news (to justify the agency’s existence, its budget, prestige, and keep the public on edge and worshipping law enforcement), then the picture of various successful terrorist attacks on the U.S., e.g., the Boston marathon, Orlando, and indeed 9/11 (and the failed ones too), would look more or less the same as it does: every time, questions about the Bureau’s prior knowledge of the attackers are permitted not to be answered publicly beyond an unrevealing level of generality due to what there is every reason to believe, based on the FBI’s history, are spurious, self-serving assertions of protecting national security. In effect, this amounts to complete control of all material information necessary to determine what the Bureau actually knew, when that knowledge is clearly relevant to understanding the fundamental character of the attacks, before law enforcement officials may freely characterize them however they think fit. The question, then, is when does it become the agency’s burden to demonstrate that it was not involved in these attacks in some surreptitiously enabling way, as opposed to the public’s or a journalist’s responsibility to affirmatively expose a smoking gun (not least to avoid the “conspiracy theorist” slur)? In my view nothing the FBI says can be believed, and it should not be accepted at face value. The public will be safer if and only if, at a minimum, law enforcement agencies, including but not limited to the FBI, have their effective monopoly of vital information comprehensively stripped from them, particularly information strongly suggesting their complicity or negligence. If this were done by law, it would mean amending the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to more explicitly require judicial oversight of the claim of “national security” whenever that claim is made by a law enforcement agency. I object to this article only insofar as it seems that Mr. Aaronson has assumed that what he has described is necessarily adequately explained as Keystone Cops, and not something possibly (or probably) more unsavory.
Trevor Aaronson seems to be the only guy who has “covered” the State’s long-running “homegrown Islamic terrorist” sting program.
The fraudulent nature of vast majority of FBI-involved “homegrown terrorist” cases is so obvious that you’d think every major news organizations would have been crawling all over these “cases” like flies on turds.
Silly me, having such pre- 9/11 ideas.
Santa Monica PD says they picked up a “heavily armed” suspect who was heading to Los Angeles Pride parade.
http://ktla.com/2016/06/12/man-with-weapons-possible-explosives-arrested-in-santa-monica-said-he-was-going-to-l-a-gay-pride-parade-report/
Someone’s on the job after all, it seems.
contrary to what the father has said –
CBS News confirmed that Mateen worshiped at the Islamic Center in Fort Piece, about 15 miles north of Port St. Lucie and 120 miles south of Orlando. Men at the mosque who didn’t want to be identified told CBS News they have known Mateen for about five years and that he would come to the center with his son, a 3-year-old, to pray. They described Mateen as a devoted father and family man and said there was no indication that he would do something like this.
An imam there told CBS News he was married.
The Islamic Center released a statement condemning the attack, calling it “monstrous.” ….
A law enforcement official has confirmed to CBS news senior investigative producer Pat Milton that Mateen made the Hajj, an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia in March 2012. He made another foreign trip to Dubai in 2011, a U.S. intelligence source tells CBS News’ Tepper.
Are you trying to make a point of some sort, here? If so, please be more explicit.
according to that report mateen was religious. earlier mona commented: “His ex-wife and father both report that he wasn’t religious, and he didn’t attend a mosque.”
That was the initial reporting, and I said it was initial. It’s going to be some time before a trustworthy profile emerges. His ex-wife, who divorced him in 2011 for being “unstable” and beating her, says he evinced no attraction to radical Islam.
But whatever else is true, it’s the damn peculiar “jihadi” who is vetted by a global security agency, works for them for ten years, and they kill Iraqi & Afhgani mujahideen.
The Intercept is disgraceful. Pure armchair analysis with the benefit of hindsight. You should be ashamed of this hack “journalism,” but I imagine you couldn’t care less about anything other than cheap shots at the government in the wake of a national tragedy.
Here we are again facing the aftermath of this violent culture that thinks the gun barrel is the quickest solution to political or ideological differences. Governments and individuals alike think violence is a way to effect some sense of change. If this is a political shooting maybe the government needs to rethink aggressive foreign policy as the mess in the middle east has inspired untold violence on typically sedate citizenry wanting to lead their lives. I’m guessing this has more than one nexus as to the club that was hit was probably due in part of intolerant religious ideologies. I don’t have any answers except that this government has a lot of enemies due to violence in the name of freedom and liberty. Humans are prone to violence. Add to that bigoted intolerant behavior in the name of faith and blood flows freely around the world. Laws and loss of still more privacy won’t solve this as some may profess, maybe nothing will but less aggression and force abroad might just be a start.
On a follow up note. I grew up in a neighborhood that has a resident FBI agent to keep eyes on the kids of cold war workers. The oppression was thick but didn’t stop the nonsense from occurring by the kids. It did keep kids from protesting the ‘Nam and other movements which explains why I despise federal agents. They do help some at times but I find it dubious to expect that they can stop a lone actor and more laws and surveillance will help.
Was Mateen protected because of his father’s political role in Afghanistan? Was the father a CIA asset?
Glad to see The Intercept keep pushing. I can only imagine what swill the TV is emitting right now.
Yes, if we are stuck with an FBI in the first place, perhaps they could devote a bit of time to making citizens more secure by monitoring genuinely threatmaking individuals. Instead of the usual assortment of sad halfwits lured into grandiose fictional plots.
Because it kind of makes you look bad, FBI. The media was always there for you before. Maybe not so much now.
Odd, isn’t it, that when we thought a police state was coming, we never thought the police in question would be the Keystone Kops.
Yes. It kind of reminds me of the difference between the dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 and the dystopia of Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil.
Exactly my thought as well.
Perhaps something like a mass shooting is to be used for other purposes?
http://nypost.com/2016/05/21/the-scandal-in-washington-no-one-is-talking-about/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/documents-atf-used-fast-and-furious-to-make-the-case-for-gun-regulations/
“Deadliest Shooting In U.S. History: Suspect Purchased Guns Legally, ATF Says” http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/12/481744095/police-say-multiple-victims-after-shooting-at-orlando-nightclub
What a horrific story. My heart definitely goes out to all the victims and their families. May they find some sort of peace through all this…
But I also have questions about the way le handled this. Did bringing in the SWAT team make things worse? Like Doug S. downthread it should raise questions about our culture of law enforcement. It just seems to me this should have been handled in a better fashion.
OMFG!!! I have just realized that ones capacity for violence can be soley determined by the possession of a State issued firearms license. As there are over 12.8 million concealed weapon permits alone have been issued to date, we all must be in mortal danger (shivers and reflexively checks to make sure all windows and doors are locked and barred before changing ones own adult diaper). Yet murder rates have steadily fallen as the percentage of adult population with permitted concealed weapons has increased (Slips snub-nose 38 snugly into flexible waistband of tranquility premium adult diaper).
Well yeah (duh). Especially when such individuals can be depicted as Islamic extremists (Can’t all Islamic extremists be diagnosed as mentally ill by western standards?). The threat of Islamic extremism was what led the FBI to facilitate the first WTC attack in 1993, which included supplying the purported terrorists with bomb making materials via their paid informant. The threat of terror is intended to fuel the public perception that an ever-expansive national security state is essential to their abiding sense of well being. In spite of this history of contrived plots, the 9/11 WTC attacks have been uniformly embraced as act of Islamic extremism by the progressive left because it dovetails so nicely with their own theories of “blowback.”
But hey, let’s forget the Saudi/American collaboration that led to the death of three thousand Americans on 9/11, and the million of Muslims since, and focus instead on the potential for random violence by a loan, gay-hating gunman named Omar Mateen. What is the solution in this instance. Well to begin with, we can define homophobia as a mental illness now that homosexuality has been declassified as such. Oh wait, in 2015, a team of Italian researchers have specifically found that “psychoticism,” “immature defense mechanisms” and a “fearful attachment style” were associated with a greater “homophobic” attitude in individuals (well that is both timely and convenient). Next we can blur the distinction between violent acts perpetrated by Islamic political extremists (FBI puppets), and those that are merely fueled by Islamic religious extremism (never let a good act of mass violence go to waste – contrived or not). But let’s not stop there (as we are on a roll toward perfect tranquility). We can now broaden our definition of religious extremism to include any individual whose religious convictions exclude homosexuality as a morally tenable lifestyle (America’s gun-toting, christian conservative base enters stage right). Voila, we now have a narrative whereby gun ownership and conservative religious belief become the mean by which the national security state convinces the most radical, politically progressive civil libertarians that the loss of liberty is a good thing (after all, there is ABSOLUTELY no room for religious or philosophical absolutism in a modern, secular society. The national security state should be the final arbiter of truth.
Now, if we could only get Obamacare to pay for adult diapers…
“I have just realized that ones capacity for violence can be soley determined by the possession of a State issued firearms license.”
“capacity” denotes ability only not propensity or disposition
Capacity can also refer to an assumed position (or, in this case, disposition)
As ether wrote, ““capacity” denotes ability only not propensity or disposition”
” “capacity” denotes ability only not propensity or disposition.”
Of course. Only people with State firearm licenses have access to weapons.
@nuf said and Baldie McEagle (AKA Mona’s sockpuppets)
You both are wrong “of course.” According to Oxford:
Capacity (def): A specified role or position: I was engaged in a voluntary capacity writing in his capacity as legal correspondent.
2nd real world example: In his capacity as an Islamic Imam, Nazem Abu Salim was convicted on charges of incitement to violence and terrorism and supporting a terror organization.
3rd example: In his capacity a licensed concealed weapon carrier, the homophobic terrorist was able to enter the gay club without raising suspicion of his intent to kill its patrons.
But Mateen’s mass shooting is an example of how dangerous men slip past the FBI’s watch while federal agents focus on targets of questionable capacity.
NONSENSE
1. the shooter has/had a mental disorder with reconciling his own sexuality and acceptance of differences because he hadnt finished growing up and instead he acted out and chose in his cowardly fashion to put the blame where it was easiest.
2. slip past the FBI’s watch?
This preposterous conclusion presumes that the F…B…I… need more info and presence in the lives of everyone as in “we need a bigger better stronger police state”. THIS IS A RUSE perpetrated by persons who are also in a state of paranoia that somehow down the road they will be challenged by other people. This ruse embraces short-sightedness. But for what reason? Such reasoning is a TOOL designed to enforce a perspective. It is a football tossed out by a separationist to their intended targets to catch and accept under the pretense that there is no other underlying cause.
Once again we are seeing the consequences of groupification nurtured by party practices that give birth to and support of grouping over individual development, that groups matter more than any single one person. Corporations are groups, not individuals.
…and the moon is made of green cheese.
Was this a botched rescue?
Police were armed with AR’s too.
Final tally?
Wolfpack mentality.
Well, something is very weird about the sequence of events, as reported so far.
It takes a significant period of time to shoot a hundred or more people, even with a semi-auto rifle, accurately enough to kill 50 and (per one hospital report) leave 46 more in critical condition.
It’s hard to believe that many of those shootings didn’t take place either (a) during the three hours the police waited to raid the premises or (b) during the raid itself. If the latter, they certainly weren’t all shot by a single perpetrator.
So, if real and honest details are forthcoming promptly . . .
A survivor who had escaped said the gunman had about 100 people rounded up. He then heard “30-40-50″ shots fired. It’s a little odd then that 50 are dead and 52 wounded.
A high velocity rifle round will penetrate through the human body giving the possibility to hit more than one target. Also, you can have wounds caused by bullet fragments, bone fragments, and pieces of the environment like wood splinters, pieces of brick, concrete, and stone.
It is odd.
And it will be interesting to learn how long after the initial exchange of fire with the officer outside this took place (if it did), whether other police had arrived by that time, and what they did/were doing while the roundup and shooting was taking place.
The problem is that these ‘surveillance’ programs are always under pressure to produce ‘actionable intelligence’, and real terrorists (and ‘lone wolves’) tend not to do things that result in ‘actionable intelligence’ (especially given that the gun lobby has made it so easy to buy the weapons useful in mass shootings, and so politically toxic to arrest someone for buying those weapons). So what do people do when under pressure to produce ‘metrics’ that really have no relationship with doing what the program is supposed to do? They find a way to produce those metrics, and get promoted or retained, or focus on actually doing the job only to get defended, deprioritized, or out of work.
Where is the media coverage of countless slaughtered by u.s. bombs.
Some say the problem is religion, or access to guns, or bigotry, or insufficient law enforcement…
While these issues are related, they are not THE problem.
THE PROBLEM IS AMERICAN CULTURE TEACHES THE NOTION THAT ESCALATING RAGE, ATTACK AND INTIMIDATION EQUALS EMPOWERED SELF-ASSERTION.
Look at the fire-spitting hate between Democrats and Republicans, and how the establishment eggs it on even as it is obvious the status quo or worse always triumphs (note how the elite as cultural gatekeeper won’t allow the rage to be directed at the system, the corporatist, imperialist/militarist establishment itself). Look at the god-awful violence in entertainment and realize that while the rest of the world doesn’t base their life-philosophy on media dominance/submission fantasies, American culture actually does.
In order to excuse the “winner takes all” mentality of its high-ranking members (both Republican and Democrat), the establishment – from Clinton to Trump – promotes Divide And Conquer among the masses(Obama pretends not to, but in practice he stokes the fires and inflames prejudice daily), corrupting American culture entirely.
AGAIN, THE PROBLEM IS THAT AMERICAN CULTURE TEACHES THAT ESCALATING RAGE, ATTACK AND INTIMIDATION EQUALS EMPOWERED SELF-ASSERTION.
Right, that must be the only problem because terrorist attacks do not occur anywhere else in the world.
They occur elsewhere in the world because the perpetrators have “learned” this mental imbalance independently, perhaps from other orthodox religious or cultural influences. I’m speaking of why it is so common here.
@Maisie –
I think you have some good points. For one thing, I agree we have too much violence in our entertainment (some of the commercials even make me cringe).
Our political rhetoric and climate has continuously become more and more poisonous. And yes, we don’t seem to get to directing our anger at the elites, now, do we?
We do need to build bridges to each other and start joining hands. I’ve sometimes signed off here with a saying, and I’ll use it now:
“Divided = Conquered, but United = Empowered!”
I like that! The whole nation needs to know it. Sadly the establishment will only let all Americans unite in raining down hideous violence against some ‘suspected’ foreign enemy. I recall Obama prattling on about how there isn’t a blue America and a red America, there’s just America – which all sounded great. But look at him once elected, mocking the traditionalism of red America (while excusing the corruption of BOTH blue and red officials) and doing all he can to promote the bitter divide.
No, the problem is not really the various abstractions you list.
“winner takes all mentality” is an abstraction. “American culture” is an abstaction. “self-assertion” is an abstraction.
I guarantee you that none of these claims will stand up to any scrutiny. For example, when you say “American culture” teaches what you claim it teaches, you make asinine statements: because anybody could point to plenty of examples of “American culture” that do NOT teach the things you claim it teaches.
I blame this kind of thinking on post-Gramsci acceptable vagueness in left-resembling academia. Magic words like “hegemony” and “institutions” can be programmed to perform whatever functions the analyst wants to claim. Thus we’ve had decades of bedtime stories for allegedly activist academics: by fighting these abstractions, they become abstract heroes themselves. Comfortable heroes, a nice combo.
I’m sure in certain circles you can peddle these vague notions and act like you are doing something about actual problems like mass murder.
If you would prefer it to be phrased “prevailing” American culture, please imagine that qualifier.
Other than that, you’ve merely declared you find my conclusions too “abstract,” and then presumed to fashion an insulting image of me as an academic notion-peddler in comfortable surroundings – and this seems incredibly superficial and unworthy of you considering some of your other posts.
I don’t find my conclusions to be abstract at all – but demonstrable in everyday experience, and predominating popular media.
And my current situation is by no means “comfortable,” if by that you mean financially secure and far from the madding crowd.
Wait, that reply would have been better to somebody who had cognizance of the kind of problem I wrote about.
I read a bit more of Maisie and discovered a typical Glenn Beck reader.
The stuff about Obama mocking red state traditionalism is fucking stupid. Obama could literally not have bent back far enough to accommodate “red state traditionalism” and all the shit heads elected in that process.
Glenn Beck? I’m a Jill Stein, Green Party supporter. Your response to my observations is unfortunately precisely the knee-jerk rage-reaction (and accompanying caricaturing) I’m talking about.
I’m lost on what it was President Obama did to mock traditional America — it was part of your claim in the post I originally responded. Saying that Obama mocked traditional America was the kind of stuff Glenn Beck would say when he was big, but I’m sorry I mischaracterized your political orientation.
Accepted. Peace. Perhaps we can discuss it more some other time.
For my part, I am sorry for being overly aggressive in my argumentation today.
Interesting that this guy worked for a company that is affiliated with Israel. It is also interesting that as per usual the victims are powerless. That is to say, why do these terrorists always hit people who have absolutely nothing to do with the cause these terrorists are fighting for? Why not hit a golf course or high end shopping area? I don’t believe these are anything other than CIA operations.
Right, the CIA would never think of that.
Really ? What connection to Israel? This should be good.
As someone who lives in Orlando and is quite familiar with the area of the shooting, my husband has worked within a block or two for a decade, I have many of the same questions.
And no I am not afraid.
I, though, hope to god I don’t find out at work tomorrow that I know any of the victims.
I also feel for the survivors since they will live with this forever.
Apparently the murderer’s father is kind of a political nut who poses as the president of the “Provisional Government of Afghanistan.” He makes Youtube videos denouncing the Pakistani government.
Untangling all the political twists and turns of Afghani and Pakistani political struggles is a hopeless maze. In any event, while this is interesting it doesn’t yet appear to have anything to do with his son’s motives for the slaughter.
“Two U.S. officials familiar with the investigation into the massacre said that no evidence had yet been found showing a direct link between the massacre and Islamic State or any other militant group.”
So reports Reuters. Omar Mateen was a corrections officer with a degree in criminal justice who fetishized the NYPD. His ex-wife and father both report that he wasn’t religious, and he didn’t attend a mosque.
His father reports that recently his son had seen two men kissing in public and that this had sent him into a rage.
but isis inspired
Sources say he swore allegiance to the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a phone call to 911 moments before the rampage at the Pulse Nightclub….
Mateen didn’t appear to have any direct ties with ISIS, sources told NBCNews, although he was a follower of ISIS propaganda and referenced the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, at the scene of the shooting.
Well, I don’t know about “following ISIS propaganda,” and there’s no evidence of him involved in any of these terrorist groups before the slaughter. At this point, it looks like he despised gay men and reached for the most obvious cultural/political ally as the banner under which this unstable man committed his murder.
why did he despise gay men? could that have anything to do with isis or islam?
Gays Must Die Says Speaker At Orlando Mosque – WFTV 9 Orlando Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBlwxqqAprQ
Why yes! Because Islam is the only religion, including the only Abrahamic religion, that has a long history of hating LGBT people. Only Islam infects the larger culture, even for the non-religious, with hatred for gays. I mean, it’s not like our American, deist founding fathers passed laws to castrate men who had gay sex.
Today’s outpouring of love and concern for gay Americans from the likes of Marco Rubio, Joe Walsh and other right-wing Republicans is a beautiful thing to behold. Now the cynics might think that’s because their Islamophobia trumps their homophobia, but they’d be wrong, right?
i mentioned islam because mateen is muslim. so maybe he learned his hatred of gays from islam. maybe those right-wing republicans learned it from christianity
bullshit Mona …. “Christianity” has a long and questionable history on aggression towards the gay community (pretending otherwise right now is deceitful).
Er Owen, was my sarcasm truly that hard to detect? Maybe we need emojis or something here?
oops … thought it was a bit out of character.
got it in the second para …thought for a sec you were deflecting on behalf of God – from y’all’s “one nation under God” – in para 1.
… pleased to learn i missed your sarcasm (for us both).
… and pls, no emojis
Gays are killed in Muslim countries. It can’t get any simpler than that for an explanation.
The fact that his Father says things like
“Our brothers in Waziristan, our warrior brothers in [the] Taliban movement and national Afghan Taliban are rising up,”
Can’t be a clue what conversations were like between them could it?
Gays are also killed in non-Muslim countries. Until recently in historical terms, killed a lot in Western countries.
His father is a deeply political man who imagines that he’s the president of the “provisional” Afghani government. He is angry with the Pakistani government — as are many reasonable people.
The tangle of political factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan involves many and shifting alliances, including with the Taliban and their precursors. In this the Persians are no different from Westerners — the West allied with Joseph Stalin, and the entered a deep Cold War against the U.S.S.R.
Most importantly, none of that constitutes any basis on which to speculate about the father and son discussing anything related to the Orlando slaughter.
“but isis inspired”
Yeah? Maybe so, although what we know of his history before this event doesn’t fit with that theory very well.
Regardless, ISIS represents an ideology and you can’t bomb or drone ideologies out of existence. You can discourage people from adopting them — and one of the best ways is to stop the actions and change the behaviors that feed them.
It will certainly be novel if it turns out that what we have, here, is an all-American, cop wannabe, gay-hating, non-observant Muslim who suddenly decided to “pledge allegiance to al Baghdadi” in a 911 call during a massacre.
Heads full of preconceptions will be popping like party balloons.
After all, what kind of jihadi works for 10 years for a company that kills Iraqi & Afhgani mujahideen? That’s what Omar Mateen did.
Intelligence accounts raise more questions on origins of Brussels, Paris attacks
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/03/30/brus-m30.html
The details of law enforcement activities at the scene may prove “interesting,” also.
Apparently, the attacker engaged in a gun battle with an officer (probably off-duty, working private security) as he entered the club. The raid to rescue the survivors didn’t happen until three hours later.
Am I the only one who wonders if so many victims might not have been shot if not for the long delay? AM I the only one who wonders (not for the first time) if we have a law enforcement culture in the US that prioritizes officer safety over all other factors?
You realize they rescued ~30 hostages, Doug, 3 hours later. If the guy wanted those hostages dead he had time.
Why don’t you return to your climate-change denial BS instead of pissing all over a horrific event that you know little about, apparently.
“Why don’t you return to your climate-change denial BS . . .”
You may not be the very most ignorant asshole who posts here, but you’re in the running, fer shur.
Your demand to know why the police didn’t pursue a guy using an automatic long-gun into a building with their handguns is the height of stupidity.
Honestly, Doug, you are what-abouting a horrific incident.
To what end?
The FBI Director must resign, taking responsibility for not preventing this carnage. If he does not, then he has just six months before he is replaced by a competent person selected by President Trump.
I am waiting for some of the Muslim folks here to condemn the murderer and apologize on his behalf. I doubt if it will happen, though.
Are you also waiting for the Christians to apologize for the attacks on women’s health clinics and abortion providers? Waiting for white southerners to apologize for the Charleston church rampage? Waiting for police everywhere to apologize for all the shootings of unarmed citizens?
You really are a nasty moron, aren’t you?
Washington and Riyadh love ISIS.
Here’s a video of the American POTUS getting necklaced by the late dictator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxVWckPZX0A
Great observation Doug, I like your posts.
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/06/12/father-of-orlando-gay-club-shooter-omar-mateen-apologises-as-death-toll-rises-to-50/
The father has the decency and courage to apologize. The people here could also do with some decency and courage.
Fuck off, Herc.
Meanwhile, Patriots® send more weapons to their ‘moderate’ allies in Syria: Al Qaeda with intent, ISIS via stupidity. But this is a benign, freedom-loving activity, not newsworthy in the God’s Country.
If you were provided with a gun, would you do and kill your neighbors? Maybe if you were Muslim, then? See the problem?
Are you also waiting for the NYPD and the global security company — and private prison contractor — G4S to apologize? Omar Mateen took lotsa selfies wearing NYPD apparel and was a corrections officer employed by G4S.
Yes, definitely. Anybody who did not act to prevent this must apologize. And all must condemn regardless of faith.
I have suggested to a group of Muslims in the local masjid to stop enjoying their post-sunset feast and continue their fast for today. Those fellows are very decent chaps and instantly agreed, except for the kids. Wish Intercept folks were better, but the difference is glaring don’t you think?
The FBI can’t stop real terrorists and criminals before or in the act. Not ones that plan on dying, anyway. All they can do is make themselves look busy so they can justify more power and higher budgets.
This is the same institution that protects those who kill civilians in America and places not called America
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/14/saud-m14.html
Every time something like this happens the FBI always seem to have prior contact. Just like with the “Boston Bomber” brothers. Wake up people!!!! These attacks are orchestrated by our Gov’t. Their goal is a NWO and they know they cannot do this until they have our guns.
How convenient.
http://www.vocativ.com/usa/nat-sec/fbi-finally-admits-lost-track-boston-marathon-bomber/
There should be an investigation on who influenced this guy. What mosque did he attend? It’s impossible this kind of hate grew in his own head. Somebody told him killing gays was a good thing to do for his religion.
All initial reports, including from the ex-wife whom he beat, are that he wasn’t religious and didn’t attend a mosque. He had a degree in criminal justice, fetished the NYPD, was a gym rat, and worked as a corrections officer.
And he hated gay men. A week or two before this slaughter, his father reports he’d seen two men kissing in public, and it sent him into a total rage.
Yup. Thanks, Mona.
We’re gonna be busy on this one. ;^(
wtf?
Yeah, his father reports that his son was outraged and said that his 3-year-old son shouldn’t be exposed to this public display of affection between two men.
Who wants to assert giving the Stasi even more money and impunity will help prevent incidents of this type?
This and every story I’ve read so far speak, mistakenly I think, of the motives in either or terms. I don’t think his motivations are mutually exclusive and down to only one. People are a complicated lot.
You gotta love these news reports that whoever the latest shooter is “was known to the FBI”. I mean, they are part of a dragnet that doesn’t want one thing anybody says to escape being transcribed and archived in some building in Utah. Yeah, he was known to the FBI. Who isn’t known to the FBI? Fat lot of good that did for the people at Pulse.
I should acknowledge the particulars did come out – it’s all at the Wikipedia article; there were two specific investigations, and unfortunately they failed to find any wrongdoing at the time.
After reading a few other articles on this, I find out this started out with a firefight outside the club, and then continued inside…
I wonder how many of the dead an injured were killed by this one man, and how many were killed by cops shooting at him…
The firefight was with only one security guard.
I think fundamentally people have no free will, their immediate culture/upbringing puts them fairly efficiently onto predictable paths and guardrails that serve in place of a larger, over-arching, personally controllable freewill. I suspect Omar may really have gone off the deepend once his ex-wife separated herself from him; similarly, it’s frequently been my suspicion that many of these mass killers go off to mass murder strangers precisely so they can avoid killing family members–oftentimes an originary hate or grievance against the family is at the psychopathic root of the impersonal hate, which is only later and subconsciously pretextually colored by ideology and sectarianism.
“His father also said Mateen had a (sic) associates degree in criminal justice, and was working a security job.” -from the following article
http://www.mediaite.com/online/who-is-omar-mateen/
Maybe, because the target was a gay club, the FBI didn’t think it was worth the bother to stop…
This would definitely fit the existing pattern…
Reminds me of city roadwork crews who tear up perfectly fine streets because they have to justify next year’s budget based on this year’s work. Entrapping mentally-addled Muslims is the FBI’s version of busy work. And individually a means of getting noticed/promoted. Actual justice, and guilt or innocence, and protecting society is way down the list of motivation.
Thanks for the article. The Intercept is the best at conceptualizing news for a holistic understanding. A homeless person being framed as an international terrorist says legions about this supposed war on global terrorism.
Excellent points, Trevor! They’re so busy with their own “terrorists” that they don’t have the resources to keep track of the real “home-grown” ones.
Note, also, that Obama immediately jumped on the gun-control angle. Whatever you may think of the subject, generally, it is absolutely idiotic to believe that there are any new gun-control laws we could adopt that would keep guns out of the hands of licensed security officers with criminal justice degrees.
But, hey, whatever dog whistle you think will bring your candidate’s supporters running.
Ty for this narrative.
It seems like all of the suspected “terrorists” that the FBI has under investigation, or has informants frame these guys has mental problems or isn’t bright. While, actual people who want to do harm to America for political reasons, a “terrorist”, are mostly college educated, come from middle class backgrounds, and wealthy. Look at the Europeans leaving Europe to fight for ISIS or before that al Qaida.