Before Nightclub Shooting, FBI Pursued Questionable Florida “Terror” Suspects

Happy National Tatti Day?!!

Musashi ? Sufi Muslim
June 14 2016, 8:26 a.m.

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.

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.

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:

AP: Did a delay in police response give shooter more time?

As the largest mass shooting in modern U.S. history began to unfold, an off-duty police officer working at a gay nightclub exchanged gunfire with the suspect. But three hours passed before a SWAT team stormed the building and brought the attack to an end.

The decision by law enforcement to hold off on entering the Pulse club — where more than 100 people were shot, 49 of them killed — immediately raised questions among experts in police tactics. They said the lessons learned from other mass shootings show that officers must get inside swiftly — even at great risk — to stop the threat and save lives.

“We live in a different world. And action beats inaction 100 percent of the time,” said Chris Grollnek, an expert on active-shooter tactics and a retired police officer and SWAT team member.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, first had a shootout with the off-duty officer at the club’s entrance. Then two other officers arrived and the firing continued.

More

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.”

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:

“If I was Donald Trump, I would have come out the minute that the FBI started to indicate this morning that we are talking about a guy who was operating from Islamic motivations,” Oren told Israeli television. “Just his name alone … a Muslim name, the son of Afghan immigrants who apparently maintained connections of some sort to extremist Islamic organizations, that in itself will greatly influence the presidential race.”

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.

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?

Definition:

Them: Who turn to violence.
Us: Who don’t.

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.

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.

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:

US law enforcement is at least initially categorizing the horrific Orlando shootings as “domestic terrorism.”

I don’t think it probably was terrorism in any useful sense of the term.

I used to know what domestic terrorism was, before the term became politicized in the past decade. It was defined right there in the Federal code of 1992:

“(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—

(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—

(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

The great thing about this definition is that it focuses on the motive behind the act. And it specifies that the motive has to be to coerce people or influence or affect government policy.

So if the alleged shooter, Omar Mateen, was a terrorist you would expect him to make demands about US government policy…..

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?

“Currently, the Saudi government hands out fines, prison sentences and whipping for being openly gay. A second conviction automatically merits automatic executions although vigilante executions are also common.” (express co uk)

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:

“The West does not actually hand the weapons to al-Qaeda, let alone ISIS,” he said, “but the system that they have constructed leads precisely to that end. The weapons conduit that the West directly has been giving to groups such as the Syrian Free Army (FSA), have been understood to be a sort of ‘Wal Mart’ from which the more radical groups would be able to take their weapons and pursue the jihad.” This constitutes a sort of ‘supermarket’ where rebels can go and receive weapons, the weapons always migrating “along the line to the more radical elements.” The idea was to “use jihadists to weaken the government in Damascus and to drive it to its knees to the negotiating table.” Exactly the same kind of policy used in Afghanistan during the 1980s, when conduits such as the Pakistani ISI were used to funnel weapons to the mujahedeen.”

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.

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.

“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.

>…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.

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:

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

“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”.

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.

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.

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.

NYT:

One of Mr. Mateen’s former co-workers said in an interview on Sunday that he had expressed concerns about the man’s demeanor when they both worked as security guards assigned to PGA Village, a resort in Port St. Lucie, Fla.

“He talked about killing people all the time,” the former co-worker, Daniel Gilroy, said.

According to Mr. Gilroy, who said that he had repeatedly complained to G4S, the security company that employed them, Mr. Mateen was a loud, profane presence who was prone to using racial, ethnic and sexual slurs.

Mr. Gilroy, a former police officer in Fort Pierce, described Mr. Mateen as a man who had “issues and just constant anger.”

“He was just agitated about everything, always shaken, always agitated, always mad,” said Mr. Gilroy, who said his relationship with Mr. Mateen became increasingly tense, with Mr. Mateen badgering him with text messages 20 or 30 times a day.

According to Mr. Gilroy, who said that he had repeatedly complained to G4S, the security company that employed them, Mr. Mateen was a loud, profane presence who was prone to using racial, ethnic and sexual slurs.

Mr. Gilroy, a former police officer in Fort Pierce, described Mr. Mateen as a man who had “issues and just constant anger.”

“He was just agitated about everything, always shaken, always agitated, always mad,” said Mr. Gilroy, who said his relationship with Mr. Mateen became increasingly tense, with Mr. Mateen badgering him with text messages 20 or 30 times a day.

Mr. Gilroy, who joined G4S after a career with the Fort Pierce police and later left the security firm, said he could not provide names of any other co-workers who could support his account of Mr. Mateen’s behavior.

He expressed a measure of regret for not having pressed G4S to take more action.

“I kind of feel a little guilty that I didn’t fight harder,” Mr. Gilroy said. “If I didn’t walk away and I fought, then maybe 50 people would still be alive today.”

But he said he was not surprised to hear of what had happened in Orlando.

“I wasn’t shocked,” he said. “I saw it coming.”</blockquote.

The Daily Beast:

Mateen had worked at G4S since 2007, and cleared their security checks when he was hired and again in 2013. The company said they were made aware that Mateen had been questioned by the FBI in 2013 and knew that the investigations had closed.

“We were not made aware of any alleged connections between Mateen and terrorist activities, and were unaware of any further FBI investigations,” G4S communications director Monica Lewman-Garcia told The Daily Beast in a statement.

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.

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.

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.

” 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.

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

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.

A uniformed Orlando Police officer working at the club off-duty had heard gunshots himself and spotted Omar Mateen outside the club. He fired his gun at the 29-year-old one-time security guard from Port St. Lucie, Florida, and two other officers quickly joined in. Mateen was not armed lightly: Police said he had an AR-15 assault-type rifle, a handgun and an explosive device.

Undeterred, he re-entered the club.

More

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?

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.

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.

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.

The ex-wife of the Orlando nightclub gunman says he was “mentally unstable and mentally ill.”

Sitora Yusifiy, speaking to reporters in Boulder, Colorado, says Omar Mateen was bipolar and also had a history with steroids.

She says that in the four months they were together he cut her off from her family and regularly beat her. She says that her family visited her and saw she wasn’t OK and rescued her from the situation.

Yusifiy says they literally pulled her out of his arms. She says she left all her belongings and has had no contact with him for seven or eight years.

She says Mateen was religious, but she saw no signs of radicalism.

Of the nightclub massacre she says, “there was no sign of any of this at all.”

More

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.

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.

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.

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.

If the FBI had in fact investigated Mateen, his capacity for violence would have been easily verified: He had a state firearms license.

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).

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?

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…

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.

Was this a botched rescue?
Police were armed with AR’s too.
Final tally?
Wolfpack mentality.

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.

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.

“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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…