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Mosque of Orlando Gunman Set On Fire In Arson Attack

Mosque of Orlando Gunman Set On Fire In Arson Attack

(Reuters) – The Florida mosque where Omar Mateen, who committed the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, prayed was damaged on Monday in an arson attack, investigators said.

Mateen was killed by law enforcement officials after fatally shooting 49 people and wounding 53 others in a gay nightclub in Orlando in June.

Local law enforcement officers received reports of flames rising from the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, located about 100 miles (161 km) southeast of Orlando, at about 12:30 a.m. EDT, St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Major David Thompson told reporters at a news conference. No one was injured.

The attack occurred on one of the holiest Muslim holidays.

Surveillance video showed a person approach the mosque moments before the blaze erupted, he said.

“Immediately after the individual approached, a flash occurred and the individual fled the area,” Thompson said.

Investigators will work to enhance the footage to identify the suspect, he said.

Mateen told police in a 911 call that he had pledged his allegiance to the head of the Islamic State militant group, though investigators do not believe he had any help from outside organizations.

Shortly after the massacre, the mosque in Fort Pierce was identified as Mateen’s place of worship. It has reported receiving multiple threats of violence and intimidation. In June a motorcycle gang circled the center and shouted at its members, and in July a Muslim man was beaten outside the mosque.

Thompson said investigators were still seeking a motive for the attack and were considering a connection with the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on Sunday.

“I would not want to speculate, but certainly that is in the back of our minds,” he said.

The Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, a major Muslim holiday, is being celebrated on Monday and also could have prompted the attack, Thompson said.

The mosque temporarily relocated its morning prayers for Eid al-Adha, also known as the Feast of Sacrifice.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Photo: A view of the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, a center attended by Omar Mateen who attacked Pulse nightclub in Orlando, in Fort Pierce, Florida, U.S. on June 17, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Brown/File Photo

There’s A Reason Trump Targets Terrorists’ Families

There’s A Reason Trump Targets Terrorists’ Families

What’s new on the Democrats-Are-Terrorist-Lovers beat?

Well, the father of Orlando gay nightclub shooter Omar Mateen attended a Hillary Clinton rally on Monday — sweet, sweet clickbait for the right wing blogosphere, and thus, the national media.

The Clinton campaign responded to criticism of Seddique Mateen’s attendance by claiming they did not invite him to the rally, nor were they made aware of his attendance until after the event had concluded. They failed to clarify whether they would have asked Mateen not to come if they had known ahead of time that he planned on attending.

But why should the Clinton campaign walk back Mateen’s attendance?

Omar Mateen’s father received plenty of national attention after his son’s attack in August because of the alleged influence of Mateen’s upbringing on his eventual declared loyalties to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (and others — Mateen cited various unaffiliated extremist groups). While Seddique has a history of commenting on Afghan politics, occasionally buying public access air time in California and posting YouTube videos on the subject, there’s no evidence that he was involved in the attack or knew about it ahead of time.

Still, Donald Trump has made “going after” the families and acquaintances of terrorists — just the “radical Islamic extremist” variety, though — a central premise of his national security strategy.

“And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump said in December. “They, they care about their lives. Don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.” (Deliberately killing terrorists’ innocent family members is a war crime. Former CIA director Michael Hayden told Bill Maher after Trump’s comments that military leadership would not follow such an order.)

Trump applied similar logic to the family and acquaintances of the two San Bernardino attackers. “Many people saw this, many, many people. Muslims living with them, in the same area, they saw that house,” he said in March.

Why? Trump announced his intention to implement a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in December, and though at times he’s changed the scope of that ban to include or exclude countries “affected by terrorism” — including France and Germany, the sentiment has stayed the same: There’s “something going on,” and Islam itself is to blame.

And what easier way to find fault in an entire religion than to call attention not to radicalized individuals — the intelligence community finds that many attacks in the U.S. are carried out by “lone wolves” — but rather to the social structures that surround them?

In reality, ISIS recruiters pressure their recruits to isolate themselves from family and friends who might otherwise be able to convince them not to go through with an attack. One account from an ISIS recruit published by the New York Times last June illustrates the process by which recruiters attempt to replace the social ties in potential recruits’ lives:

Meanwhile, let’s talk about someone who was actually invited to attend the Republican National Convention as a member of the press: James Edwards, the white supremacist who the Trump campaign had previously falsely denied was given an interview with Donald Trump Jr. The campaign also initially denied white supremacist leader William Johnson was selected as a California delegate to the convention, before the media questioned the choice.

Unlike Seddique Mateen — unlike any of the less-newsworthy, innocent families of terrorist attackers targeted by the Trump campaign — Edwards, Johnson, and many others who identify with their politics were asked to participate in Trump’s nomination process.

 

Photo: WPTV

Should The FBI Have Censored The Orlando Shooter’s Propaganda Call?

Should The FBI Have Censored The Orlando Shooter’s Propaganda Call?

Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Sunday that the transcripts of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen’s calls with police during his rampage would be censored. Transcribed text of the calls would be released instead of the original audio, she said, and the release would not include Mateen’s apparent “pledge of allegiance” to the Islamic State. “We’re not going to… further proclaim this individual’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda,” Lynch said on Meet the Press.

Then, a day later, the FBI announced that they would release the initial 911 call without anything omitted. They also released a timeline of Mateen’s calls with police negotiators, in which he claimed there were explosives in cars around the nightclub — a claim that turned out to be untrue. Mateen demanded to police negotiators that the U.S. stop bombing Syria and Iraq.

The omitted portions of the initial transcript didn’t leave much to the imagination: Abu Barkr al-Baghdadi is the leader of ISIS — or was, if reports of his death by the Amaq news agency last week are to be believed. Below, I’ve filled in brackets with the new information released on Monday.

OD: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
OM: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficial [in Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [in Arabic]. I let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What’s your name?
OM: My name is I pledge of allegiance to [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State].
OD: Ok, What’s your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [the Islamic State].
OD: Alright, where are you at?
OM: In Orlando.
OD: Where in Orlando?
[End of call.]

The FBI, when they released the bracketed information above, cited the “unnecessary distraction” created by the original omissions. In a joint statement, the Justice Department and the FBI said they had omitted information from the original transcripts to show sensitivity to the “interests of the surviving victims, their families, and the integrity of the ongoing investigation. We also did not want to provide the killer or terrorist organizations with a publicity platform for hateful propaganda.”

Right wing groups attacked Lynch at President Obama for censoring the pledge of allegiance to ISIS, saying that they were politicizing the release by removing evidence of “radical Islamic terrorism.” Mounting pressure from these groups could be why the redacted portions of the transcript were released, even though the content of the redactions was fairly well-known in the days immediately after the attack.

The act of pledging allegiance to ISIS is an important part of the message terror attacks like Mateen’s are meant to send. The day after the attack, the New York Times‘ Rukmini Callimachi wrote about what it meant that Mateen knew to state his motivation to police:

This public oath is about the only requirement that the Islamic State imposes on followers who wish to carry out acts of terror in its name. In an annual speech, the terror group’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, last month incited its supporters to carry out killings abroad during the holy month of Ramadan.

No attack is too small, he advised, specifically naming the United States as a target. “The smallest action you do in the heart of their land is dearer to us than the largest action by us,” he said, “and more effective and more damaging to them.”

An official ISIS publication quoted an anonymous “source” stating that Mateen was working on behalf of the organization, though there have been no concrete ties shown yet between Mateen and ISIS, aside from ISIS propaganda that Mateen may have consumed. It’s possible the publication, Amaq, was responding to the news that Mateen had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

As Brenan Koerner reported in WIRED after the San Bernardino shootings,

The most significant way in which the Islamic State has exhibited its media savviness has been through its embrace of openness. Unlike al Qaeda, which has generally been methodical about organizing and controlling its terror cells, the more opportunistic Islamic State is content to crowdsource its social media activity—and its violence—out to individuals with whom it has no concrete ties.

So were the Justice Department and the FBI justified in their desire to omit certain portions of the initial 911 call, in order to deprive Mateen and ISIS of the opportunity to provide a model for other would-be terrorists? Or should they have known that certain outlets and politicians — including Paul Ryan, who said Monday that editing the call transcript was “preposterous” — would interpret the move as a decision to minimize the “Islamic extremism” aspect of the attack?

From a counterterrorism standpoint, censoring the names makes sense: Why announce the information that Mateen wanted the world to know about his attack?

There is, on the other hand, a journalistic argument to be made that no information related to an attack of this scale — and frankly, political importance — should be withheld from the public.

But the real reason the full transcript was released is probably a bit more cynical: Conservative outlets accused the Obama administration of sterilizing the truth. The Obama administration wanted to avoid yet another conspiracy-laden scandal, and so they nipped the story in the bud by telling people what they already knew — inadvertently broadcasting the terrorists’ message in the process.

Photo: U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch testifies before a House Appropriations subcommittee on the Justice’s Department budget in Washington February 24, 2016.   REUTERS/Gary Cameron

After Orlando, More Genuine Policy Dialogue Is Needed

After Orlando, More Genuine Policy Dialogue Is Needed

Omar Mateen may have committed the worst gun mass murder in U.S. history, but his terrorist act will change little in America.

Occurring as it did six months before the presidential election, politics has gotten in the way of the reflection and deliberation that should be happening.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Congress’ first notable response to the Orlando shootings was a 15-hour filibuster, led by Sen. Christopher Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. He was pushing for a vote on two pieces of legislation, one for expanded background checks and the other to keep people on the terror watch list from buying guns. As he ended the filibuster, he seemed to have prevailed.

By the next morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out that the Republicans had merely conceded that the Senate would vote on two amendments to the appropriations bill for the Commerce, State and Justice department. There had been no consensus from his side on which amendments they would agree to consider.

So a vote, but no deal on what it will be for or against. And it very likely will be against what the Democrats want. Senate Democrats even skipped a classified briefing on the Orlando investigation just so they could continue the filibuster.

None of this theater would have occurred if both political parties had been focused on making an impact beyond showboating for their base voters. If they were, the nation would have heard a lot less emotional pontificating and far more thoughtful analysis and study.

The stagnation in Congress allowed the NRA to keep harping that the goal should be to defeat radical Islam, as if it is a spot on the map rather than an ideology that is propagated all over the world, including to the U.S., via the internet.

By mid-week, investigators seeking to unravel the Orlando shooter’s motives revealed his pledge of allegiance to the Islamic state but could demonstrate no real association with the group. They did uncover a history of domestic violence and what appeared to be his internal conflicts about homosexuality and a range of other factors.

The issue is keeping such a person — the so-called lone wolf — away from the weaponry that allows him to take multiple lives. And that’s gun control.

The fact that Omar Mateen had been on the government’s terror watch list understandably took center stage in the week after the murders. Surely the government has a compelling interest in denying anybody on that list the right to buy weapons.

But those discussions will go nowhere until it can be demonstrated that any such government watch list is accurate and that its management is above suspicion. McClatchy reported that 1.1 million names, representing 440,000 people were on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment as of December 2013, according to the National Counterterrorism Center. About 25,000 were U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.

Another 16,500 are taken off every year. In 2014, that included Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter.

But government studies have found problems with the list. One report indicated that up to 35 percent of the names shouldn’t have been included. McClatchy’s reporting details a lawsuit that questions how a four-year-old in California ended up on the list.

Until those sorts of questions are cleared up, groups as different as the NRA and the ACLU will find themselves in the same camp, arguing that government watch lists are unreliable and therefore a threat to people’s constitutional rights. It’s a valid argument. But it’s a fear that can be allayed if effort is made to improve the lists, to give the FBI and other terrorism investigators the resources to maintain more accurate records, accessible to other relevant agencies, so that everyone is hyper focused on the same goals.

In the case of Mateen, there is also the question of how a person can be investigated intensely, be dropped from the list and then go on to commit the worst act of gun violence in U.S. history.

Study the mentality of mass shooters, be they homegrown loners, self-radicalized or directed by the Islamic State. The red flags are there to see. It’s how we react to those clues and how our laws allow us to respond that is the problem.

What we may well conclude is that a wide range of new attitudes, policies and laws may be necessary to head off such violence. But first we must have sober, good-faith study and debate.

Photo: Hank Morgan reacts after hanging a banner for the Pulse gay nightclub shooting victims in Orlando, Florida, U.S., June 16, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young