The good news: the White House will finally release transcripts of the conversations had between the Islamist terrorist who murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, and the law enforcement officers who were communicating with him.
The bad news: the same white House, in the form of the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, was -- until sufficiently castigated by Americans to decide late yesterday to release without redaction all the content -- only going to release, as she called them, "partial transcripts" -- meaning we would have gotten to read only what she, who knows better than we what our tolerance level for Islamist terror is, decides is OK for us. So now she is the word-doctor-in-chief.
Note -- we taxpayers pay her for that privilege.
Loretta Lynch went on all five of the Sunday morning news talk shows this past Sunday, to say that she was going to do that "partial release." Not the voice recordings, mind you, just written transcripts of the part of the dialogue she wants you to know.
What was really curious -- well, several things were, but certainly this was at the top -- was that she essentially said, on all five of the shows, what was in the part we weren't mature enough to hear. She specifically is taking out the part about where the Islamist murderer pledged allegiance to ISIS, where he pledged allegiance to the clown who is the head of ISIS, and anything to do with Islam. But in print, those references would be replaced with a "redacted" mark.
Now, this really strains credibility, so let me try to put some facts together in a logical organization for you.
- Barack Obama, in his first year as president, ordered the scrubbing of certain terms like "jihad" and "sharia" from training manuals in use in Federal agencies associated with law enforcement and the like.
- Obama refuses to use any term associated with either Islam or Islamism (they're not the same, as I noted yesterday) in speaking of ISIS, even when an ISIS-driven murderer involved does use the words, himself, as this one did -- and the first "I" in ISIS stands for "Islamic."
- We all know that the Orlando killer pledged allegiance to ISIS. That was out there within an hour of the murderer's being killed, possibly by the FBI to make sure that Obama couldn't try to make it a "hate crime" (he did anyway).
So you have a reflexively Muslim-supporting president trying for eight years to deny the involvement of Islam or Islamism in terror, confronting a mass murder where the murderer flat-out says he did it for ISIS. What does he do? He tells his Attorney General (and, embarrassingly, she complies) to scrub out the mentions of Islam or ISIS from transcripts of conversations we're all aware of already.
By the way, we need to give Miss Lynch credit for creativity. In trying to answer the question that was asked as to, you know, "why" she was practicing censorship in what was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever, she came up with a nearly brand new word. "Because", she explained, "we wanted to avoid revictimizing those who went through this horror."
"Revictimizing." OK, she is not the first person to use the term; it's just fun to dump on her. But the families and friends of the people who were killed or wounded in the Orlando attack already know the guy had pledged allegiance to ISIS. What is the difference between their victim status today and what it would be tomorrow if the transcripts were to be released in full, and we saw the words "I pledge allegiance to ISIS"? Is that difference, nonexistent as it even is, more important than the public's right to know what was said and the public's trust that the White House -- and Justice Department -- is giving us all the facts and not playing Big Brother?
Last. but not least, I call attention to the answer that Miss Lynch gave in answer to another question. The murders took place in a gay nightclub. When asked if anywhere in the transcripts, before or after censoring them, if the Orlando murderer had ever mentioned his feelings about gay people, she said "You know, he didn't get into that." Those words.
He "didn't get into that." Hours of transcripts later, let's use the Occam's Razor approach here. If the fact that this were a gay nightclub had had anything to do with his motivation, do you not think that even once, he would have mentioned on those calls to 911 that he had some kind of feelings toward gay people that contributed to the murders or, at least, the selection of the murder site?
No, it seems pretty clear that this was an ISIS-motivated or ISIS-inspired attack, at least it is clear from what he said that it was. But that doesn't fit the whole "hate crime" narrative that the administration wants to foist on us. It would be so much easier to maximize the "gay hate crime" aspects of this and make victims out of the victims, as long as Obama can minimize the actual reason for the murders, which was an act of violent Islamist terrorism.
As difficult as it is to understand where Obama's head is at, and why he holds ISIS above ordinary Americans, it is nearly impossible to understand how he gets other people, like Loretta Lynch, to go along with it. How does she have the brass whatevers to stand up in front of the American people and on five different shows, tell us that she is going to scrub ISIS references in the transcript that we already know exist?
I mean, we know that she is doing it under orders to make sure that Orlando is seen as (A) under a hate-crime-against-gays narrative to try to get votes from the gay community (which apparently is starting to arm itself, a bit hilariously and wonderfully), and (B) a gun-control narrative to try to get laws passed that weaken the Second Amendment and would not have stopped most, or all, of the ISIS attacks in the USA to date.
Unfortunately, the attempt by the White House to deflect blame from ISIS only makes ISIS stronger and the USA weaker. Which clearly is what Obama wants -- how do you read anything else into it?
But however, we have to ask, does he get anyone to go along, including his Attorney General? We'll never know.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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