At 2:35 a.m. on June 12, Omar Mateen called 911 from the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. For 30 minutes he’d been on a killing rampage and he wanted the world to know why. He spoke for less than a minute.
“In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficent,” he began. “Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God.” And then he announced: “I wanna let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.” The dispatcher asked for his name. “My name is—I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.” The dispatcher asked again for his name. Mateen said: “I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, may God protect him, on behalf of the Islamic State.”
In two other calls, both of them much longer, Mateen declared himself an “Islamic soldier” and reported that he was carrying out the shootings in order to avenge the deaths of Muslims in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Patience Carter heard one side of those 911 calls from her position near the killer in the bathroom of the Pulse nightclub. “The motive was very clear to us,” she told reporters. “Through the conversation with 911, he said that the reason why he was doing this was because he wanted America to stop bombing his country,” she said. “So, the motive was very clear to us, who were laying in our own blood and other people’s blood, who were injured, who were shot, that we knew what his motive was, and he wasn’t going to stop killing people until he was killed, until he felt like his message got out there.”
To make sure that message was unmistakable, Mateen posted on Facebook during the massacre. “I pledge my alliance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi . . . may Allah accept me,” Mateen wrote in one post. “The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west. . . . You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes . . . now taste the Islamic state vengeance.”
This information was available to law enforcement—and to the White House—almost immediately after the attack on the nightclub. And yet, some 36 hours later, when President Barack Obama spoke to reporters, he said that the shooter had pledged loyalty to ISIS only “at the last minute.” Obama insisted that the reason behind the slaughter was a mystery: “I think we don’t yet know the motivations.”
In the days that followed, we learned more about Mateen and his history of radicalism. Mateen’s father was a longtime Taliban sympathizer. A decade before Mateen’s attack in Orlando, he threatened to shoot a classmate at a cookout when his hamburger apparently touched some pork by accident. Mateen attended a mosque with a Florida man who would later become a suicide bomber in Syria. In part because of that connection, the FBI investigated Mateen twice as a possible jihadist threat. Perhaps the most chilling piece of information to emerge is that Mateen had told coworkers that he hoped to be “martyred” in an FBI raid on his home.
All of which means the president is wrong, and willfully so. We know Omar Mateen’s motivation. He was a committed jihadist. He killed in the name of Islam. None of this suggests that there weren’t other factors. Perhaps there were. But it’s not necessary to understand them all in order to recognize the most obvious.
The Obama administration efforts to ignore inconvenient realities reached the point of self-parody last week, when the Department of Justice released bowdlerized transcripts of the 911 calls the killer made from the Pulse nightclub.
“I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of the Islamic State” became, after FBI censoring, “I pledge of allegiance to [omitted].”
“I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may God protect him, on behalf of the Islamic State” became “I pledge allegiance to [omitted] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [omitted].”
The FBI said its redactions were meant to deny ISIS a propaganda victory. But seven years of the Obama administration’s non-war on terror point to a different explanation. Truths that complicate Obama’s ideological objectives are simply cast aside in favor of his preferred reality.
“Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab confessed to working with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Three days later President Obama described him as an “isolated extremist.” When Faisal Shahzad tried to bomb Times Square, then-secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was quick to dismiss it as an amateurish “one-off” attack, never mind the involvement of the Pakistani Taliban.
The president doesn’t want to answer for a deadly al Qaeda attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi six weeks before the election? Claim it wasn’t al Qaeda and claim it wasn’t a planned attack. The Obama campaign doesn’t want anything to complicate its 2012 campaign narrative that “al Qaeda is on the run”? Refuse to release the “small college library” full of documents captured at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. Is the DNI assessment of Iran’s involvement in terrorism complicating efforts to win support for a nuclear deal? Simply have them rewrite it and leave out the damning evidence. State Department leaders don’t like video evidence of Fox News correspondent James Rosen catching the spokesman in a lie? Edit it out of the recording. Disagree with the assessments from the intelligence community that some Guantánamo detainees are too dangerous to release? Ignore them and transfer those detainees anyway.
The Obama administration’s efforts to shape our perception of the threats we face doesn’t make the actual threats go away. And yet the president did it again last week, saying that jihadists pledged to fight and die for ISIS “are not religious warriors.” It would be bad enough if he were just trying to fool us. Worse is the possibility that he’s fooling himself.
