Home»US»Newsweek: ISIS May Be Withholding Proof That Las Vegas Shooting Was Jihad In Order To Discredit FBI

Newsweek: ISIS May Be Withholding Proof That Las Vegas Shooting Was Jihad In Order To Discredit FBI

0
Shares
Pinterest WhatsApp

“If Islamic State did indeed cultivate Paddock, as it has claimed was the case, the group surely has some evidence of its engagements with him.

If it does, it may be the case the group is waiting on FBI and other agencies to dismiss its claim of responsibility for the Las Vegas attack before posting contradictory evidence online for the world to see.

Islamic State has been very focused on undermining confidence among civilians in the West that their technologically-superior governments are competent managers of our collective security.”

No one should have confidence in the FBI at this point anyway.

Bruce Joiner, the security guard wounded in the May 2015 jihad attack at a free speech event in Garland, Texas co-organized by Pamela Geller and me, is suing the FBI for allowing its undercover agent to aid ISIS in plotting that attack.

There are many, many unanswered questions about what happened at Garland, and about what the FBI was doing there.

60 Minutes ran a feature last March about the FBI’s curious role in the Garland jihad plot.

It was, predictably enough, viciously biased, sloppy, and incomplete, but it was nonetheless illuminating in raising a hard and unanswerable question: did the FBI want Pamela Geller and me dead?

CBS did a good job of highlighting a curious and still unexplained aspect of the attack: the FBI clearly knew the attack was coming (although it didn’t bother to inform us or our security team), as the FBI agent was right there, following behind the jihadis, whom he had encouraged to “tear up Texas.”

But even though they knew the attack was coming, they didn’t have a team in place to stop the jihadis.

They had one man there, and one man only. The jihadis were not stopped by FBI agents, but by our own security team.

If the jihadis had gotten through our team, they would have killed Pamela Geller and me, and many others. (They would no doubt have loved to kill Geert Wilders, but he left before they arrived.)

The Daily Beast wrote in August 2016 about how this undercover FBI agent encouraged the jihadis.

The Beast’s Katie Zavadski wrote: “Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. ‘Tear up Texas,’ the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.”

What was the FBI’s game in telling them to “tear up Texas”?

Why didn’t they have a phalanx of agents in place, ready to stop the attack?

Or did they want the attack to succeed, so that Barack Obama’s vow that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” would be vividly illustrated, and intimidate any other Americans who might be contemplating defending the freedom of speech into silence?

Pamela Geller twice asked the FBI for an investigation into this matter. They ignored her requests.

And now the Islamic State may be working to undermine confidence in the FBI? They wouldn’t have to work very hard.

“If ISIS Was Behind Las Vegas Shooting, There’s a Terrifying Reason It Won’t Prove It Yet,” by Tom O’Connor, Newsweek, October 9, 2017 (thanks to David):

Authorities continue to doubt that the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) was behind last week’s massacre in Las Vegas, despite the jihadists’ persistent claims the shooter acted on their behalf. According to one leading expert’s analysis, however, the conflicting narratives might be playing straight into ISIS’s hands.

Despite digging deep into Stephen Paddock’s background, investigators have struggled to understand what drove the 64-year-old man, who described himself as a “professional gambler,” to slaughter 58 people and injure hundreds more when he opened fire on crowds attending a country music concert from his 32nd-floor hotel room in Las Vegas. Nothing so far has reportedly led them to believe ISIS’s claim that Paddock converted to Islam and acted as “a soldier” of the group’s self-styled caliphate, leaving observers wondering why the global militant group would risk making such an outlandish, intentionally false allegation.

The answer could lie in a larger plot to exploit the U.S.’s already eroding trust in its leadership.

“If Islamic State did indeed cultivate Paddock, as it has claimed was the case, the group surely has some evidence of its engagements with him. If it does, it may be the case the group is waiting on FBI and other agencies to dismiss its claim of responsibility for the Las Vegas attack before posting contradictory evidence online for the world to see,” terrorism analyst Michael S. Smith II tells Newsweek.

“Islamic State has been very focused on undermining confidence among civilians in the West that their technologically-superior governments are competent managers of our collective security,” he adds….

While Las Vegas’ Sheriff Joe Lombardo told reporters Monday that police “have no intelligence or evidence the suspect was linked to any terrorist groups or radical ideologies,” Smith warns that ISIS’s proven ability to avoid detection helps it send potential recruits a clear message: “Intelligence agencies in the West are not actually omniscient.”

The reality of this message has been demonstrated more than once before, with deadly consequences. Months prior to the series of ISIS-orchestrated gun and bomb attacks that killed 130 people in November 2015 in Paris, the 27-year-old “mastermind,” Abdelhamid Abaaoud, bragged about evading arrest, despite traveling as a known affiliate of the group, during an interview with ISIS magazine Dabiq.

Before August’s dual van-ramming and stabbing attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils that killed 16, the CIA had reportedly warned Spanish authorities of an ISIS-related threat specifically on Barcelona’s popular Las Ramblas, where 15 people were killed. Elsewhere in Europe, Morocco-born Youssef Zaghba, one of the men behind June’s deadly vehicular ramming and stabbing attacks that killed 8 people in London, told authorities “I’m going to be a terrorist” after being stopped in an Italian airport....

Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer


The Washington Standard

Previous post

Shooter Opens Fire on Texas Tech Campus, at Least One Dead

Next post

Did Authorities Lie about Las Vegas Shooter's Hotel Check-In Date & License Plate?