Man
Claiming to be Lover of Orlando Shooter Casts
Further Doubt on “Terror” Claims
By Bill Van
Auken
June 23,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WSWS"
- The
attempts to cast the horrific June 12 massacre of 49
people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando as a case
of Islamist terrorism have been further undermined
by the testimony of a man claiming to have been the
lover of the shooter, Omar Mateen.
In an
exclusive interview Tuesday with the Spanish
language television network Univision, a man who
identified himself only as Miguel and who appeared
with his face and voice disguised said that Mateen
had attacked the gay nightclub not as an act not of
terrorism, but of “revenge.”
According
to his account, Mateen was enraged over a sexual
encounter with two Puerto Rican men he had met at
the Pulse nightclub, one of whom, he said, later
acknowledged that he was HIV positive. He described
Mateen as “terrified” of becoming infected with the
virus.
“I’m going
to make them pay for what they did to me,” he
recalled Mateen telling him, adding that “he hated
Puerto Rican gays” because of the incident.
The man
recounted that he had met Mateen via a gay dating
app and had gone with him between 15 and 20 times to
the Ambassador Hotel in Orlando. A receptionist
interviewed by Univision confirmed that she
recognized Mateen and that the man the network
interviewed had been a regular guest.
The FBI
confirmed the man’s report that he had been
interviewed several times by the agency, which has
also sought security video from the hotel.
The
testimony of “Miguel” conforms with accounts given
by a number of others, including Mateen’s former
wife and a number of patrons of the Pulse nightclub,
who described him as a regular and reported that he
had been on gay dating apps for years.
The
gunman’s ex-wife, Sitora Ysufiy, an immigrant from
Uzbekistan, told a Brazilian television news
interviewer that Mateen had been “mentally unstable
and mentally ill,” having physically abused her
during their brief marriage.
Ysufiy
added that she believed he was gay, and that his
father, an Afghan immigrant, had denounced him as
such in front of her. According to her and her
fiancé, she recounted this experience to the FBI,
but had been asked by FBI agents “not to tell this
to the American media.”
The media,
for its part, has largely cooperated. Neither the
New York Times nor the Washington Post,
two newspapers that set the agenda for the national
press, had published as of Wednesday a word about
either the Univision interview or Mateen’s ex-wife’s
account of her encounter with the FBI.
Instead,
the overwhelming attention has been given to
Mateen’s call to 911 during the massacre, in which
he delivered “a pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State,” and the
controversy surrounding the FBI’s redaction of this
statement from a transcript originally released to
the press.
Given the
widespread testimony relating to Mateen’s apparent
mental illness and internal conflicts over his
sexual identity, as well as the extremely repressive
social attitudes within his family, there is every
reason to suspect that the invocation of the Islamic
State was aimed at concealing his real motives.
There is a
clear political purpose behind the media’s selective
reporting. The aim is to support the narrative that
Mateen acted as a “domestically radicalized”
Islamist terrorist, inspired to violence by the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), rather than,
as with the far more typical mass shooter in
America, driven by mental illness, perceived
grievances and the toxic social atmosphere that
prevails in a country dominated by unending war and
deepening inequality.
The
massacre in Orlando is being harnessed to a drive by
the US ruling establishment to escalate war abroad
and political repression at home. The mass killing
has coincided with demands by US generals for the
dispatch of more American troops to Iraq as well as
a call by some 50 State Department officials for the
redirection of the US intervention in Syria to more
directly target the Russian-backed government of
President Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile,
the US Senate Wednesday narrowly defeated
legislation that would further empower the FBI to
troll through the Internet browsing histories,
emails and social media activity of American
citizens without the necessity of securing a court
order. The measure represents a significant
expansion of the warrantless searches authorized
under the Patriot Act, which require only an
administrative subpoena, called a “National Security
Letter” (NSL). Over the past decade, the FBI has
issued some 300,000 such letters.
While
supposedly not including access to the content of
emails, the legislation in the Senate would allow
the FBI to track the web sites viewed by citizens
and determine how long they visited them, as well as
the “to” and “from” lines of emails and location
information garnered from IP addresses.
Telephone
and Internet companies served with NSLs are barred
under the law from disclosing either to their
customers or the general public that they have
received these letters.
Those
backing the legislation have invoked the Orlando
attack as the pretext for the further shredding of
constitutional protections against unreasonable
searches and seizures.
One of the
sponsors of the measure, which was presented as an
amendment to a spending bill that included funding
for the FBI, was Arizona’s Republican Senator John
McCain. “In the wake of the tragic massacre in
Orlando, it is important our law enforcement have
the tools they need to conduct counterterrorism
investigations and track ‘lone wolves,’ or
ISIS-inspired terrorists,” he said.
The vote on
the measure was 58-38, just two shy of the 60 votes
needed for it to go forward. Eleven Democrats joined
all but six members of the Republican majority in
voting to approve it. In a procedural move, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell changed his vote
from “yes” to “no,” allowing him to reintroduce the
legislation during a later debate.
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