FBI Still Concealing Almost All of What the Orlando Gunman Said

[marmar]

(The Intercept) Doing nothing to advance the heated political debate over what combination of factors might have prompted Omar Mateen to open fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando last week, the FBI on Monday refused to release the audio or a full transcript of the gunman’s phone conversations with the police during the attack.

The FBI instead published a written timeline of the attack, which included a redacted transcript of one conversation between Mateen and a 911 operator, and a partial summary of what he said in three further calls with the Orlando Police Department crisis negotiators that lasted 28 minutes in total. The bureau argued that letting the public hear or even read the gunman’s justification for the attack in his own words risked encouraging further attacks.

Later on Monday, after that redaction was widely criticized, the FBI reversed itself, issuing an unredacted transcript revealing what had been removed: the name of the person the gunman said he dedicated his attack to, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

However, based on a previous description of Mateen’s 911 calls given by FBI Director James Comey last week, it appears that the federal investigators continued to withhold details of a second conversation Mateen had with the 911 operator, which was not referred to at all in the government’s timeline. “He made 911 calls from the club, during the attack,” Comey said last week. “He called and he hung up. He called again and spoke briefly with the dispatcher, and then he hung up, and then the dispatcher called him back again and they spoke briefly. There were three total calls.”

Also missing from the transcript and summary of the conversations was any mention of the fact that, as Comey also said last week, Mateen had expressed solidarity with the Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, and Moner Mohammad Abusalha, a Floridian who carried out a suicide bombing in Syria in 2014 on behalf of al Qaeda’s representatives there, the Nusra Front. The FBI’s Boston office revealed that Mateen had referred to the Tsarnaev brothers as his “homeboys” during one of the 911 calls, despite a lack of evidence that he had ever been in contact with them. .................(more)

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/20/fbi-releases-partial-redacted-transcript-orlando-gunmans-911-calls-attack/

[Bluenorthwest]

1. Comey and Lynch see the victims as utterly unimportant props in their narrative.

Only the full truth will suffice. LGBT community knows that lies and edited truth are toxins, we put much energy into the honest life.

What the government is doing is disgusting.

[Hortensis]

7. Goodness. Of course they're not making

all the findings of their investigation public while it's still ongoing and before any legal actions have been initiated, much less completed. It's not disgusting, it's the way it needs to be in order to serve the public properly.

[tonyt53]

2. He also expressed support for both Sunni and Shi'ite equally, and other confusing ramblings

Jumping to rash conclusions causes people to hear only what they want to hear.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. Redacted materials means no conclusions can be reached at all, they have declared that fiction

will rule this day. They have no respect for the LGBT community.

[1StrongBlackMan]

4. How will/would the LGBT community be benefited by the release of unredacted materials ...

during the active investigation?

[davidn3600]

5. What about the truth?

Are you saying it's better for the government to just tell us what's on the tape instead of listening to it ourselves?

[1StrongBlackMan]

6. During an active investigation? YES.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

8. Orlando PD

Needs to just release it all, once the investigation is at a point they can do so.

The DoJ has lost all credibility on this one, IMO.

[Behind the Aegis]

9. Seems many people are OK with not knowing.

It allows them to fill in the blanks themselves. Transparency used to be important, now it is nothing more than a 'suggestion'.