For those of you who might not have heard about this, on February 2, in an interview with Chris Matthews from MSNBC, Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor, defended the travel ban instituted by President Trump with the highly inaccurate ‘Bowling Green massacre’ claims, as well the ban on Iraqi refugees instituted under Obama. Though she later said she misspoke, there has now been not one or two, but three instances of Counselor Conway citing the ‘Bowling Green [event]’.
She clearly believes that she doesn’t deserve to catch any flak for citing false, fake events to justify a move by President Trump that many people find bigoted and just plain wrong. To defend herself, she said, “I misspoke one word.” She also said that what she meant to say was “Bowling Green terrorists.”
While it would be nice to believe that she had simply misspoken, there are now two other sources – both TMZ and Cosmopolitan magazine – in which she cited it.
On January 29, in an interview with Cosmopolitan and speaking about former president Obama’s ban on Iraqi refugees, Conway explained, “He did that because two Iraqi nationals came to this country, joined ISIS, traveled back to the Middle East to get trained and refine their terrorism skills and come back here, and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers’ lives away.”
On the same day, she parroted the same comments when she was interviewed by TMZ. “He did that because, I assume, there were two Iraqis who came here, got radicalized, joined ISIS, and then were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green attack on our brave soldiers,”.
Her understanding of the events that actually took place is sloppy, to say the least. The FBI has released statements saying that the men “admitted using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against U.S. soldiers in Iraq and… attempted to send weapons and money to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) for the purpose of killing U.S. soldiers.” However, they never mentioned the men going back to the Middle East or training for an attack. Nor was there an attack on U.S. soil.
Though the initial quote she gave during her interview with Chris Matthews might have had some credibility (that the men were the “masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre) due to the fact that you could misinterpret her words to mean she thought they supplied al-Qaeda with weapons, her other quotes make it apparent that she honestly believes faux news.
No doubt that President Trump’s supporters will consider this irrelevant due to the fact that the men did target our soldiers, however, it doesn’t justify his travel ban, which is supposed to prevent domestic terrorism.