Tag: Bowling Green massacre

Conway Cited Fake ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ in Previous Interviews

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, reportedly cited a made-up terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to justify the administration’s highly controversial travel and refugee ban in more than one interview.

Conway has been widely derided on social media and by critics since last week, when she falsely claimed on MSNBC that an attack called “the Bowling Green massacre” had prompted former President Barack Obama to suspend the U.S.’s Iraqi refugee program for six months. There was no such terrorist attack.

Conway soon apologized, describing it as an “honest mistake.” She said she meant to say “Bowling Green terrorists” in reference to two Iraqi refugees who were arrested in Bowling Green in 2011 on terrorism-related charges.

The magazine Cosmopolitan reported Monday that Conway cited the non-existent “massacre” in an interview with one of its reporters a few days before she made the claim on MSNBC, on Jan. 29, with additional details.

“He did, it’s a fact,” Conway told Cosmo, arguing that Obama had also banned Iraqi refugees from the U.S. (he did not ban them, but slowed down the resettlement program and revetted some refugees who had been admitted already).

“Why did he do that? He did that for exactly the same reasons,” Conway told Cosmo. “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.”

She cited a made-up “Bowling Green attack” in an interview with TMZ, too.

(h/t Politico)

Kellyanne Conway Blames Refugees For ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ That Never Happened

Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Donald Trump, has come in for criticism and ridicule after blaming two Iraqi refugees for a massacre that never happened.

Conway, the US president’s former campaign manager who has frequently faced the press to defend his controversial moves, cited the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” in an interview in which she backed the travel ban imposed on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Interviewed by Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball programme on Thursday evening, Conway compared the executive order issued by Trump in his first week in the White House to what she described as a six-month ban imposed by his predecessor Barack Obama.

This claim has been debunked by commentators who have pointed out that the 2011 action was a pause on the processing of refugees from Iraq after two Iraqi nationals were arrested over a failed attempt to send money and weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq.

Conway told Matthews: “I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalised and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre.

“Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”

It didn’t get covered, many are now pointing out, because there was no such massacre.

The two Iraqi men arrested in 2011 did live in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and are currently serving life sentences for federal terrorism offences. But there was no massacre, nor were they accused of planning one. The US department of justice, announcing their convictions in 2012, said: “Neither was charged with plotting attacks within the United States.”

Analysis by the Cato Institute of terrorist attacks on US soil between 1975 and 2015 found that foreign nationals from the seven countries targeted by Trump’s travel ban – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia – have killed no Americans.

Following the Conway interview, some social media users pointed out that false rumours about a Halloween massacre had circulated in several universities, including Ohio’s Bowling Green state university, in 1998.

But the likelihood that Conway had Kentucky in mind was bolstered when that state’s senator Rand Paul also made a variation of her false claim. In a separate interview with MSNBC, Paul referred to “the attempted bombing in Bowling Green, where I live”.

Conway had already prompted astonishment by describing comments by White House spokesman Sean Spicer that Trump’s inauguration crowd “was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period” as “alternative facts”.

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving – Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” Conway told NBC last week.

Matthews did not press Conway on her Bowling Green massacre claim in the interview, and she has not yet responded to reports that she misrepresented the events of 2011.

(h/t NBC News)

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