I have watched the interview Univision's Maria Elena Salinas did with a man "Miguel" who had a sexual and personal relationship with Omar Mateen. Considering the content of the interview, it has which has gotten surprisingly little play. If it is true then the murder and maiming at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando is a lot more about the access of guns to potentially violent messed up and mentally ill people than ISIS or international terrorism.
The man, "Miguel" wanted his name, appearance and voice disguised because he fears for his safety, which is entirely reasonable. He has also, voluntarily, told what he knows to the FBI. I can't see any reason for him to make it up.
Miguel said that he had a two-month sexual relationship with Mateen and that Mateen had had sexual relationships with other men. He mentions that Mateen advertised on gay hook-up aps, he met him through Grindr but he says he knew Mateen had also looked for men to have sex with on two other aps. Most significantly he said that Mateen was involved in a sexual three-some with two Puerto Rican men, one of whom, later, revealed that he was HIV-positive. Apparently Mateen discussed that with Miguel. Miguel speculates that Mateen specifically targeted Pulse on Latin night in an act of revenge against gay Puerto Ricans. It was why Miguel said he doesn't believe terrorism had anything to do with it. From the transcript:
Miguel: To tell you the truth, after we had the conversation about the two Puerto Rican[s] who he have the threesome and then one of the Puerto Ricans told him ‘I’m HIV positive and I’m sorry I don’t say nothing’. Plus, all the rejections he got. I believe, I really think all his anger – he [hated] gay Puerto Ricans for all the bad thing[s] they [did] to him. This will sound bad and I know a lot of people going to get a lot of pain for what I’m going to say. But I believe this crazy horrible thing he did – that was a revenge.
MES: You think this was not terrorism.
Miguel: Not at all. Like I told to the FBI if you are a terrorist and you really wanna kill a lot of people you don’t go to Pulse. Pulse is nothing compared to Parliament. Parliament is a disco, a hotel and a bar. And [a lot of people go there].
He also says that Mateen was deeply conflicted about his sexual identity and, especially, the attitude of his own father about it. He said it was his father who forced Mateen to get married. From what Mateen's first wife has said about him, that she suspected he was gay and mentally ill and violent towards her, Miguel's narrative about Mateen having married to please his father is a reasonable suspicion.
If this is true then the use to which Omar Mateens' ethnic and religious background are being put by Republicanfascists in politics and in the media is a total distortion of what happened for the basest of political purposes. If Miguel is right then there are a number of things to be learned from it but the biggest is that it is insane to allow people to buy automatic weapons in civilian life, that the gun industry, the gun nuts and their political and judicial servants have created the conditions where a screwed up man can kill large numbers of people in a short time - that's what automatic weapons were invented to do, to kill lots of people in a short amount of time. And if you want to see what the most screwed up part of this whole, horrible story is, that's it. Omar Mateen may have been a seriously screwed up guy, he might have been full of hate and - according to a man who apparently knew him and talked to him - motivated by a desire for revenge against a specific identity of people, but it was the Supreme Court justices, the Republican politicians - and a handful of Democrats and independents, who kow towed to the interests of the gun industry and the NRA who put the gun into his hand which allowed him to commit the act he committed. If he had a knife or a plain old fashioned six shooter it's certain the body count would have been lower.
That the gay club where Miguel met Mateen was called the Parliament has a certain irony to it. It is too bad it wasn't called "the Senate" or The Congress or the Supreme Court because that's where the people who armed him gather to do far worse than anyone else ever did to Mateen. They are the ones who armed Omar Mateen and gave him the power to do what he did with his screwed up mind and his messed up life.
I don't think anything short of someone going into the Congress like Mateen did or the Supreme Court or some gathering of the Republicanfascist elite would change what they have done. The only way we can change that is by removing the fascists from the government and making laws that take automatic weapons out of the civilian population and really crack down on the gun industry which will find some way to sell their killing machines on the black market. The Roberts and Rehnquist Courts are the major source of this depravity, as Samantha Bee's show pointed out, even Warren Berger said that the gun industry was the source of the lie that gun control was unconstitutional, a position which became the standard one in the Republican Party and among Republican judges and Justices. The Supreme Court majority has made gun industry lies and propaganda the law of the land. Even Ronald Reagan got that much of it, after he got shot.
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