Kellyanne Conway justifies Donald Trump's travel ban by referring to what she calls the "Bowling Greene Massacre." It's true that there's a city in Kentucky called Bowling Green. But there never was any massacre. Claire Phipps explains:
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 fictional “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.
It's true that two Iraqi men where arrested in Bowling Green on weapons charges. But Conway is peddling her own version of "alternative facts:"
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.”
The Cato Institute pointed out that:
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.
There are lies and damned lies. And then there's Kellyanne Conway.
Image: The Guardian
