(crossposted at MeanRachel.com, Burnt Orange Report & The McCaul Retort)
A politician using his office to exploit Americans' fears about homeland security, radical Islam, and foreign intelligence. Sound familiar? We're not talking about George W. Bush this time, but instead Republican Congressman Michael McCaul. Since early July, McCaul has been misleading Americans about two young Pakistani-American boys who McCaul claimed were being "held in there against their will" at a international madrassa school, which McCaul says has Taliban ties in this FOX interview.
However, as CNN reported Sunday night, the media-hype surrounding McCaul's messianic quest to bring these children home is essentially just that: overblown hype about two children who were in fact not being held against their will and not being trained at a radical Islamic school at all.
Click here for the CNN video report on the McCaul expose.
After hearing about the two Atlanta children in a 2008 documentary called Karachi Kids, McCaul, who sees everything through red-threat-level colored glasses, immediately began exploiting homeland security fears in the name of the two children, as evidenced in this article from theHouston Chronicle on McCaul's website. He refers to schools like the one the boys were at as "jihadist seminaries" and claims that they are "creating a new breed of terrorist." However, in his haste to turn this into an election-year fist-bump, McCaul failed to check with his own State Department, the parents of the children or to do any sort of his own research to find out what the situation at the international school was.
As recently as Wednesday, the Austin American Statesman's Gardner Selby had a mention of the Pakistani-American boys being "released." When McCaul's spokesman Geoff Bailey found himself grasping for answers as to why McCaul was MIA on July 4th weekend in his own district, he used the two children as a political pawn in explaining how McCaul has shown "proven leadership." Communications director Mike Rosen attempted to explain further:
Rosen said McCaul’s personal request to Pakistan’s president that the two boys be released "absolutely" prompted their freedom.
"He’s very much responsible for those boys being home today," Rosen said.
It makes one wonder that since these children were not being held against their will to begin with, what exactly did McCaul do to catalyze their so-called freedom? Additionally, also taking into account that these children were not being held against their will, what sort of government has the right to bring them back from another country? It sounds as though they've lost more of their freedom in McCaul's hands being brought home -- collateral damage, and nothing more, in McCaul's exploitation of American children and misinformation to American citizens.