Kellyanne Conway claimed she “misspoke” when she referred to a “Bowling Green massacre” that never happened. So come on, media meanies, lay off her! This one was an innocent mistake, even if she is a habitual liar. Except it turns out she misspoke that exact way twice:
"He did [call for a temporary ban on Iraqi refugees], it’s a fact," she said of Obama. "Why did he do that? He did that for exactly the same reasons. 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."
Conway was referencing the case of two Iraqi men, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan, who entered the U.S. under the guise of refugees in 2009 and were arrested in 2011 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on charges related to terrorism. But when Cosmopolitan.com reached out to the FBI to verify details of Conway’s account, a spokesman wrote in an email that “a couple of your facts seem incorrect” and provided a link to a Justice Department press release, which, he said, “outlines all the public information and timeline.”
What details? Basically all of them. The two men in question were radicalized before coming to the United States. They did not travel back to the Middle East after arriving here, according to records of the case. Obama did not ban Iraqi refugees, though he had tens of thousands of them rescreened and temporarily toughened the visa process.
And, of course, describing things the men did in Iraq as “the Bowling Green massacre” is calculated to frighten Americans by suggesting that Iraqis are coming to the U.S. and massacring people. These don’t have to have been good guys for this to be yet another Kellyanne Conway lie.