Not Your Call

Well, after a freakout from the right wing, the DOJ has agreed to release the full transcripts from the Orlando shooter during his rampage:

The Orlando killer pledged allegiance to the Islamic State while in the midst of murdering 49 people at a gay nightclub last weekend. But for a few hours Monday, we couldn’t read that part of Omar Mateen’s phone conversations with dispatchers and police because the FBI took it out of transcripts of 911 calls it released.

To Republicans, the redacted transcripts were yet another example of how the Obama administration is mishandling this whole war on terror by ducking every opportunity to avoid talking about the real issues behind it — and specifically, Islam.

………

The pressure worked. The FBI reversed course Monday afternoon and released the redacted parts of the transcript in which Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, saying the political debate over the redaction had become a distraction.

It’s more than that, it’s public records, and the Department of Justice wanted to suppress these records because they did not approve of that message:

[FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ron] Hopper Hopper said authorities also did not want to “give credence to individuals who have done terrorist acts in the past.”

“We’re not going to propagate their violent rhetoric,” he said.

Mr. Hopper, that decision is is not your call, nor should it be.

Your job is not to determine what news is available to the general public.

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