Frank Gaffney: Too Early to Say Las Vegas Attack Had No Connection to International Terrorism

Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the Las Vegas shooting and the continuing mystery around killer Stephen Paddock’s motives.

“At the very time we’re being told we don’t know what the motivations of this individual might be, it’s not terrorism,” Gaffney observed. “I don’t know how it can be both. Maybe we don’t know his motivation to have been in the service of the Islamic State, but if it were, then it might well be terrorism or at least jihadism.”

Addressing reports that Paddock wired $100,000 to the Philippines and sent his girlfriend there shortly before launching his deadly rampage, Gaffney noted it has an “ongoing crisis with Muslim minorities going back to the 19th Century.” He mentioned “interesting but explored connections to the Philippines with the guys who blew up the Murrow building in Oklahoma City.”

“We’ve had plots to blow up U.S. airplanes out of the Philippines,” he continued. “Al-Qaeda, the precursor to and organization that spawned the Islamic State, we’ve got other sharia supremacists in that country operating in and from it. That connection has to be exhaustively explored. I’m told that the girlfriend is now in the FBI’s custody back here in the United States, so I trust we’ll be learning more about it.”

Gaffney stressed that it was inappropriate for the government to declare the Las Vegas attack had nothing to do with international terrorism when it does not yet appear such connections can be definitively ruled out.

“I understand that before this attack, the Islamic State – which has of course been in extremis back in its home bases, thanks to U.S.-led assaults there – has been putting out the word that they are going to attack us at home, and that they’re going to be going after places where large numbers of us are gathered,” he said.

“Is that exactly the profile of this episode? Well, it certainly looks like it, doesn’t it? So if that, in fact, is true it’s another suggestion that what we’re dealing with does have a connection to this sharia supremacist agenda,” he contended.

“Some of these threats, some of these attacks, are so difficult to protect against that one of the things we’ve just got to be doing a better job of is triage, if you will, against these various possible perpetrators,” Gaffney urged.

“I worry every day, as I think Alex you do at Breitbart, about mosques in America where we know people are being encouraged to engage in jihad against this country. Is that happening in this instance? I’m not saying that. I don’t know. But to become more proactive in trying to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future, whether it’s instigated by ISIS or the Muslim Brotherhood or others, we’ve got to be looking at places where problems are being incubated, and that would include an awful lot of mosques in this country,” he said.