Kellyanne Conway previously brought up the fictitious "Bowling Green massacre" to justify Trump's Muslim ban

Turns out that Conway has referred to a so-called "Bowling Green massacre" more than once

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published February 6, 2017 4:08PM (EST)

 (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Kellyanne Conway, advisor to President Trump, said last week that she "misspoke one word" when claiming that Muslim terrorists had perpetrated a massacre in Bowling Green, Kentucky — a massacre that never happened — and the media had not reported on it.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the first time she made that bogus assertion.

During a phone interview conducted with Cosmopolitan on Jan. 29, Conway wrongly claimed that President Obama had called for a "ban on Iraqi refugees" (he only increased the number of background checks) and argued 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."

Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan were arrested in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2011 for "using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against U.S. soldiers in Iraq" as well as trying "to send weapons and money to al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) for the purpose of killing U.S. soldiers" fighting overseas.

There is no evidence that they ever took any American lives on American soil.

Conway's dishonest claim about a massacre in Bowling Green, Kentucky first attracted attention when she made it on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on Thursday night.

"I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a 6-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre," Conway told Matthews. "It didn’t get covered."

 


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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