Pair this up with Gen. Dempsey’s phone call to Terry Jones on Wednesday. If this report is correct, then what, exactly, is the status of free speech in America?
The US prosecutor-general said on Wednesday that four people were being questioned after Tuesday’s events.
Nine Coptic Egyptian-Americans were also put on an airport watch list. They are believed to have contributed to the production of the anti-Islam film that led to the embassy protest.
The US doesn’t have a “prosecutor-general.” We have an attorney general, and a lousy one at that, but there’s been no stir so far from the DOJ that I’m aware of to question anyone connected to the film. But then again, the US press might simply choose not to report such a story if it’s happening.
Frankly, it would not be out of character for this administration. But since the report came from Al Jazeera, take it with a pound of salt.
Update: The feds really have been hunting for the filmmaker.
Federal authorities have identified a southern California man once convicted of financial crimes as the key figure behind the anti-Muslim film that ignited mob violence against U.S. embassies across the Mideast, a U.S. law enforcement official said Thursday.
Attorney General Eric Holder said that Justice Department officials had opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other diplomats killed during an attack on the American mission in Benghazi. It was not immediately clear whether authorities were focusing on the California filmmaker as part of that probe.
A federal law enforcement official said Thursday that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, was the man behind “Innocence of Muslims,” a film denigrating Islam and the Prophet Muhammad that sparked protests earlier in the week in Egypt and Libya and now in Yemen. U.S. authorities are investigating whether the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya came during a terrorist attack.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation…
One word: Chilling.
Roger’s theory is sounding more credible as this stuff comes out. This is starting to look a lot like a “Reichstag fire” in prelude to a massive pogrom against the Copts.
I suspect that these “Copts” were either part of, or were used by, the Jihadis behind this whole production. This has nothing to do with Free Speech. The whole thing is an operation. The Islamists didn’t just stumble across this obscure You Tube. They produced it and distributed it with arabic subtitles. The people who actually worked on it likely did not know why the video was actually made. One look can tell you it was not for an American audience but low level crap like that works just fine in the ME.
Snork, I think the target is exactly whom we are seeing, not the Copts. If that were the case they would have targeted the Copts in Egypt, not the US embasy. The Egyptian who produced the film posed as a Jewish real estate developer.
Amazing how the State of California could not identify a licensed agent or developer named “Sam Bacile”. Or how his cell phone has the same home address as a certain Egyptian with a mile long rap sheet of financial fraud crimes.
I suspect that, at the end of the day and assuming our crack journalistic profession makes it that far, we will find exactly zero “Copts” involved in this cinematic dreck.
– and Inspector-general exist in countries with commissars.
I’m impressed by the media’s willingness to blame Copts whenever possible, and to repeat the blame and specifically the word ‘Copts.’ Contrast that with their unwillingness to blame Muslims for their attacks on our embassies or any other actual actions.
On this site we often talk about how Jews do not seem to care about Israel but I am shocked how little Christians seem to care about other Christians. As Jews become more religiously aware they care far more about the fate of the Holy Land yet I do not see a similar cause among religious Christians.
If you are a Copt you are facing more of a Kristallnacht type situation than Jews are. You are marooned within a hostile people and government infatuated with a vicious ideology. Who is standing up to them? Who is saying that the attacks on the embassy are concurrent with attacks on religious minorities in these countries? Who is the Christian leader obsessed (and one should be obsessed) with saving Christian lives? As a Jew it is not my job. They are not my co-religionist though my sympathies go out to them. Christians are blessed with great resources and why they are not rallying I do not know.
“They produced it and distributed it with arabic subtitles.” Not with subtitles, it was dubbed. At least if it were subtitled in Arabic, people could see how bits of the English dialogue had been dubbed in. It was bad enough that the cast, who were saying lines about ‘George’, had them replaced with references to ‘Mohammed’ – anyone seeing the version dubbed in Arabic would assume that it was a direct translation of what the cast originally said.