Just stumbled onto this. It is supposedly from Newsweek. Take it for what it's worth.
“If ISIS Was Behind Las Vegas Shooting, There’s a Terrifying Reason It Won’t Prove It Yet,” by Tom O’Connor,
Newsweek, October 9, 2017 (thanks to David):
Authorities continue to doubt that the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) was behind last week’s massacre in Las Vegas, despite the jihadists’ persistent claims the shooter acted on their behalf. According to one leading expert’s analysis, however, the conflicting narratives might be playing straight into ISIS’s hands.
Despite digging deep into Stephen Paddock’s background, investigators have struggled to understand what drove the 64-year-old man, who described himself as a “
professional gambler,” to slaughter 58 people and injure hundreds more when he opened fire on crowds attending a country music concert from his 32nd-floor hotel room in Las Vegas. Nothing so far has reportedly led them to believe ISIS’s claim that Paddock converted to Islam and acted as “a soldier” of the group’s self-styled caliphate, leaving observers wondering why the global militant group would risk making such an outlandish, intentionally false allegation.
The answer could lie in a larger plot to exploit the U.S.’s already eroding trust in its leadership.
“If Islamic State did indeed cultivate Paddock, as it has claimed was the case, the group surely has some evidence of its engagements with him. If it does, it may be the case the group is waiting on FBI and other agencies to dismiss its claim of responsibility for the Las Vegas attack before posting contradictory evidence online for the world to see,” terrorism analyst Michael S. Smith II tells
Newsweek.
“Islamic State has been very focused on undermining confidence among civilians in the West that their technologically-superior governments are competent managers of our collective security,” he adds….
While Las Vegas’ Sheriff Joe Lombardo told reporters Monday that police “have no intelligence or evidence the suspect was linked to any terrorist groups or radical ideologies,” Smith warns that ISIS’s proven ability to avoid detection helps it send potential recruits a clear message: “Intelligence agencies in the West are not actually omniscient.”
The reality of this message has been demonstrated more than once before, with deadly consequences. Months prior to the series of ISIS-orchestrated gun and bomb attacks that killed 130 people in November 2015 in Paris, the 27-year-old “mastermind,” Abdelhamid Abaaoud, bragged about evading arrest, despite traveling as a known affiliate of the group, during
an interview with ISIS magazine Dabiq.
Before August’s dual van-ramming and stabbing attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils that killed 16, the CIA had reportedly warned Spanish authorities of an ISIS-related threat specifically on Barcelona’s popular Las Ramblas, where 15 people were killed. Elsewhere in Europe, Morocco-born Youssef Zaghba, one of the men behind June’s deadly vehicular ramming and stabbing attacks that killed 8 people in London, told authorities “
I’m going to be a terrorist” after being stopped in an Italian airport.
...
