According to the Telegraph newspaper, "Omar Mateen, the Orlando gunman, told his victims the attack was revenge for American bombing of Afghanistan, but allowed black Americans to be released because 'they have suffered enough.'"

The person who recounted what Mateen said is 20-year-old Patience Carter. According to theTelegraph article, she heard Mateen telling police on the phone that he was pledging allegiance to Isil and saying the attacks were in retaliation for America's bombing of Afghanistan."

So, why do so many Americans, especially the US mainstream press, do everything they can to avoid confronting that simple fact — that Mateen killed those people in retaliation for America's bombing of Afghanistan?

Indeed, why have they done the same thing with respect to every other anti-American terrorist attack since 1993?

Beginning with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and continuing with the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the US Embassies in East Africa, the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon attack, the Ft. Hood attack, the San Bernardino attack, and others, the terrorists have made it clear that they are retaliating for the death and destruction that the US government has wreaked on people in the Middle East or Afghanistan, including countless people of the Muslim faith.

Nonetheless, so many Americans, especially the US mainstream press, do everything they can to avoid confronting that basic fact — that all the Americans who died in those attacks died at the hands of terrorists who were retaliating for what the US government had done to people over there.

Why?

People will point to the fact that the terrorists are religious fanatics. They'll point to sections in the Koran that appear to condone violence. They'll point to the notion that Muslims have been waging a centuries-long war to establish a world-wide caliphate.

But they will scrupulously avoid confronting the fact that those religious fanatics have killed Americans in retaliation for the people the US national-security state has been killing over there on a continuous basis for the last 25 years — and before the first terrorist attack was committed on US soil.

It seems to me that the most likely reason for this phenomenon is the fact that people are to suggest that the US government was the one that started the killing game. They're scared that if they go down that road, they'll realize that there is a choice to be made: Continue the US killing of people over there, which will mean more retaliatory terrorism here at home, or stop killing people over there, which will mean no more retaliatory terrorism here at home.

Avoiding the retaliation issue enables people to avoid having to face that choice. By simply focusing on such things as Islam, the Koran, radical Muslims, regular Muslims, and the supposed Islamic quest for a worldwide caliphate, people think that they can, in good conscience, continue supporting the Pentagon, the CIA, and the troops as they continue to kill and injure more people over there while blocking out of their minds that that choice comes with some very adverse consequences.

Keep in mind that this is not a chicken-and-the-egg problem. When the terrorists struck on 9/11, US officials and the mainstream press took the position that the terrorists started the killing with their terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thus, in their minds the US national-security establishment was justified in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. The terrorists were considered the aggressors and the United States the defender.

Not so, however. In fact, the 9/11 terrorists made it very clear that they were retaliating for the massive number of people who the US war machine had already killed in the Middle East prior to 9/11, specifically through the Persian Gulf War intervention, in which the US war machine killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, followed by the brutal sanctions on Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, followed by UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright's infamous declaration that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions was worth it, followed by the illegal no-fly zones over Iraq, which killed more people, including children.

Ever since 9/11, both sides — the US side and the terrorist side — have been playing a dance of death with each other, with the terrorist side saying that it's retaliating for the deaths the US national-security state is wreaking in the Middle East and Afghanistan and the US side saying that it's killing terrorists before they can come to the United States and commit terrorist strikes.