RUTHFULLY YOURS

Holed up in an Orlando nightclub and surrounded by police, Omar Mateen told a hostage negotiator that he was angry about the death of a top Islamic State operative, according to recently released transcripts of their phone conversations during Mateen’s massacre earlier this year.

The new details of the conversations, released by Orlando Police last week, show Mateen had more than a passing interest in Islamic State, counterterrorism experts said. He specifically singled out the death of Abu Wahib, one of the more visible leaders of the terror group, as one of the main motivations for his attack. Abu Wahib was killed in an airstrike in Iraq just weeks before Mateen opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in June in an attack that killed 49 people and wounded 53. Mateen died in a shootout with police.

“Yo, the airstrike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago—That’s what triggered it, okay?” he told the police negotiator, an apparent reference in the transcript to the Islamic State commander.

Abu Wahib, whose real name is Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi, was known as one of the group’s more Internet-savvy leaders, often appearing in propaganda videos.

Only an “avid consumer” of Islamic State propaganda would know when Abu Wahib was killed, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“This isn’t somebody who decided that night he was going to wrap his personal grievances around ISIS,” Mr. Hughes said.

Islamic State supporters in the U.S. more commonly cite as inspirations people like Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al Qaeda recruiter who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. While talking to the 911 operator the night of the Orlando shooting, Mateen also pledged allegiance to Mr. Baghdadi, according to a partial version of transcripts released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in June.

It is unclear when precisely Mateen, 29, was radicalized, though he had aroused the FBI’s suspicion after making claims of ties to terrorists in 2013.

At a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday defended his agency’s handling of probes into Mateen, as well as into Ahmad Khan Rahami. Mr. Rahami is awaiting trial on charges he placed bombs around New York and New Jersey earlier this month that injured 31 people.

Mr. Comey was repeatedly pressed by lawmakers about whether the FBI should have investigated longer before closing its probes into Mateen and Mr. Rahami, which took place well before their deadly attacks. Mr. Comey acknowledged that in the case of Mateen, agents had not searched his online activity for indications of radicalization.

In the series of phone calls with the negotiator during the Orlando massacre, Mateen also railed against U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, saying they were killing women and children.

“What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. You get what I’m saying?” he said.

Mateen’s constant references to U.S. airstrikes are a “basic regurgitation of the propaganda he’s consuming,” said Brig Barker, a retired FBI special agent who focused on counterterrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last night Trump got a C and Hillary got a B. He lost big opportunities to smash her arguments and challenge her integrity when he got on the defensive. But he didn’t erupt or insult.
She was smug and loaded for bear with the help of Lester Holt’s obvious bias.
Remember 2008? She won every debate with Barack Obama on policy, his inexperience, “training on the job” jabs, and his inability to handle the three o’clock A.M. call. She even threw in the race card when she opined that “white working class men” were more likely to vote for her. And she lost the primary and he won the election.
Those who prefer Trump still do and those who prefer Hillary still do. We’ll see what the poll weevils will say.

When Obama assumed office in 2009, there were high hopes that the first African American president with bi-racial parents would be able to bridge the racial divide and foster unity in the country. Those hopes were soon dashed. Nearly eight years later, the nation is more polarized than ever, as devastating race riots grip large metropolitan cities with alarming frequency.

Instead of offering hope, Obama gave us demagoguery. Instead of fostering unity he stoked and encouraged divisiveness. Instead of providing concrete solutions, he issued speeches laced with empty rhetoric and platitudes. Instead of calming the nation in times of crisis, he engaged in race baiting.

The first test of Obama’s seriousness in addressing race relations came just six months after being sworn in. Police officers in Cambridge Massachusetts received a call of a possible burglary in progress and responded. When arriving at the scene, they found Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to force his way into his house through a malfunctioning door. The police were unfamiliar with his identity and asked for identification to establish residency. Gates instantly became irate, indignant and uncooperative. It went downhill from there. Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, though the charges were later dropped.

An event that was essentially a misunderstanding and a local matter was suddenly thrust into the spotlight and propelled to the national stage. You see, Gates, an African American, cried racism. He also happened to be pals with Obama. Obama could have told Gates to work things out with the police or file a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board if he felt slighted. Instead, Obama stoked the flames of hate by publicly siding with Gates, claiming the police “acted stupidly.”

Before ascertaining the facts, Obama rushed to judgment and immediately condemned those entrusted with safeguarding our security. His asinine response would set the administration’s tone for the next seven years. Obama later backtracked on his rush to judgment and offered the arresting police officer, Sgt. James Crowley, a beer but the damage had already been done. The only thing that the African American community took away from the encounter was that the police acted “stupidly,” thus reinforcing preexisting negative perceptions so prevalent within that community.

There is no doubt that some level of tension exists between various police departments and members of the African American community but the president has a responsibility to calm frayed nerves and foster understanding and outreach. Instead, Obama has done the opposite. Race-baiting, tax cheats and serial liars like Al Sharpton are frequent guests of the White House. According to official records, Sharpton visited the White House on more than 100 occasions and that number excludes official administration visits to him.

Murders in the U.S. jumped 10.8% in 2015, according to figures released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation—a sharp increase that could fuel concerns that the nation’s two-decade trend of falling crime may be ending.

The figures had been expected to rise, after preliminary data released earlier this year indicated violent crime and murders were climbing. But the double-digit increase in murders dwarfed any of the past 20 years, in which the biggest one-year jump was 3.7% in 2005.

In 2014, the FBI recorded violent crimes of all types narrowly falling, by 0.2%. In 2015, the number of violent crimes rose 3.9%, though the number of property crimes fell 2.6%, the FBI said.

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said a key driver of the jump in murders may be increasing distrust of police in major cities where controversial officer shootings of African-American residents have led to protests.

Members of minority and poor communities may be more reluctant to talk to police and help them solve crimes, part of the “Ferguson effect”—a term used by law-enforcement officials referring to the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed, black 18-year-old man in Ferguson, Mo., by a policeman in 2014.

Some law-enforcement officials, including FBI Director James Comey, have said that since the Ferguson shooting and protests, some officers may be more reluctant to get out of their patrol cars and engage in the kind of difficult work that reduces street crime, out of fear they may be videotaped and criticized publicly.

“This rise is concentrated in certain large cities where police-community tensions have been notable,’’ said Mr. Rosenfeld, citing Cleveland, Baltimore, and St. Louis as examples. The increase isn’t spread evenly around America, he pointed out, but centered on big cities with large black populations.

In all, there were 15,696 instances of murder and nonnegligence manslaughter in the U.S. last year, the FBI said.

The anaphylactic political shock over EpiPen prices continues, and last week a House committee dragged in the company CEO. But some outrage should land on the Food and Drug Administration, which won’t approve a generic stinger that would end Mylan’s monopoly power. Instead, the agency is finishing regulation that will restrict competition precisely as patients are demanding cheaper medicines.

The FDA will next year complete a new rule on labeling generic drugs, which are chemically no different from brand-name versions but sell at an average 80% discount. One reason generics are so much cheaper is that the drugs are approved under an expedited FDA process and bear identical labels to branded equivalents—side effects and so on. The FDA would allow generic producers to alter their own labels to include “up-to-date” safety risks, as the agency puts it.

That sounds innocuous, but here’s the fine print: Generic producers would be exposed to a crush of new lawsuits. The Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that generic drug makers are shielded from torts that accuse a company of failing to warn consumers of risks. The reason for the dispensation is that generic producers are not at liberty to tweak their labels. The FDA’s rule would skirt that precedent, and the law: The 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act requires branded and generic drugs to be identical “in all respects—including labeling,” to borrow from a 2014 letter from Congress to the FDA.

Unleashing the trial lawyers would increase generics spending by $5.6 billion in 2017, and the figure reaches $8.6 billion in 2024, according to a report by Alex Brill of Matrix Global Advisors. Consumers will pay for legal fees and settlements through higher drug prices. Small companies may not be able to absorb the expense. Even large firms will suffer because he industry sells its generic products near marginal cost. The result is likely to be less of the competition that drives down prices: A patient pays a mere 20% of the brand-name cost when eight generic firms are battling for market share, an FDA analysis found.