Surprise, surprise U.S. Homeland Security officials missed a number
of opportunities to stop the Chechen terrorist who carried out the
Boston Marathon bombings because they failed to properly investigate,
coordinate and communicate, according to a new congressional report.
A decade ago we heard a similar version of this involving the worst
terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), the agency responsible for protecting the United States against
foreign threats, also missed many opportunities to stop the 9/11
hijackers and failed to uncover important intelligence about the Islamic
terrorists that murdered thousands of innocent Americans. All these
years later it seems that little has changed in the U.S. intelligence
community.
It’s as if the Three Stooges are in charge of national security only
it’s the monstrous umbrella agency—the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS)—created after 9/11 to protect the country from another terrorist
attack. It turns out that two DHS agencies, the FBI and Customs and
Border Protection (CBP), could have intercepted Boston Marathon bomber
Tamerlan Tsarnaev if they had done their job! The brutal details are
laid out in the lengthy report that blasts federal officials for their
failures.
Years before the 2013 marathon bombing Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old
terrorist who was eventually killed in a wild shootout with police, was
under investigation by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).
Russian authorities actually notified the FBI in 2011 to express concern
that Tsarnaev had become radicalized and that he might return to Russia
to join extremist groups. Tsarnaev appeared on a federal hot list of
potential terrorists yet was not detained when alerts were triggered.
Despite the alarms, congressional investigators found that CBP failed
to stop Tsarnaev at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York in 2012 even
though an advisory made his detention “mandatory.” The warnings had been
triggered when Tsarnaev booked roundtrip air travel to Russia, but—get
this—CBP was not reviewing all of the “high-interest” subjects on the
daily advisories! “While it is impossible to say with certainty that
such a second look would have prevented the bombings, it is equally
impossible to say with certainty it could not have,” says the report,
which was released this week by the House Homeland Security Committee.
Judicial Watch exposed another interesting tidbit about Tsarnaev a few months after the bombings; the Obama administration could have deported him
years before he detonated bombs at a major sporting event over a
criminal arrest. In 2009 Tsarnaev was nabbed for domestic violence and,
though he was a legal U.S. resident, federal authorities could have
removed him from the country but evidently didn’t feel he represented a
big enough threat. The House report doesn’t mention the case, but it
points out plenty of other mishaps by the feds.
Besides dropping the ball on Tsarnaev, the committee chastises DHS
agencies for not sharing information even though they supposedly have
the same mission of protecting the country. “There were opportunities in
which greater sharing of information might have altered the course of
events,” the report says, adding that “such failures must not be allowed
to persist.” The FBI must also improve information sharing about
terrorists with local police, according to the report. Lack of
information sharing between federal agencies is an issue that has come
up many times over the years.
(Click link below to read more)
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- Judy Chaffee
- This site is the inspiration of a former reporter/photographer for one of New England's largest daily newspapers and for various magazines. The intent is to direct readers to interesting political articles, and we urge you to visit the source sites. Any comments may be noted on site or directed to KarisChaf at gmail.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
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