The Agony of Hindsight
"Why didn't they involve the local law enforcers who could have stayed on the case and picked up signals from some of the students who interacted with them, from the people in the mosque.
"In this case, aggravatingly, you have two of our great homeland security agencies that didn't involve before the event the local and state authorities that could have helped us prevent the attack."
U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman
Another Congressional hearing. From the agony of hearing of the State Department's failure to adequately respond to military-support appeals from the Libyan consulate in Benghazi when a terrorist attack was launched which the administration attempted to portray as a protest over a film that offended Muslims which ended in a triumph for evil and a shaming for an inept State functionaries at the highest level, another one is launched to parse the intelligence failures that led to the Boston Marathon bombings.
Russian security alerts the FBI and then the CIA about their suspicions relating to an ethnic Chechen family posing a possible threat to Russia, and living in the United States as landed immigrants, in Boston. The FBI performs a cursory check, failing to alert local Boston police, then closes the file having found nothing incriminating. On the other hand there are four city police representatives on a federal terrorism task force which interfaces with the FBI.
And they are aware that FBI records are open to them for scrutiny at any time, should they wish to look at what's there, to determine whether or not there might exist some matter that could be of potential concern to them. Boston Commissioner of Police Ed Davis felt secure in the feeling that even if the FBI had alerted the Boston Police of the Tsarnaev family's purported ties to terrorist groups, they might not have unveiled anything suspicious on their own accord.
"That's very hard to say. We would certainly look at the information, we would certainly talk to the individual. From the information I've received, the FBI did that, and they closed the case out. I can't say that I would have come to a different conclusion based upon the information that was known at that particular time."
And nor did the Department of Homeland Security give the Boston Police a heads-up when it investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev's six-month trip to Russia. Where he most surely was in contact with a distant cousin known to have been heavily involved with terrorism, and where he undertook holy jihadist martyrdom training himself.
That, after all, is the purpose of Joint Terrorism Task Forces that operate in conjunction with the FBI in major American cities. To bring federal, state and local security officials together for information sharing.
Good plan in theory.
Labels: Defence, Security, Terrorism, United States
posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 10, 2013
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