In testimony before the Senate on Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that while DHS knew about Boston bomber suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveling to Russia last year, but didn’t know anything about his return or thereafter. After Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) asked Napolitano whether a spelling error had caused DHS to miss Tsarnaev’s return from Russia, Napolitano responded by stating that his departure was known by authorities in January 2012. “The system pinged when he was leaving the United States,” she said. “By the time he returned,” she added, “all investigations had been closed.”
Eli Lake of the Daily Beast reports that concerns about Tsarnaev stemmed from the possibility that he might commit acts of terror against Russia with regard to Chechnya, not acts of terror against the United States. This may be evidence that the administration continues to treat the threat of Islamist terror as a regional rather than a global issue.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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