Missteps by Feds Exposed on Boston Marathon Bombings

Two weeks into the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings, here is what we know – or at least what we think we know:  The terrorist attack was perpetrated by Chechen national Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dhokhar.  Tamerlan was killed during a gun battle with police, while Dhokhar lies in a hospital bed recovering from wounds sustained during a dramatic manhunt last week. Three people were killed during the blast and nearly 200 others wounded.  Many victims are now without limbs. One police officer was shot and killed on the campus of MIT by the terrorists.

We know both brothers self-identified as Muslims, and we know both were “radicalized” at some point over the last few years.

And we also know, as reported on our Corruption Chronicles blog, that Tamerlan could have been deported after a 2009 domestic violence arrest.

As to the rest of the story, there is much we don’t yet know for certain regarding how these brothers fit into the overall terrorist network.

But we are beginning to get a disturbing read on the depth of the U.S. national security failures that allowed the attacks to happen in the first place, a subject considered by a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing this week.  The narrative is emerging of willful blindness by Obama administration agencies to the warning signs leading up to this attack:

• The Boston Globe notes that Russian authorities alerted the U.S. government not once but “multiple times” over their concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, “including a second time nearly a year after he was first interviewed by FBI agents in Boston.”

• Members of Congress were “particularly concerned that U.S. Customs generated an alert when Tamerlan Tsarnaev left for Russia in 2012 but no one was aware when he returned and he was not re-interviewed,” Reuters reports.

• According to The Washington Post, the CIA had its suspicions more than a year before the bombings and urged action: “The CIA pushed to have one of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers placed on a U.S. counterterrorism watch list more than a year before the attacks, U.S. officials said Wednesday…The disclosure of the CIA’s involvement suggests that the U.S. government may have had more reason than it has previously acknowledged to scrutinize Tsarnaev in the months leading up to the bombings in Boston. It also raises questions why U.S. authorities didn’t flag his return to the United States and investigate him further after a seven-month trip he took to Russia last year.”

Reuters also further noted that some of the accusations of “information hoarding” by intelligence agencies are cropping up again: “Some on Capitol Hill questioned whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other U.S. security agencies failed to share information about suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, even after reforms enacted to prevent information-hoarding following the September 11 hijacked plane attacks 12 years ago.”

Judicial Watch offers details and analysis on this issue.  We posted another Corruption Chronicles story highlighting documents dating from 1998 in that detail how Chechen terrorists Chechen terrorists use cell phones to detonate backpack bombs. 

Could intelligence agencies have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings?  We sure can’t rule that out.

Yahoo reported that the surviving terrorist, Dhokhar, “told investigators from his hospital bed that the brothers grew radical from anti-U.S. material on the internet and acted without assistance from any foreign or domestic militant groups.”

So we’re supposed to believe the word of a terrorist? Not a chance, says Rep. Peter King: “That basically seems to be the story, but I don’t see how we can accept that,” King told CNN.

Authorities must investigate every shred of evidence and pursue every lead until they determine who else, if anyone, was involved in this terrorist attack on the United States.  But the Obama administration is blaming a federal magistrate for prematurely Mirandizing Dhokhar, and he has clammed up.  (The Obama administration had infamously “Mirandized” the would-be Christmas bomber.)

Even before 9/11, JW launched a comprehensive investigation into terrorist networks, including the so-called moderate Muslim groups that fund acts of terror, and the rampant political correctness inside federal agencies that keep federal investigators blind to the “enemy within.”  You may be surprised to know, as The Washington Examiner editorializes, that:

It is quite possible, though, the FBI agents who interviewed Tsarnaev on both occasions failed to understand what they saw and heard because that’s what they were trained to do. As The Washington Examiner‘s Mark Flatten reported last year, FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel. Three of the panel members were Muslim advocates from outside the FBI, which still refuses to make public their identities. Nearly 900 pages were removed from the manuals as a result of that review. Several congressmen were allowed to review the removed materials in 2012, on condition that they not disclose what they read to their staffs, the media, or the general public.

Judicial Watch is actively litigating and investigating this terrorist-front-inspired bowdlerization of our national security establishment’s counter-terrorism training materials.