Let’s just look at what we already know about the brothers who are suspects in the bombing:
They are being portrayed as militant Muslim jihadists.
The older brother, Tamerlan, was named after a great Islamic warrior.
Their mother, though she insists that her children were innocent, has a criminal record as a shoplifter.
They come from a known breeding ground for Islamic extremists.
The older brother has domestic violence charges on his record, yet the system failed to deport him.
Both had very questionable “social networking” profiles and activity and surprisingly enough, their profiles were left up for all to see. As of the last time I checked these accounts had still not been disabled.
The FBI was warned about the older brother and interviewed him but concluded that he was no threat.
There is a plethora of information out there that makes it look like this could have been avoided if the authorities had done their jobs, and that may be the real story here.
Business Insider published an article Friday titled The FBI Needs To Explain Why It Failed To Monitor Boston Bombing Suspect Despite A Clear Warning. Below is an excerpt from that article:
“The foreign government told the FBI that Tsarnaev had become ‘a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer and that he had changed drastically … as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.’
In response to this warning, the FBI says it checked databases and interviewed Tsarnaev and other family members in the summer of 2011 but found no evidence of ‘terrorism activity.’
Then the FBI says it ‘requested more information’ about Tsarnaev from the foreign government but never received it.
Less than two years later, Tsarnaev is suspected of masterminding a successful terrorist attack on the city of Boston that killed three people and injured nearly 200.
So the FBI has some questions to answer.
Namely:
Given the explicit warning, why didn’t the FBI continue to monitor Tsarnaev?
Why didn’t the FBI follow up with the foreign government when it didn’t get the additional information it requested?
How common is a warning from a foreign government about a specific person like this? Does the FBI get thousands of them?
What made the FBI effectively clear Tsarnaev — and what might the FBI change to avoid making this mistake again?
Will the FBI conduct a full investigation into what happened?”
Where has DHS been in all of this?