Any time there is an intelligence failure the different intelligence agencies quickly blame each other in hopes of avoiding scrutiny. Let the blame game begin. The Central Intelligence Agency is now claiming they pushed to have Tamerlan Tsarnaev added to a terrorism watch list a year before the Boston Marathon Bombing.
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.
Russian authorities contacted the CIA in the fall of 2011 and raised concerns that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed last week in a confrontation with police, was seen as an increasingly radical Islamist who could be planning to travel overseas.
In other words, 11 years after 9/11 and the establishment of the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security – which spends much of its time spying on lawful American citizens - the intelligence agencies still don’t coordinate with each other on terrorism cases?
The CIA request led the National Counterterrorism Center to add Tsarnaev’s name to a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, that is used to feed information to other lists, including the FBI’s main terrorist screening database.
The CIA’s request came months after the FBI had closed a preliminary inquiry into Tsarnaev after getting a similar warning from Russian state security, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
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.
To be clear Tamerlan was identified and flagged by the appropriate agency and nothing was done. So before we start talking about CISPA and PATRIOT Act 2 and all the other new authorities and resources the police state needs, remember, they had the information and just did not talk to each other like before. Even after the consolidation and the establishment of a Director of National Intelligence we are having the same issues – the left hand still doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
