The government’s potential terrorist list includes a stunning 450,000 people. More than the security services can keep track off apparently as it seems one of the Boston Bombing suspects had been included prior to the Boston Marathon Bombing.
The name of one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was listed on the U.S. government’s highly classified central database of people it views as potential terrorists. But the list is so vast that this did not mean authorities automatically kept close tabs on him, sources close to the bombing investigation said on Tuesday.
Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a police shootout early Friday, while his younger brother Dzhokhar, 19, was captured later that day. Prosecutors say the brothers, ethnic Chechens who had been living in the United States for more than a decade, planted two bombs that exploded near the finish line of the marathon on April 15, killing three people and wounding more than 200.
So if he was in the terrorist database what went wrong?
The FBI found nothing to suggest he was an active threat, but all the same placed his name on the “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment” list. The FBI has not said what it did find about Tsarnaev…
Because of its huge size, U.S. investigators do not routinely monitor everyone registered there, said U.S. officials familiar with the database.
As of 2008, TIDE contained more than 540,000 names, although they represented about 450,000 actual people, because some of the entries are aliases or different name spellings for the same person. Fewer than 5 percent of the TIDE entries were U.S. citizens or legal residents, according to a description of the database on the NCTC website.
So, let me get this straight. The Department of Homeland Security routinely monitors peaceful protests but the FBI does not seriously keep track of terrorists, including one that was in the system before he bombed the Boston Marathon? Almost like the security services were setup to crush political dissent not protect the public.
If there were actually half a million hard core terrorists trying to destroy America, game over. As the Boston Bombers just demonstrated it does not take much to shut down a major city. The reason America has not been destroyed by “terrorism” is because there are not enough people who want to do it not because it is preventable. Let alone preventable by waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which actually motivated the bombing.
The rampant and unrestrained growth of the police state in America is not only tyrannical it is counterproductive to stopping terrorism. If everyone is a threat then no amount of protection will be effective.
Photo by LmBuga under Creative Commons license.
