The critical challenge facing America’s counterterrorism agencies is to connect the dots that draw an outline of a plot in the making and then intervene to prevent death and destruction.
Identifying the dots — those bits of information that are innocuous standing alone but together are terrifying — is perhaps the hardest aspect of the work. More, they don’t just come your way. You have to hunt them down.
Self-evidently true, the basics bear repeating because there are serious questions as to how national security authorities failed to recognize that Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a brewing jihadist threat.
The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday began an inquiry that must deliver a full accounting of who knew what when. The panel must also determine why agents failed to learn more, as well as how they let Tsarnaev slip from view as he became radicalized.
According to the bureau, Russian security asked for data on Tsarnaev “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States” on a trip to Russia.
The Boston field office then “checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history.”
After turning up nothing, the FBI asked the Russians for further information. They failed to respond; agents interviewed Tsarnaev and closed a cursory once-over. Never did the feds place Tsarnaev under surveillance or press to get evidentiary support for an eavesdropping warrant.
One question congressional probers must ask in this regard is whether the FBI regulations covering the conduct of preliminary anti-terror probes prevented agents from more aggressively checking out Tsarnaev. Of startling note, a “senior law enforcement official” told The New York Times that federal guidelines prohibited additional probing without new information.
Tsarnaev traveled to Dagestan last year and returned after six months. His reentry passed unnoticed because the government had purged Tsarnaev’s name from a watch list after the FBI’s probe had been closed for a year without action.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said deleting files is standard procedure. If so, the U.S. is erasing potentially crucial dots, apparently out of excessive concern about retaining the names of individuals whose links to terrorism have not been conclusively proven.
Over the next months, watched by no one, Tsarnaev created a YouTube page that featured jihadist videos, made a large fireworks purchase in New Hampshire — apparently to amass gunpowder — and got into two confrontations over his radical theological ideology with Muslims at a Cambridge mosque.
Since few citizens report extremist declarations like Tsarnaev’s, the episodes are the kind that the NYPD looks for in public settings using undercover officers or cooperating witnesses. Speaking as anonymous sources, some FBI agents have denigrated the NYPD program as spying. If only those agents had been listening when Tsarnaev spoke.
Seeing no evil
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