Chambliss:
Law Enforcement Agency May Have Known About Boston Bombing in Advance
April
24th, 2013
.
Georgia
Sen. Saxby Chambliss told Channel 2 Action News late Tuesday
afternoon that a law enforcement agency may have had information in
advance of the Boston bombings that wasn’t properly shared.
“There
now appears that may have been some evidence that was obtained by one
of the law enforcement agencies that did not get shared in a way that
it could have been. If that turns out to be the case, then we have to
determine whether or not that would have made a difference,”
Chambliss said.
Though
Chambliss would not get into specifics on the information or whether
or not the bombing could have been prevented, he told Channel 2
Action News that they will find out if someone dropped the ball.
Russia
contacted US government ‘multiple’ times
23
Aprilo, 2013
WASHINGTON
-- Russian authorities alerted the US 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 -- raising new questions about whether the
FBI should have focused more attention on the suspected Boston
Marathon bomber, according to US senators briefed on the probe
Tuesday.
The
FBI has previously said it interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 after
it was initially contacted by the Russians. After that review, the
FBI has said, it determined he did not pose a threat.
In
a closed briefing on Tuesday, members of the Senate Intelligence
Committee learned that Russia alerted the United States about
Tsarnaev in ``multiple contacts’’ -- including ``at least once
since October 2011,’’ said Richard Burr, a Republican of North
Carolina, speaking with reporters afterward.
Senators
said the briefing also revealed failures among federal agencies to
share vital information about Tsarnaev, indicating, they said, that
the US government still has not established a strong system to
``connect the dots’’ about would-be terrorists residing in
America more than a decade after 9/11.
Senator
Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and member of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, praised law enforcement authorities for
quickly producing videos of the suspects and putting a halt to their
violent spree Thursday night and Friday.
“But
I’m very concerned that there still seem to be serious problems
with the sharing of information, including critical investigative
information,’’ she said after emerging from the closed-door
committee briefing. ``That is troubling to me, this many years after
the attacks on our country in 2001, that we still seem to have
stovepipes that prevent information from being shared effectively,
not only among agencies but also with the same agency in one case.”
Collins,
who was among senators receiving a briefing from Deputy FBI Director
Sean M. Joyce and officials from the National Counter-terrorism
Center and the Department of Homeland Security, did not elaborate on
details of those failures.
Members
of the House also received a briefing Tuesday and emerged with
questions.
“We
have to go back and take a good hard look at the gaps,’’ said
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida Democrat. ``With each event that
occurs like this one, we have to go back and take a look at what
lessons we could learn and how to fill in those gaps.’’
Warnings
raised by Russia have loomed large in the investigation of how
Tsarnaev, a Kyrgyzstan national, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, a
naturalized US citizen, allegedly prepared for the April 15 bombing
attacks near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
``I
think the increasing signals are that these are individuals that were
radicalized, especially the older brother, over a period of time,’’
said Republican Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, after the briefing.
He said the brothers ``used Internet sources to gain not just the
philosophical beliefs that radicalized them, but also learning
components of how to do these sorts of things.”
US
officials have faced tough questions for not tracking the older
brother’s travels to the Russian provinces of Dagestan and Chechnya
-- where he spent more than half of last year and may have interacted
with militant groups or individuals.
The
FBI has said it was not aware that Tsarnaev had traveled to Russia in
2012. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said
Monday that the FBI told him it was not aware of the older Tsarnaev’s
travels because his name had been misspelled on an airliner passenger
list. US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano confirmed
the misspelling during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary
Committee Tuesday, but she said Homeland Security nonetheless was
aware of his trip.
“Even
with the misspelling under our current system, there are
redundancies, and so the system did ping when he was leaving the
United States,” she said.
Napolitano
said the Senate’s proposed immigration overhaul bill would improve
that system to avoid any chance of clerical errors, by making
passports ``electronically readable.’’
Her
disclosure that Homeland Security knew of the trip, but not the FBI,
raised questions among lawmakers.
“I
want to make sure that DHS is talking to the FBI,” said Senator
Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee.
“It looks to me like there is a lack of communication.”
Others
expressed concern about signs that officials did not connect the dots
about the potential threat Tsarnaev’s may have posed.
“Post-911
we thought we had created a systems that would allow for the free
flow of information between agencies,” said Senator Saxby
Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia and member of the intelligence
panel. “And I think there have been some stone walls .. .that have
been re-created that were probably unintentional.”
Senator
Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee,
cautioned against jumping to any final conclusions.
“We
had a full discussion back and forth over the process that’s
followed and we need to keep at that and we need to see if there are
any loopholes in it, that we fix those loopholes,” she said.
She
characterized the issues as part of an evolving intelligence process.
“With
every one of these we find problems, it’s not just this one,” she
said. “And you try to remedy the problem so next time it’s not
going to happen and something else pops up next time, but the right
things are being done and the right kind of investigation is being
conducted.”
“I
think there’s concern about knowledge about the individual’s trip
to Russia and was that information shared between the FBI and
Homeland Security,” said, Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas
Republican who chairs of the House Homeland Security committee.
Boston
bombing suspect put on terrorist watch list at CIA request
The
CIA asked the main U.S. counterterrorism agency to add the name of
one of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers to a watch list more
than a year before the attack, according to U.S. officials.
25
April, 2013
The
agency took the step after Russian authorities contacted officials
there 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 and could be planning to
travel overseas. The CIA requested that his name be put on a database
maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center.
That
database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is
a data storehouse that feeds a series of government watch lists,
including the FBI’s main Terrorist Screening Database and the
Transportation Security Administration’s “no-fly” list.
Officials
said Tsarnaev’s name was added to the database but it’s unclear
which agency added it.
The
CIA’s request came months after the FBI had closed a preliminary
inquiry into Tsarnaev after getting a similar inquiry about him from
Russian state security, according to officials, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss
the matter.
The
new disclosure suggests that the U.S. government may have had more
reason than previously known to scrutinize Tsarnaev in the months
leading up to the bombings in Boston.
Law
enforcement officials said that the request to the FBI in 2011
originated from fears by the Russian government that Tamerlan was a
threat to Russia and would commit a terrorist act in Russia -- not
the United States. The request came from Russian federal police to
the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
“There
was a concern he might have some kind of ties to terrorism,” said
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. “We did everything legally that we
could do with the little bit of information we had. After we did, we
found no derogatory information.”
The
FBI gets hundreds of similar requests a year from foreign
governments, said a law enforcement official. The findings were
reported back to Russia and Russian authorities were asked if they
had any more information for the United States to investigate about
Tamerlan and they did not.
“They
were satisfied,” said the official. “We had checked on their
information. And no further information was provided.”
In
Russia, meanwhile, representatives of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were
in Dagestan to interview the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers, an
embassy official said in an e-mail. The mother was interviewed
Tuesday by Russian security officials, according to one of her
representatives, but the father was ill and remained at home.
A
police source in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region that
borders Chechnya, the homeland of the Tsarnaev family, told the RIA
Novosti agency that the parents told U.S. officials they would go to
the United States soon.
“During
the talks it was decided to take the Tsarnaev parents to the United
States. The parents have given their consent to this, they will be
involved in the U.S. investigation,” the source told RIA Novosti.
The
Americans who interviewed the parents were kind and polite, said Heda
Saratova, a lawyer for the family. She said they would go to the
United States soon but had not yet had time to make plans.
Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, the injured suspect in the
Boston Marathon bombings, has told interrogators that he and his
brother, Tamerlan, were driven by hard-line Islamist views and anger
over the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but had no ties to foreign
militant groups, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The
statements made by Tsarnaev from his hospital bed provide what
authorities described as the clearest indication yet of the brothers’
apparent motivation in carrying out the attack.
The
information gleaned by a special team of FBI interrogators before
charges were filed against Tsarnaev on Monday appears to be
consistent with the direction of a broader investigation that has not
uncovered any links to terrorist networks abroad, officials said.
“These
are persons operating inside the United States without a nexus” to
an overseas group, a U.S. intelligence official said. Instead,
officials said, the evidence suggests that the Tsarnaev brothers were
“self-radicalized.”
U.S.
officials briefed on the interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said he
has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq and the campaign in
Afghanistan as factors motivating him and his brother in the alleged
plot.
Neighbors
have also described comments by the Tsarnaevs about the U.S. wars.
Albrecht Ammon, 21, of Cambridge said in an interview last week that
he had recently argued with the older Tsarnaev about U.S. foreign
policy.
Tsarnaev
said U.S. wars were based on the Bible, “a cheap copy of the
Koran,” Ammon said. Tsarnaev also said that “in Afghanistan, most
casualties are innocent bystanders killed by American soldiers,”
according to Ammon.
The
new disclosure about the CIA’s concern about Tamerlan Tsarnaev came
as Vice President Biden lashed out at Islamist terrorism and
described the perpetrators of the Boston
Marathon bombings as “twisted, perverted” jihadists, as
he and other dignitaries paid tribute to an MIT police officer
allegedly slain by one of the bombers last week.
Attending
the memorial service for officer Sean
Collier were thousands of students and uniformed police from
across the country. Speaker after speaker eulogized the 27-year-old
for his dedication to the students he was sworn to protect.
But
Biden also used the occasion to angrily denounce the brothers of
Chechen origin who allegedly planted the bombs and later murdered
Collier, calling them “two twisted, perverted, cowardly knock-off
jihadis.”
He
said the “doctrine of hate and oppression” espoused by Islamist
terrorists “cannot compete with the values of openness and
inclusion” illustrated by U.S. society in general and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in particular.
“And that’s
why they’re losing around the world.... Our very existence makes a
lie of their perverted ideology.” Biden added that he was proud the
country has not succumbed to the fear that terrorists aim to instill.
“We
have suffered,” he said. “We are grieving. But we are not
bending. We will not yield to fear. We will not hunker down. We will
not be intimidated.”
U.S.
officials said Tuesday that the suspects in the April 15 Boston
Marathon bombings, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, may have
killed Collier in an effort to steal his gun and arm themselves after
they became the targets of a massive manhunt three days after the
blasts.
The
officials said Collier appears not to have attempted to defend
himself when he was shot in the head Thursday night. Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, 26, already had a handgun, and officials said the two may
have been seeking to obtain one for Dzhokhar, 19. The attempt failed,
officials said, because the brothers were not able to remove the
officer’s weapon from a holster that was protected by a locking
mechanism.
A
video surveillance camera shows the shooting and the failed effort to
pull the officer’s gun, officials said. A short time later, the two
suspects allegedly carjacked a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle, loaded
it with explosives and engaged in a shootout with police. Tamerlan
was killed in the gun battle, and an injured Dzhokhar was captured
Friday hiding in a covered motorboat in Watertown, Mass.
New
York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters Wednesday
that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have been planning to go to New York after
the bombings to “party,” but he said it was clear whether the
college student had made any specific plans. Kelly said the
information came from investigators’ hospital interviews with
Tsarnaev.
At
MIT’s Briggs Field on Wednesday, police pallbearers carried
Collier’s casket to a bier in front of a stage as bagpipers played.
“Our
hearts are truly broken,” MIT Police Chief John DiFava told the
audience. “His caring and compassion were genuine, without
duplicity.”
“He
was born to be a police officer, and he lived out his dreams,” one
of Collier’s brothers, Rob Rogers, said after a performance by
singer James Taylor.
Collier
was also eulogized by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and by MIT
President L. Rafael Reif.
“Sean
was a model for how a police officer should serve,” Warren said.
“He saw his police work as a calling.” The freshman senator
added: “We are strong. We are Collier strong. We are Boston
strong.”
“He
was truly one of us,” Reif said.
Of
all the things he has read about Collier, Biden said in praising the
slain officer, the one that struck him most was “the student quoted
as saying, ‘he loved us, and we loved him.’ ” Biden added:
“They loved him because they knew he loved them.... What a
remarkable son. What a remarkable brother.”
MIT
canceled classes Wednesday so that students, faculty, campus police
officers and thousands of others could attend the service. Security
was high, with the city shutting down a number of streets, parking
lots and garages. Only those with MIT identification or members of a
police force were allowed to attend.
At
about noon, the sound of bagpipes drifted from the service and across
campus. A massive American flag, suspended between two constriction
cranes, blew in the wind. After days of cold temperatures and
freezing rain, the weather was sunny and warm enough to skip a coat.
Some
students gathered outside the security gates, standing on benches and
landscaped hills, to listen to the eulogies. Inside the gates, law
enforcement officers wearing various uniforms listened as Biden
lauded them for “standing ... between our families and danger every
single solitary day.” Volunteers wore name tags reading “Collier
Strong.”
The
MIT Police Department, located a block from the site of the service,
was draped with black bunting. Half a dozen wreaths of flowers,
mostly yellow, stood before the entrance, along with several flower
arrangements. Crayon posters hung on the wall, stating “Boston
Strong” and “God bless officers.” Police motorcycles were
parked everywhere.
Earlier
Wednesday in Boston, police reopened to the public a section of
Boylston Street and Copley Square near the marathon finish line,
allowing pedestrian, auto and trolley traffic to flow once again.
Police gave the all-clear to reopen the street shortly after 3:30
a.m., nearly nine days after the bombings
that killed three spectators and injured more than 250 other people.
Some stores whose windows were blown out by the blasts remained
boarded up.
City
officials allowed Boylston Street residents and employees to return
Tuesday evening. Videos and photos of what they found showed that
part of the city frozen in time: marathon posters abandoned on shop
floors, food still sitting on restaurant tables, an outdoor patio set
with napkins and silverware meant to be used more than a week ago.
By
Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of people filled the sidewalks and
patronized shops and restaurants, helping them recover from being
closed for so long. Tour buses rumbled up and down the street,
passing over the painted finish line that is beginning to fade.
Copley
Square has been transformed into a memorial garden, with large piles
of flowers, stuffed animals and other mementos. Paper cranes hang
from several of the trees. Most windows are decorated with “Boston
Strong” posters or American flags.
Marathon
Sports, a shop near one of the blast sites, is still closed. The
front window features a large poster offering condolences to the
bombing victims, gratitude to first responders and a message of hope:
“We will run again.” In front of the store is a small pile of
flowers, plus a Chinese flag and a note written in Chinese. One of
those killed, Lu Lingzi, was from China and studied statistics at
Boston University.
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