Rare News Desk
Last Friday President Obama declared that the Boston bombers were failures. “Whatever they thought they could ultimately achieve,” Mr. Obama said last Friday, after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended hiding in a boat in Watertown, Massachusetts, “they’ve already failed.” However, the Tsarnaev brothers effectively carried out a deadly jihadist terror attack on the United States. They killed four and wounded over a hundred others. The Boston area had suffered a week of terror, from the bombings, through the attempts to identify the at-large perpetrators, the manhunt, the “shelter in place” lockdown, and ultimate violent conclusion. By not preventing this, Mr. Obama and his administration were the ones who failed.
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The Tsarnaev brothers’ plot to attack the United States was a tactical success. The fact that eventually one was killed and one captured is incidental from the global jihadists’ point of view. A movement that regularly employs suicide attackers is more interested in the deed than the fate of those who do it. As battles in the war on terrorism go, this was a bad guy win.
The government’s failure would be understandable if the Boston attack had been a lone-wolf, out of the blue, no warning, completely random act of violence. But it was not. The government was warned about Tamerlan Tsarneav, it knew there was an international connection, and authorities should have been watching him closely, monitoring his communications, and generally treating his potential for violence more seriously.
The more we learn about the background to the attack the greater the sense that the system is broken. Russian intelligence services raised the alarm about Tamerlan Tsarnaev several times, even after the FBI had interviewed him and wrongly determined he was not a threat. The Russians were afraid that Tamerlan was an Islamist extremist who was planning an attack inside their country. They must have had a reason for this; they did not randomly choose him. He must have been in contact with radicals inside Russia, which alone establishes the foreign nexus the administration still denies existed.
The FBI may not have been impressed with Tamerlan but the CIA pushed to have his name added to the National Counter Terrorism Center’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE database. This information, and presumably information on all Tamerlan’s known foreign radical contacts and affiliates, would have been available to the FBI and other government agencies had they wanted it. This fact also raises the question why the Tsarnaev investigation was not reopened after his seven month trip to Russia, where he reportedly visited the Caucasus region, the center of Chechen extremism.
There is also the matter of the Tsarnaev brothers’ possible accomplices inside the United States. The FBI was reportedly tracking a 12 man sleeper cell related to the case. Two men were rounded up in New Bedford last weekend, Dias Kadyrbayev, 19, and Azamat Tazhayakov, 20, from Kazakhstan, on visa violations. They had previously been questioned as witnesses in the bombing case. Two women who were on the scene at the time of the arrest were spirited away in a van from a foreign consulate. Who were those women and why were they taken from the scene like that? Were they foreign intelligence operatives who had penetrated the terror cell and were extricated? If so, why was the Boston Marathon attack not prevented? If not, how to explain the strange way in which they vanished? And where is the rest of this dozen-strong sleeper cell?
The most important question is, with all these signals that something might be going on, why did the government miss it? In part it may be a cascading failure at the strategic level, the belief that the war on terrorism – or struggle against violent extremism, or whatever it is styled as these days – can successfully be prosecuted through remote drone strikes on leadership nodes overseas. It betrays an overly hierarchical mindset and failure to appreciate how these highly dispersed, horizontally organized and adaptable terror networks work. And as Boston tragically illustrates, the government can drone on and on and still not prevent domestic terror attacks.
Political correctness also played a role. In the case of Ft. Hood Massacre shooter Nidal Hasan, those who had raised red flags about his behavior before the fact were waved off because the administration turns a blind eye to Muslim radicalism. Tamerlan Tsarnaev fit this same profile, and even was known at his local mosque to be a radical troublemaker. Around the same time Tamerlan was undergoing his extremist transformation, the FBI was purging mention of Islam in its training materials and other internal publications. The Obama administration still stubbornly denies the ideological nature of the terror threat. This inexplicable fixation would be quaint if it wasn’t costing American lives.
Congress should immediately investigate the government’s failure to protect the citizens of Boston from the two or more active jihadists operating in their midst. There is already ample evidence of a breakdown in the early warming system, of failure to utilize pertinent shared intelligence, and perhaps a willful blindness to the motives behind the threat. A fair and open investigation may reveal the gaps in the system that allowed this terrorist victory. This is critical because other terror groups will be studying the Boston bombings for lessons learned. They had a win on April 15, they will want another.
