Why Did It Take The FBI Four Days To Find The Boston Bombers, When They Had One 'On File' Already? -- Peter Foster, The Telegraph
Lots of “tough questions” are being asked about why the FBI – having interviewed the older Boston bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in 2011 – failed to continue to keep tabs on him.
But that is the wrong question to be asking. The much more pressing question is: why the FBI didn’t nab the bombers on Monday night?
After all, they hadn’t skipped town, and one of them – Tamerlan – was sitting "on file" as someone whom the Russian government said they suspected was an Islamist terrorist. A man they repeatedly interviewed just two years ago.
Why did no one check those files, within minutes of the bombs going off on Monday? And if they did, why didn’t Tamerlan’s number come up?
I’m not sure what the FBI equivalent of Google is, but surely “Boston + terrorist + jihad watch list + Muslim Community” should have thrown up the name “Tamerlan Tsarnaev”.
If it had, then at the very least a junior agent might, as a precaution, have been dispatched to see whether Tamerlan was still around, or indeed had a kitchen filled with pipe bombs and homemade explosives.
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My Comment: I followed the Boston Marathon bombing aftermath very closely .... and it was late Tuesday night/Wednesday morning that the web itself started releasing scores of pictures and video taken at the bombing on suspects who were acting suspiciously .... including some of the Tsarnaev brothers. Law enforcement was absent during this time.
I do understand that the FBI has to be cautious on what they are doing and who they are suspecting .... but the impression I had was that it was the web that was driving this investigation .... forcing the FBI to finally release the grainy pictures that then produced a response from the public of even higher quality pictures .... and finally the names of the suspects.