The Boston Globe reports [6]:
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.
***
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.
Similarly, foreign governments repeatedly warned the U.S. before 9/11. The chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable [7]. It is thoroughly-documented that an attack such as 9/11 was entirely foreseeable [8]. Specifically, Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen [9].
Several key employees for the defense department say that the government covered up their testimony about tracking lead hijacker Mohammed Atta [10] before 9/11.
Reuters notes [11]:
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.
***
Another list, the Terrorist Screening Database, is a declassified version of the highly classified TIDE with fewer details about terrorist suspects. One source said Tsarnaev was on this list, too.
After being put in the TIDE system, his name was entered in another database, this one maintained by the Homeland Security Department's Customs and Border Protection bureau which is used to screen people crossing U.S. land borders and entering at airports or by sea.
Moreover, Senator Saxby Chambliss - who served on the United States House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chaired the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security - told Channel 2 Action News from Atlanta 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," Chambliss said.
(Was the evidence the reason why the bomb squad, bomb-sniffing dogs and a "drill" were present at the starting line [12] of the Boston marathon?)
The Bush and Obama administrations implemented hardly any of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission [13].
Both the Bush and Obama administrations have slashed funding for programs which would actually help prevent terror attacks [14].
Why have we lost our rights [15] in the new "post-9/11 world" [16] if the government can't keep us safe?
Trillions of dollars - and thousands of American lives - have been squandered on boondoggles and pork [17].
What the heck are we doing?