WASHINGTON—After the Boston Marathon bombings, legislators and the public have questioned how officials handled the attacks and whether or not it could have been prevented.
“My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security committee at the first public Congressional hearing on the terrorist attack.
“We learned over a decade ago, the danger in failing to connect the dots. The cornerstone of the 9/11 Commission Report was that agencies had stove-piped and intelligence, which prevented us from seeing potential terrorist plots,” McCaul said.
In the 9/11 attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies had information regarding the hijackers prior to the attacks, yet the agencies weren’t communicating with one another. From these events, the Department of Homeland Security was created, along with other government agencies, and the U.S. took stronger measurements to prevent future terrorism acts.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and brother, Dzhokhar, 19, carried out the attack at the Boston Marathon. It’s been reported that Russian authorities notified the CIA and FBI, on separate accounts, about Tamerlan possibly becoming radicalized and seeking more fuel from groups in Dagestan, part of the North Caucasus of Russia and home of Islamist militants.
Tamerlan was put on the U.S. Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database in late 2011, which keeps a list of all terrorism suspects and has reached 875,000 names. It’s maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. The information on the list is available to all counterterrorism professionals throughout the Intelligence Community, including the Department of Defense, according to a description on its website.
But according to an LA Times article, this database doesn’t serve as a watch list.
“The database is so large and the records can be so vague that there often is little a law enforcement agency is willing or able to do in response to a TIDE match,” wrote the author. Therefore, “too vague to flag Boston suspect.”
This year, the Government Accountability Office, which serves as a watchdog, found that the sharing and managing of terrorism-related information between government agencies is a “high risk.” The GAO updates this high-risk list every two years with programs that need continued attention “due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of transformation.” The report found that the federal government is working to better the sharing of information but said it has “not yet estimated and planned for the resources needed” to tackle this issue.
Michael Weiser, who studied international relations and Middle East politics at Tel-Aviv University and California State University said communication across all government agencies is important, but isn’t sure if the Boston attacks could have been prevented.
“In this case it might have increased the chance of detection, but I don’t know it if would have been decisive,” Weiser said.
The problem, he said, is many think of terrorism threats coming from a specific region.
“The radicalized Islamist movement is not necessarily isolated to a localized area,” Weiser said, adding that it could come from anywhere from the Philippines to Yemen to America. But cautioned that he does not know whether or not federal agencies examined Tamerlan with this in mind.
“The idea is to think globally. Jihadism is a global movement,” he said.
With this, some believe the focus should now be on homegrown terrorism and also cyber-radicalization, like extremists who post videos on YouTube that can reach millions across the world. Even President Barack Obama has said he believes the brothers acted alone in the attacks.
“One of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States,” Obama said at a news conference.
A New York Times article reports that the “Tsarnaev brothers appear to have been radicalized and instructed in explosives not at a training camp but at home on the Internet.” The author writes that Dzhokhar told investigators that he and his brother followed manuals and “do-it-yourself articles” on how to carry out attacks in the U.S. without having to go abroad.
With this being an ongoing investigation, there will be many more details revealed as time comes. But, I will have to agree with Weiser that we, as a nation, have to start looking at these events as a “global threat” rather than coming from one specific region or area. We must also examine how agencies can control the growing trend of cyber-radicalization.
