Pick Who You Spy On: Spy on the Identified Terrorists, Not Us
Michael Graham nailed it in a column in the Boston Herald today.
From BH here:
The Boston bombing case has revealed failures on many fronts.
Yesterday, Boston Police Commissioner Davis testified before Congress that cops on the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force had never been told about the FBI’s investigation into Tsarnaev back in 2011, so they had no reason to keep an eye on him.
Worse, they weren’t told until after the deadly shooting in Cambridge, so local cops had no reason to go look for him during those several days after the bombing.
Think about that: A guy is on not-one-but-two terror watch lists, he has traveled to Dagestan — and after three people are killed and hundreds injured, the FBI doesn’t even have him on their radar.
Nobody from Tsarnaev’s mosque notified his department about Tsarnaev after his shouting matches with fellow Muslims. Or after some in the Islamic Society of Boston feared he was becoming extreme in his views. The Muslims of our community should have approached the cops. They didn’t.
And Davis’ solution?
“Government should tighten security around celebratory public events and consider using more undercover officers, special police units and technology, including surveillance cameras,” according to his testimony.
“Images from cameras do not lie. They do not forget,” Davis said. “They can be viewed by a jury as evidence of what occurred.”
Wait — so the FBI and my Muslim neighbors sit on information before and after a terrorist bombing, and you want more spying on?…?me? How does that make sense? I have to stumble from one Back Bay bar to another under government monitoring because the feds didn’t want to tell the cops about a local Muslim guy with connections to Chechen terrorism?
And who cares about the “viewed by a jury” part? That’s for prosecuting crimes after the fact. How about doing something to prevent the next bombing before it happens?
The Boston bombers didn’t almost get away because we had a surveillance failure — we had an intelligence failure. A suspect who should have been front and center was, somewhere along the way, swept under the rug.
“More spying” isn’t the lesson to learn. “Smarter, targeted spying” is.
I think more cameras are indeed good for forensics purposes, but cameras are not a preventative measure. Only by actually following up on intelligence will stop another domestic terror attack. Queasiness and lack of political will to do what is obvious- monitoring radicals in Muslim communities- is the only way we will prevent another Boston bomber. But as long as liberals are running things, we remain in danger.
