Explosion at Boston Marathon II

I wouldn't argue that the feds had the reason or manpower to have been watching Tamerlan Tsarnaev close enough to prevent the bombing, but I don't think it is ridiculous to think they should have narrowed in on him as a prime suspect very, very quickly.

 

Somewhere there is a sentence there. Damned if I can find it, though.

 

He recently returned from six months in a region know to have Islamic terrorists.

Friends and family say he was becoming more radical.

He was getting into shouting matches at his Mosque:

If they'd checked in on this guy, at some point you'd think they would have decided maybe the Russians were right, and increased surveillance on him.

 

Yes, because three days is an unreasonably long amount of time to comb through thousands of hours of video footage at the biggest sporting event in one of the country's largest metropolitan areas in the country, search said footage thoroughly to identify not only who but how many suspects there were, get a clear photo of the suspect/suspects, run said photo through all available law enforcement data and identify who those individuals are.
Clearly when the bombs went off at 3 p.m., the FBI should have been like "Oh, wait, that one dude we interviewed two years ago who seemed like he wasn't a threat at the time totally seems like a reasonable suspect here, let's go arrest him now," and had both brothers in custody in as much time as it would take David Caruso to take off his sunglasses and say "They f**ked with Boston? Now they're going to get Massacred."
YYYYYYYEEEEEAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!
I'll repeat: Life doesn't work like an episode of 24 or, in this case, CSI Miami.

 

I'm not sure about "quickly". What I've suggested is that once they had identified the two bombers from the photos and video, but before they released them to the public -- which led to the mayhem in which a cop was executed -- someone should have had a light bulb go off in their head.

I don't know, maybe when they saw they were "white guys", they only considered "right-wingers" and "Tea Baggers" and not radical Muslims from the Caucuses.

 

America is known to have Islamic terrorists now too. Does that mean the FBI should interview and initiate surveillance on anyone who visits this country too?

 

Why is it unreasonable to suspect a potential radical Islamist, who is local, and who you've interviewed might be a good person to check out after the bombing, and certainly after the photos were identified (but before they were released to the public)?

 

You're flailing now.

Yemen has training camps. The underpants bomber was trained there.

Afghanistan used to be a place Jihadists went for training.

Chechnya is a place where a Russian, of Chechen decent, interested in Jihad, would have gone to participate in Jihad, and/or train for it.

And, let's not forget, these guys would have been a terror trainer/master/planner's wet dream. They were white, and could travel freely into and out of the U.S. We know that Al-Quada and its affiliates are looking for guys just like this. (Which isn't to say that any international conspiracy is involved.)

 

It's not unreasonable ... assuming he's the only potential radical Islamist in the country--no, actually, the world-- thatthey've interviewed in the past two years and that the individual FBI agent that did interview him in that particular instance was the one assigned this case and not any other case in the since that interview.
Unless, of course, you're trying to convince me that this terror suspect is/was the only threat to America at the time the bombs went off and that the FBI isn't a large government agency tasked with routinely interviewing thousands of potential threats to the country from all over the globe every day of every month of every year since this guy's interview.

 

The only reason they released them to the public was because a bunch of dumbasses who thought they knew how to conduct investigative work were identifying anyone who looked "shifty" as a subject.

Maybe if there weren't thousands of backseat drivers, the FBI would have done things even more quickly than the time it took them.

 

Oh, come on now, it was totally unreasonable for the FBI to release those photos. After all, it was much safer for people to comb through images on Reddit and decide on their own who looked like a suspect (Hint: Anyone Muslim or carrying a bag).
I mean, it's not like anyone misidentified who the suspects were, like on the cover of a major daily New York newspaper or anything.
I'm sure no one would have come to harm had the FBI just handled the investigation themselves rather than try to calm the panic of a city searching for answers.

 

I would assume the FBI and other federal agencies were devoting every available resource to this and have enough technology at their disposal that it wasn't just a case of individuals scanning video and photos with their eyes and sitting down at a table sorting through manila file folders.

Shouldn't what was known about Tamerlan and in the federal databases have popped when they started running their algorithms or whatever they do to figure probabilities and narrow the field? With facial recognition software shouldn't it have identified Tameralan as a local man already in the database who looked similar to somebody photographed near the finish line?

I don't want to wag my finger when I haven't been in fedearl law enforcement's position, but I'm surprised that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hadn't at least already been interviewed about his brother by the time he went to bed in his dorm room Wednesday night.