Authorities in Massachusetts were never told the Russian government warned the United States of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but investigators were largely preoccupied with another problem at the time: protesters.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into
Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years ago on the recommendation of Moscow,
but closed their case without concluding he posed any threat – and
without warning officials local to Boston that a suspected radical
extremist was residing in their town. On the other hand, evidence
has proved that a Boston police counterterror intelligence unit
spent a significant amount of time and money in 2011 using a US
Department of Homeland Security-funded fusion center to spy on and
monitor protest groups, including Occupy Wall Street offshoots and
anti-war demonstrators.
On Thursday, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis admitted to a congressional panel that federal agents
failed to warn his department of Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who
died last month during a firefight with police. Investigators
believe he orchestrated a terror plot during the April 15 race with the help of his brother, Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, who has since been apprehended, charged and confined to a
federal facility.
Hours after Davis told lawmakers “we would have liked to
know” about the Russian tip-off, NBC News national
investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff accused the FBI and DHS
for failing to do their job, all the while concentrating their
resources on a campaign to investigate peaceful demonstrators.
Last October, the American Civil Liberties Union in
Massachusetts published a trove of documents confirming that the
Boston Police Department spied on protesters and even relied on their local
federally-funded fusion centers to further their probe.
“[O]fficers assigned to the Boston Regional Intelligence
Center [BRIC] at the Boston Police Department are collecting and
keeping information about constitutionally protected speech and
political activity,” the ACLU announced at the time.
“What’s happening in this city is really disturbing, and if
you talk to activists who have been out on the streets protesting
war for 10 years, protesting on behalf of immigrants’ rights or
workers’ rights, they will tell you that this is not a
surprise,” Kade Crockford of the ACLU told RT then. “The
Boston Police Department has clearly been monitoring political
speech for some time in this city.”
This week, Isikoff calls into question why that conduct was
approved of but an investigation into Tsarnaev was not.
“The police monitoring of the activities of Occupy Boston —
an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the
country in 2011 — came during a period after the U.S. government
received the second of two warnings from
This article originally appeared on : RT