Ex-CA cop: U.S. law enforcement blew terror response

April 20, 2013

By Chris Reed

A former official with a state law-enforcement agency sent me a contrarian take on the week’s events in Massachusetts:

“At the risk of spoiling the high fives on the Boston bombing incident, has anybody asked how this guy was not on the FBI’s radar 5 minutes after the terrorist attack.  He openly posted radical ideas and linked to Chechen terrorist videos on the internet and had just traveled back to the epicenter of terrorism, Chechnya and Dagestan?????   

“We spend billions upon billions to gather intel, surveil the internet and identify potential threats.   JTTFs and terror centers and intel fusion hubs are to track and hopefully prevent these guys from acting.  At least he should have been on a short list of candidates within 12 hours of the bombing.  

“Yet the FBI was reduced to posting blurry video photos like any 7-11 robbery 5 days after the attack.  really, only the amateur nature of the attackers led to their arrests…not brilliant police work.  Didn’t get any value from anti-terror money spent.  After 5 days it would seem like someone might have looked at the Chechens photographs, which the FBI presumably had, and a light bulb would have lit up. They lived in the neighborhood!  The leader was a wife-beater!

“Then there is the never-ending problem of allowing immigrants from terror-spawning regions to come here.  Chechens?   As if there aren’t a couple billion non-muslim non-american hating people in the world who wouldn’t give their left arm to come here.  Chechens?   Seems like we have already experienced this with Somali ‘refugees’ who return to Jihad not to mention the 9-11 hijackers.  It’s a big world, how about we consider our own interests in immigration and visitation?  Political correctness run amok.”

We’ll see if more of this contrary thinking emerges after the high-fives and back-slapping come to an end.