Frankenstein redux prime Also cf Ground zero Wall St http://www.sjcite.info/gzero.html
Bloody shirts & black marbles http://www.sjcite.info/lamb.html
{ ed. What pains me the most is that my now sequestered taxes pay for this Machiavellian incompetence of undeclared war in my name that ultimately attacks me to falsely justify its own budgetary demands for defense against threats it created.
Kafka + Orwell = butt ugly babies. }
~ ~ ~
Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the FBI 4.28.12 David K. Shipler NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.htmlTHE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.
When an Oregon college student, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, thought of using a car bomb to attack a festive Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving, with Mr. Mohamud in the passenger seat. To trigger the bomb the student punched a number into a cellphone and got no boom, only a bust.
This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves — too sure, perhaps.
Carefully orchestrated sting operations usually hold up in court. Defendants invariably claim entrapment and almost always lose, because the law requires that they show no predisposition to commit the crime, even when induced by government agents. To underscore their predisposition, many suspects are “warned about the seriousness of their plots and given opportunities to back out,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. But not always, recorded conversations show. Sometimes they are coaxed to continue.
Undercover operations, long practiced by the F.B.I., have become a mainstay of counterterrorism, and they have changed in response to the post-9/11 focus on prevention. “Prior to 9/11 it would be very unusual for the F.B.I. to present a crime opportunity that wasn’t in the scope of the activities that a person was already involved in,” said Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union, a lawyer and former F.B.I. agent who infiltrated white supremacist groups. An alleged drug dealer would be set up to sell drugs to an undercover agent, an arms trafficker to sell weapons. That still happens routinely, but less so in counterterrorism, and for good reason.
“There isn’t a business of terrorism in the United States, thank God,” a former federal prosecutor, David Raskin, explained.
“You’re not going to be able to go to a street corner and find somebody who’s already blown something up,” he said. Therefore, the usual goal is not “to find somebody who’s already engaged in terrorism but find somebody who would jump at the opportunity if a real terrorist showed up in town.”
And that’s the gray area. Who is susceptible? Anyone who plays along with the agents, apparently. Once the snare is set, law enforcement sees no choice. “Ignoring such threats is not an option,” Mr. Boyd argued, “given the possibility that the suspect could act alone at any time or find someone else willing to help him.”
Typically, the stings initially target suspects for pure speech — comments to an informer outside a mosque, angry postings on Web sites, e-mails with radicals overseas — then woo them into relationships with informers, who are often convicted felons working in exchange for leniency, or with F.B.I. agents posing as members of Al Qaeda or other groups.
Some targets have previous involvement in more than idle talk: for example, Waad Ramadan Alwan, an Iraqi in Kentucky, whose fingerprints were found on an unexploded roadside bomb near Bayji, Iraq, and Raja Khan of Chicago, who had sent funds to an Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan.
But others seem ambivalent, incompetent and adrift, like hapless wannabes looking for a cause that the informer or undercover agent skillfully helps them find. Take the Stinger missile defendant James Cromitie, a low-level drug dealer with a criminal record that included no violence or hate crime, despite his rants against Jews. “He was searching for answers within his Islamic faith,” said his lawyer, Clinton W. Calhoun III, who has appealed his conviction. “And this informant, I think, twisted that search in a really pretty awful way, sort of misdirected Cromitie in his search and turned him towards violence.”
THE informer, Shahed Hussain, had been charged with fraud, but avoided prison and deportation by working undercover in another investigation. He was being paid by the F.B.I. to pose as a wealthy Pakistani with ties to Jaish-e-Mohammed, a terrorist group that Mr. Cromitie apparently had never heard of before they met by chance in the parking lot of a mosque.
“Brother, did you ever try to do anything for the cause of Islam?” Mr. Hussain asked at one point.
“O.K., brother,” Mr. Cromitie replied warily, “where you going with this, brother?”
Two days later, the informer told him, “Allah has more work for you to do,” and added, “Revelation is going to come in your dreams that you have to do this thing, O.K.?” About 15 minutes later, Mr. Hussain proposed the idea of using missiles, saying he could get them in a container from China. Mr. Cromitie laughed.
Reading hundreds of pages of transcripts of the recorded conversations is like looking at the inkblots of a Rorschach test. Patterns of willingness and hesitation overlap and merge. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Mr. Cromitie said, and then explained that he meant women and children. “I don’t care if it’s a whole synagogue of men.” It took 11 months of meandering discussion and a promise of $250,000 to lead him, with three co-conspirators he recruited, to plant fake bombs at two Riverdale synagogues.
“Only the government could have made a ‘terrorist’ out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope,” said Judge Colleen McMahon, sentencing him to 25 years. She branded it a “fantasy terror operation” but called his attempt “beyond despicable” and rejected his claim of entrapment.
The judge’s statement was unusual, but Mr. Cromitie’s characteristics were not. His incompetence and ambivalence could be found among other aspiring terrorists whose grandiose plans were nurtured by law enforcement. They included men who wanted to attack fuel lines at Kennedy International Airport; destroy the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) in Chicago; carry out a suicide bombing near Tampa Bay, Fla., and bomb subways in New York and Washington. Of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since 9/11 on American soil, 14 were developed in sting operations.
Another New York City subway plot, which recently went to trial, needed no help from government. Nor did a bombing attempt in Times Square, the abortive underwear bombing in a jetliner over Detroit, a planned attack on Fort Dix, N.J., and several smaller efforts. Some threats are real, others less so. In terrorism, it’s not easy to tell the difference.
= = =FBI's longtime director faces criticism of bureau again
4.27.13 Susan Cornwell and Thomas Ferraro Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/fbis-longtime-director-faces-criticism-bureau-again-122025633.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As he nears the end of a dozen years as director of the FBI, Robert Mueller finds himself defending the agency over its handling of two high-profile cases. It is a familiar spot for the low-key ex-Marine.
At the request of President Barack Obama, Mueller stayed on for two years beyond the job's 10-year term to help stabilize law enforcement's fight against domestic and international threats to U.S. security. Recent events - the bombing at the Boston Marathon and ricin-laced letters sent to Obama and a U.S. senator - have left Mueller dealing with suggestions that agency missteps may have added to the damage.
Mueller, 68, who is scheduled to leave office in early September, has endured many congressional attacks against his agency's performance. While he is not universally praised on Capitol Hill, he has won enough bipartisan support to be considered a success.
Tellingly, it was a target of the 2001 anthrax letters - Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont - who told Mueller at a 2008 hearing that he seriously doubted the findings of the FBI's long and complicated anthrax investigation. But three years later, Leahy as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman helped Mueller win a two-year extension of his term.
The FBI chief gets far milder treatment than some other prominent members of the 0bama administration, such as U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. She came under heavy fire from Republicans for remarks she made after the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi in which four Americans were killed, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.In Washington, where making enemies is easy, Mueller wins high scores from members of Congress for his competence, even as he guided a vast expansion of FBI powers since the hijacked plane attacks of September 11, 2001.
"I believe he is well liked, even though I find fault with a lot of his policies, or how he does things," Senator Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. "I think he's well intentioned ... it's kind of difficult for me to criticize him even when there is a screw-up," Grassley added.
This month, the FBI has faced fresh assaults over its failure to spot the potential danger from Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a suspect in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, after Russia asked the bureau to investigate him two years ago. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a police shootout and his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has been charged in the bombings that killed three people and injured more than 200.
Two senior Republican lawmakers complained Tamerlan Tsarnaev was yet another in a series of cases in which a person investigated by the agency had later taken part in attacks.Soon after the Boston bombings, the FBI accused an Elvis impersonator of sending letters containing ricin to Obama and other officials, only to quickly drop the charges for a lack of evidence.
Mueller and his leadership team have briefed members of Congress about the cases, but further inquiries are likely.
"I think he is ready to go home. He has had 12 years," said Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. He praised Mueller, who was first nominated to the job by a Republican president, George W. Bush.
"He has had some major issues to confront, including 9/11, then Russian and China threats, cyber threats," he said.
Some lawmakers say that despite the Boston blasts, the FBI thwarted other plots in recent years, including one to bomb New York's subway system. They also note that there was an arrest within days of the Boston bombing.
"I thought they (the FBI) did fabulous in getting to the bottom of the Boston bombing, but as great as that was, it was embarrassing to bring in a guy who had nothing to do with the ricin mailings," said Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican who serves on the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the FBI.
Mueller's office did not comment, although Mueller has praised the work of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies for the arrest of the Boston bombing suspect.
LOW PROFILE?
Some think Mueller's secret to success has been keeping a low profile in a town where many people are constantly angling to get attention. Mueller, while doing a lot of closed-door briefings for leaders, does not talk much to the media.
"I think he has been successful because he hasn't been a press hog," Grassley said.
Mueller, a former Justice Department official, was nominated for the top FBI job in 2001 and took office days before the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
When Obama asked Mueller to stay on, some Senate Republicans initially balked. One, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, came around after Mueller met with him to discuss the bureau's handling of a Kentucky case.
Mueller fielded heavy criticism from his earliest days in office.
After the 9/11 attacks, politicians from both parties questioned how the FBI had missed several warning signs of the hijackings, such as a memo from a Phoenix agent about Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons.
The anthrax case led to criticism because the bureau focused for so long on the wrong man, a mistake that ultimately cost the government millions of dollars in settling a lawsuit.
The FBI finally concluded that Army scientist Bruce Ivans was responsible for the anthrax attacks, but he killed himself before charges were brought.
In 2008, Leahy, then the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Mueller he did not believe the FBI finding that Ivans was solely responsible. Leahy said he thought others had to be involved.
Mueller reorganized the FBI to expand its analytical capability and improve its intelligence collection. He also beefed up its bioterrorism capabilities.
He has been praised for resisting some parts of the expansion of domestic surveillance under Bush.
Grassley said Mueller had not always been as responsive as possible to the senator's letters or "as protective of whistleblowers as he should be."
But he said there should not be another extension as director for Mueller, no matter how well liked he may be.
The purpose of the law limiting the director's term "is to make sure we don't get into this J. Edgar Hoover syndrome, that one guy is so indispensable," Grassley said, referring to the former FBI director of almost four decades. "We don't want to get caught in that syndrome again."
2013 false flags
Boston Marathon bombing 4.15.13
Daniel Hopsicker outs patsies' media pandering uncle as spouse to CIA Central Asian station chief's daughter, and long time active Halliburton agent in Central Asian oil operations.
likeliest truth : "listen to CNN Piers Morgan interview talking to bombers' mother; she said the FBI had been “counselling” him for 5 years, ever since he became involved with “religious politics”. So this went down just like the 7/7 London bombings. The older brother was targeted to begin with because of his Chechen origin. He was recruited by the FBI as an informant, and sent to Chechnya to be “sheep dipped”, that is to establish his connection with “terrorists” in Chechnya. At this point he was ready to be used as a patsy. He was told that he would be able to help by assisting in a counter-terrorist “drill” that was going to be held during the Boston marathon. The drill was being carried out by Craft International. Craft has a hat with a skull on it and the motto “No matter what your mother told you, violence does solve problems”. Look up Craft International on the Net. Several of these Craft operatives may be seen standing around in many videos of the event. They all wore the same khaki pants and dark jackets and carried backpacks. The patsy was given an identical backpack containing what he thought was a fake pressure cooker bomb and told to place it somewhere as part of the drill. He must have been the most surprised person there when it actually went off. This is exactly the way the 7/7 bombing worked, where the young Muslims were asked to participate in a “drill” that went live with real bombs. It’s similar also to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a standard FBI technique."
note : The Craft International mercenary corp. employees using the Boston Marathon as a training opportunity are National Guard members
renegade Beltway gadfly Wayne Madsen re Jamestown Foundation conducted 7.12 conferences in the Republic of Georgia currently used to validate the attending elder Boston Marathon bomber's posthumous labeling as a Chechen flavored jihadi.
9/11 Cassandra #1 (Cowleen Rowley being #2) S. Edmonds lays out the broader OECD agenda & process
dead bomber's blue blood wife
Investigators believe Boston bombs likely made at Tsarnaev home
5.4.13 Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Mark Hosenball Reuters
Investigators believe Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, likely made the bombs they are suspected of setting off at last month's Boston Marathon in Tamerlan's home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, law enforcement officials said on Friday.
FBI agents have been questioning Tamerlan's wife, Katherine Russell, and other witnesses for days to try to piece together exactly how and where the devices were made and what people knew about the brothers' beliefs and plans.
Investigators said they are increasingly convinced that the ethnic Chechen brothers lifted their bomb designs from Internet postings by Islamic militants, though they substituted some components, and made the lethal devices less than five miles from the spot where the bombs killed three and injured 264.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 24-year-old wife lived on Norfolk Street in Cambridge. Tamerlan spent hours alone there, minding the couple's young child as his wife worked up to 80 hours a week as a health aide, her lawyer, Amato DeLuca, has said. His brother Dzhokhar, 19, was enrolled as a student at the University of Massachusetts and lived in a dormitory on the school's Dartmouth campus, about an hour's drive from Boston.
Investigators believe that during his long days at home alone, Tamerlan, who enjoyed expensive clothes and cars and occasionally worked as a mechanic, likely honed his bomb-making skills with materials found around the house. Police had said the bombs were built from pressure cookers packed with nails and ball bearings.
Soon after investigators released pictures of the suspected bombers and asked the public for help in identifying and locating the two men, Tamerlan communicated with his wife, said officials familiar with the investigation, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.
Law enforcement officials said the pair communicated after she saw the pictures of her husband and brother-in-law on television. Russell sent a text message to her husband, a national security source said.
Russell's lawyer declined to comment on Friday. He said earlier in the week that Russell spent many hours talking with officials and was eager to "provide as much assistance to the investigation as she can."
Officials took DNA samples from her after a woman's DNA was found on one of the bomb remnants. Other media have reported that the DNA on the bomb is not a match to Russell. The FBI declined to comment on the matter.
Ever since her husband was killed after a shootout with police, Russell, still dressing in long skirts and traditional Muslim head scarf, has been trying to stay out of sight while living with her parents in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. She has tried to distance herself from the man she married in June, 2010 at a mosque in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood.
She declined to pick up Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body from the Massachusetts Medical Examiner's office, allowing his relatives to claim the remains and arrange for a funeral.
{ commentary post : Bomber brothers' father is Noxchi (Chechen), mother Avar (Dagestani) }
Tsarnaev's death was ruled a homicide and he died from gunshot wounds and blunt trauma to the head and torso, according to a person familiar with the death certificate. Dzhokhar drove over Tamerlan while trying to escape as police shot at the pair.
Meanwhile investigators were also pursuing leads across the state and focusing their attention on the Dartmouth area where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect, was a student.
"The searches at various locations in Dartmouth, Mass., today are part of the ongoing investigation into the marathon bombing," a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office said. "Residents should be advised that there is no threat to public safety."
Earlier in the week, authorities arrested three of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's college friends, charging two with hiding evidence and one with lying to investigators. Two Russian-speaking students from Kazakhstan, Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, were accused of removing Tsarnaev's backpack filled with empty fireworks and his laptop from his dormitory room, the government said in court documents.
Investigators found the backpack in a local landfill. A third college friend, Robel Phillipos, an American, lied to investigators about what the trio had done, authorities said.
All are now being held in jail.
In Kazakhstan, Dias Kadyrbayev's father, Murat, told news website Tengrinews.kz that he was certain his son was innocent and that the students "are assisting the investigation in every possible way,"
He described how his son was taken into custody in the hours after a shoot-out between the Tsarnaev brothers and police.
"The last time I spoke with him after the arrest, he told me then over the phone, 'Papa, they've arrested us like in an American movie. They came ... with a platoon of soldiers, with submachine guns, with laser sights,'" the father told Tengrinews.kz.
U.S. officials said the two Kazakhs were initially picked up on immigration violations last month and were later charged with obstruction of justice.
The mayor of Boston expressed anger that officials had disclosed that the Tsarnaev brothers initially planned their attacks for July 4. "It frightens people. We continue to get information out there that will arouse people," Mayor Thomas Menino said at a luncheon. The city will hold its annual Fourth of July celebrations, which include a concert by the Boston Pops Orchestra and fireworks, as planned.
"We won't be frozen by terrorists," he said.
BMB forewarning cf. http://www.sjcite.info/gzero.html#alert
Intelligence report identified vulnerability before Boston bombing
5.9.13 Brian Bennett, Richard A. Serrano Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-intelligence-report-vulnerability-boston-bombing-20130509,0,7305052.story
The 18-page report was written by the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a command center funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security that helps disseminate intelligence information to local police and first responders.
The "joint special event assessment" is dated April 10. It notes that at the time there was "no credible, specific information indicating an imminent threat" to the race.
"The FBI has not identified any specific lone offender or extremist group who pose a threat to the Boston marathon," the report reads.
Two officials read parts of the report to a Washington Bureau reporter.
Since the blasts, the FBI has acknowledged that agents had interviewed one of the suspected bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in 2011 but determined that he did not pose a threat. Customs agents were aware that Tsarnaev had traveled to Russia in 2012, but decided that he didn't require additional questioning when he returned to the U.S. later that year.
What was known to the FBI and other agencies before the Boston bombings was being examined by the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday in the first of a series of hearings investigating the attacks.
Top police officials in Boston testified to the panel that the FBI never shared with local law enforcement agencies that Tsarnaev had visited Dagestan and that FBI and Russian officials were concerned he and possibly his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, might become radicalized extremists.
“We would have liked to have known,” said Edward F. Davis III, commissioner of the Boston Police Department. But, he said, “we were not aware of the two brothers, we were not aware of their activities.”
In fact, Davis testified, it was more than three days after the April 15 bombing, after Tamerlan was killed in a police shootout and Dzhokhar was on the run, before he learned about the Tsarnaevs.
“We didn’t look at the brothers until after the shootout,” he said.
But he said he was uncertain what his local intelligence officers would have made of Tamerlan’s 2011 trip to Dagestan, noting that the FBI interviewed him but found nothing suspicious and that Russian officials did not tell the FBI why they were interested him.
“We would certainly have looked at the information,” Davis said. “We would certainly have talked to the individual.” But, he added, “I can’t say I would have come to a different
Kurt N. Schwartz, Massachusetts undersecretary for homeland security, added that “at no time were we told about the brothers.”
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, at one time chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said that if the FBI had shared the information on the Tsarnaevs, it “could have prevented all this from happening,” referring to the three killed and 260 injured at the marathon.
Local communities, he said, “are going to be your first line of defense. So I’d say the fact that neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security notified the local members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force is really a serious and aggravating omission.
“Nobody bats 1,000 percent, it's true,” he said. “How do you explain it? People are imperfect.”
House Homeland Security Committee member Peter King (R-N.Y.) agreed, recalling that FBI officials also never told the New York Police Department that they were aware of an unfolding plot to bomb Times Square before an arrest was made there.
“The failure to share information is absolutely indefensible,” King said.
= = =
FBI Under Fire, Didn't Tell Boston PD About Marathon Bombing Suspects
5.9.13 Brian Ross ABC News
http://news.yahoo.com/fbi-under-fire-didnt-tell-boston-pd-marathon-180445788--abc-news-topstories.html
The FBI never told the Boston police or the Massachusetts State Police about possible Russian terror connections of the suspected Marathon bombers until three and half days after the attack, law enforcement officials testified today before the House Homeland Security Committee.
"My fear is that the Boston bombers succeeded because our system failed," said committee chairman Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas).
Boston police commissioner Ed Davis told McCaul that his department was not told before the bombing that the FBI had opened an investigation into Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, or that Tsarnaev had traveled to the North Caucasus in 2012, even though he had three detectives and a sergeant assigned to the Joint Terror Task Force with the FBI.
"Would you have liked to known that?" asked McCaul. "Yes," said Davis, although he said later it was not clear that the knowledge would have prevented the bombings.
In a statement released today, the FBI said the Boston police department not only had access to the shared counter-terrorism incident management system, but the BPD "specifically had representatives assigned to the JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] squad that conducted the 2011 Assessment of deceased terrorism suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev."
"State and local law enforcement personnel, analysts and FBI personnel at Fusion Centers who have the appropriate security clearances are afforded the same unrestricted access as their FBI colleagues," the FBI said. The FBI said it conducted some 1,000 assessments in the Boston area alone the same year as Tsarnaev's.
The Boston police commissioner also revealed that not a single student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth called police after surveillance pictures of the other suspected bomber, 19-year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a student at the school, were made public.
Authorities believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were responsible for detonating a pair of bombs near the finish line at the Boston Marathon April 15, killing three, including an 8-year-old boy, and injuring more than 260 others. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police days after the attack, while Dzhokhar was injured and later captured.
Today the Los Angeles Times reported an intelligence assessment distributed five days before the race identified the finish line of the Boston Marathon as an "area of increased vulnerability" and warned extremists may use "small scale bombings." Massachusetts State Police spokesperson David Procopio told ABC News that such assessments are "routine" and "standard" and said similar language can be found in many threat assessments for large events.
"This is based on common sense and accumulated expertise in event security, and was not the result of actionable intelligence or any specific threat," Procopio said.
While the hearing in Washington was underway, police in Worcester revealed that the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been removed from the city "and is now entombed" at a location that was not disclosed.
Investigators are now looking into whether a distant cousin of the Tsarnaev's may have influenced the older brother in his radicalization. The cousin, Magomed Kartashov, is allegedly the founder of a group called The Union of the Just, which reportedly promotes the application of strict Islamic Sharia law and has been known to be anti-American.
= = =
Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington now DENIES his nation warned the United States about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2012
4.30.13 David Martosko and American Media Institute
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2317493/Saudi-Arabian-ambassador-Washington-DENIES-nation-warned-United-States-Tamerlan-Tsarnaev-2012.html
The Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. today denied its government warned the U.S. about accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
According to a highly placed source who spoke to MailOnline, the Saudis sent a written warning about Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012. That was long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds.
The official told MailOnline about a written warning from the Saudi government to the Department of Homeland Security, and said he had direct knowledge of that document.
But the Middle Eastern nation's embassy in Washington denied that account on Wednesday.
It issued a statement which read: 'The Saudi government had no prior information about the Boston bombers. Therefore, it is not true that any information, written or otherwise, was passed to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or any other US agency in this regard,' an embassy statement statement claimed.
'The Saudi government also does not have any record of any application by Tamerlan Tsarnaev for any visa to Saudi Arabia.'
The Saudis' warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.
Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also allegedly denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the source said. Tsarnaev's plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed.
The Saudis' warning to the U.S. government was also shared with the British government. 'It was very specific’ and warned that 'something was going to happen in a major U.S. city,' the Saudi official said during an extensive interview.
It 'did name Tamerlan specifically,' he added. The 'government-to-government' letter, which he said was sent to the Department of Homeland Security at the highest level, did not name Boston or suggest a date for his planned attack.
If true, the account will produce added pressure on the Homeland Security department and the White House to explain their collective inaction after similar warnings were offered about Tsarnaev by the Russian government.
A DHS official denied, however, that the agency received any such warning from Saudi intelligence about Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
'DHS has no knowledge of any communication from the Saudi government regarding information on the suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombing prior to the attack,' MailOnline learned from one Homeland Security official who declined to be named in this report.
The White House took a similar view. 'We and other relevant U.S. government agencies have no record of such a letter being received,' said Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council.
The letter likely came to DHS via the Saudi Ministry of Interior, the agency tasked with protecting the Saudi kingdom’s homeland.
A Homeland Security official confirmed Tuesday evening on the condition of anonymity that the 2012 letter exists, saying he had heard of the Saudi communication before MailOnline inquired about it.
An aide to a Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee speculated Tuesday about why the Obama administration contradicted the knowledgeable Saudi official.
‘It is possible the Department of Homeland Security received the information from the Saudi government but never passed it on to the White House,’ the GOP staffer said. 'Communication between DHS and the White House's national security apparatus isn't always what it should be.’
'I can easily see it happening where one hand didn't know what the other was doing because of a turf war.'
'Just like the different agencies in the Boston JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] want credit for breaking the Tsarnaev case,' the aide added, 'they sometimes jealously guard the very intel they should be sharing the most freely. Sometimes it makes no sense at all.'
House Homeland Security Committee chairman Mike McCaul plans to announce on Wednesday an investigative hearing to probe what U.S. intelligence knew prior to the Boston attacks, two senior Republican sources told MailOnline.
Separately, President Obama announced Tuesday that the U.S. government will launch a wide-ranging inquiry into the sharing of information among the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies of the federal government.
'We want to leave no stone unturned,' the president said in a rare White House press conference.
The internal review will be led by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and several inspectors general.
'This is not an investigation,' Clapper’s spokesman Shawn Turner said in a prepared statement. 'This is an independent review of information-sharing procedures. It is limited to the handling of information related to the suspects prior to the attack.'
It is not yet clear whether information from Saudi Arabia will be involved in Clapper's inter-agency review.
Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz appeared on CNN Tuesday afternoon, upbraiding the Obama administration for presuming that the federal government's handling of intelligence prior to the Boston bombings was appropriate and effective.
'As soon as the bombing happened we had officials, locally and from the feds, saying, "Oh, this was an isolated case, there was just one person involved." We didn't know that,' Chaffetz said.
The 'starting point' for a federal investigation, he said, must be, 'This is unacceptable, we will not stand for it, we will get to the bottom of it, and we will not rest until we figure it out.'
'Mr. President,' he said, addressing Obama, 'the starting point should be an intolerance that this thing happened.'
The high-ranking Saudi official whom MailOnlne interviewed at length provided a wealth of detail about the warning he says his government sent to the United States. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk publicly about foreign intelligence, or about Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic relationship with the United States.
He suggested that the Saudi Ministry of Interior sent the letter out of an abundance of caution in order to be helpful to the United States, even though its intelligence on Tsarnaev wasn't yet fully developed.
'With Saudi Arabia it's always code red,' he said. 'There's no code orange, or code yellow. Always red.'
The Saudi government, he added, alerted the U.S. in part because it believed American authorities should be inspecting packages that came to Tsarnaev in the mail in order to search for bomb-making components.
The written warning also allegedly named three Pakistanis who may be of interest to British authorities. The official declined to provide more details about the warning to the UK, but said the two governments received the same information.
The Ministry of Interior, he said, sent the letters in 2012, likely after Tsarnaev returned from Russia to the United States in July.
President Barack Obama's published schedule indicates that he met in the Oval Office with Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi Interior minister, on January 14, 2013.
The Saudis denied Tsarnaev entry to the kingdom when he sought to travel to Mecca in December 2011 for a pilgrimage known as an Umrah – one that is undertaken during months that don’t fall within the regular Hajj period of the year.
That rejected application came one month before he traveled to Russia, where U.S. intelligence sources believe he acquired training enabling him to construct and detonate the bombs that he and his younger brother placed hear the Boston Marathon’s finish line.
The younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is in federal custody at a prison medical facility.
The Saudi official who spoke to MailOnline speculated that Tsarnaev's residence in the United States might have made it more difficult for him to gain entry into the kingdom.
'U.S.-based Muslims who become radicalized and want to visit Mecca create an unusual problem,' he said, compelling the Saudi government 'to carefully examine applications.'
In the wake of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal met with Secretary of State John Kerry on April 16, and then had an unscheduled meeting with President Obama on April 17.
'This is the DNA of the Saudi government,' said the Saudi official, referring to officials in the royal court in Riyadh. 'This is how they work. They sent the letter, but that wasn't enough. They then sent the top guy to meet personally with the president.'
He dismissed the idea that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was likely trained by al Qaeda while he was outside the United States last year.
The Saudis' Yemen-based sources, he explained, said militants referred to Tamerlan dismissively as ‘the volunteer.’
'He was a gung-ho, self motivated jihadi who wasn't tasked by a larger group,' he said. 'There is no reason for anyone in Afghanistan to have in his thinking a scenario like this,' the official added, referring to pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon. 'He took the initiative. That’s why they call him "the volunteer."'
'The Boston thing is beneath them,’ he said of al Qaeda. ‘They don't think like this. This is like a firecracker to them. They want something big.'
Tamerlan may have boasted about his plans online, the Saudi official said, offering an explanation for how Yemen-based sources first learned of him. Islamist militants have well-developed social networks that can enable news to migrate quickly across vast distances.
The Saudi government sometimes tracks such radicals by launching fake jihadi websites to attract extremists. The Ministry of Interior then tracks them electronically, often across the world, and shares information with governments it considers friendly, including the United States.
'The Saudi Arabian government is doing everything it can to wipe out these people and treat America as a true friend,' the official said.
The Saudi intelligence services have a long history of providing credible information to America and Great Britain about looming threats.
'This is the fourth time the Saudi Arabian government has given the U.S. specific intel' about a possible terror plot, the official said, citing prior warnings about Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who repeatedly tried to light a fuse in his shoe to bring down American Airlines flight 63 bound for Miami in December 2001.
He also cited the 300-gram 'ink-cartridge bombs' planted on two cargo planes headed for the United States from Yemen in October 2010. Those explosives were intercepted in Dubai, and at an East Midlands airport in Great Britain.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev's namesake was a 15-century Central Asian warlord who referred to himself as ‘the sword of Islam.’ Sometimes spelled 'Tamerlane' in English, he was known for his cruelty.
When he conquered Baghdad, he reportedly made a pyramid of human skulls from unfortunate residents of that city. Although still revered in Chechnya and throughout Central Asia, the original Tamerlane is sometimes vilified in modern-day Saudi textbooks.
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