The Federal Bureau of Incompetence

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

11 April 14

evin Cullen of the Boston Globe, who is the best cityside columnist in American newspapers, pretty much has had it with the FBI. Actually, he pretty much had it with the FBI while covering how the Boston office of the Feebs ran camouflage for the murderous Whitey Bulger for couple of decades. But he further has had it because, as was revealed during the congressional hearings into the Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent firefight and search, the FBI may have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev that it declined to share with local authorities, and that it has been banging its own drum on television about how the FBI cracked the case.

Unfortunately, neither DesLauriers nor Douglas was able to shed any light on what the FBI did when it came to the advance warning they had from Russian authorities about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. A "60 Minutes" spokesman said correspondent Scott Pelley asked the question but producers decided the FBI's answers were, as he put it, "not newsworthy." Nothing the FBI has said about this is newsworthy, because they haven't said anything. It's standard operating procedure at the FBI. Wednesday's hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security in Washington raised more questions than answers because the FBI won't give answers. "Why would they be accountable to ‘60 Minutes' or the Globe or whoever when they aren't even accountable to Congress?" asks Bill Keating, the Massachusetts congressman who sits on that committee. Keating watched the "60 Minutes" episode, too, and almost fell off his chair because the FBI had been ducking Congress by suggesting they didn't want to compromise the investigation into the bombing or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's upcoming trial. "We asked the FBI to come before our committee three times, and they refused," Keating told me. "And then I see them on TV pointing at one of the Tsarnaev brothers in a surveillance photo . . . So they can go on TV, but they can't go before Congress?"

Why did the FBI slow-play the local cops on what the Russians told them about the elder Tsarnaev? They're not talking, not even to Congress, which really ought not to be optional at this point. In fact, the whole thing stinks of bureaucratic empire building and ass-covering. The New York Times ran a Bureau-centric piece in which the FBI's inspector general blamed the Russians, not for refusing to share information on Tsarnaev, but refusing to share enough information about him. (God, it must be nice to have the Russians to blame for things again.) From the Times:

Russian officials had told the F.B.I. in 2011 that the suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, "was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer" and that Mr. Tsarnaev "had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups." But after an initial investigation by the F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about Mr. Tsarnaev, according to the report, a review of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the bombing.

Now, even assuming the Russians were negligent in turning over all that they had concerning Tsarvaev's slide into improvised jihadism, I am sure that the police in Boston, Cambridge, or Watertown would have liked to know what the Russians did tell the FBI in 2011. Alas, the FBI does not work or play well with others. Cullen, again:

Right after 9/11, three very fine police leaders - Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans, Lowell Police Chief Ed Davis, and John Timoney, of the New York, Philadelphia, and Miami police - went to Washington to see FBI Director Bob Mueller. They knew that everything had changed when those planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania. They wanted assurances that the FBI would change, too, and begin sharing information with local police. But nothing changed. The FBI doesn't share information with other agencies. It never did. I've talked to Cambridge police officers who would have been all over Tamerlan Tsarnaev if they had known Russian authorities told the FBI he had extremist leanings. They never got that intelligence because the FBI couldn't be bothered sharing with local cops.

We have not been able to get this case right for a year. (Hanging over all of this is the fact that one of the primary witnesses against Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Ibragim Todashev, was shot to death in Florida while he was being interrogated by the FBI.) Dzokhar Tsarnaev is going to get hammered at his trial, and everybody will cheer, and the fact that we have not been able to get this case right for a year will be forgotten.