The Boston Marathon bombings were bad enough. The loss of life was terrible, but the runners and their families who lost legs and feet because they wanted to give their Dad a hug at the finish line were worse.
One week later, we all watch with trepidation as the first bomber is killed and the second captured bleeding in a boat in Watertown.
THE MOST TERRIBLE NEWS OF ALL IS THAT IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN PREVENTED!! This is EXACTLY the situation that DHS was supposed to catch. This is EXACTLY why the agencies were ORDERED to share information, and still these guys can tweet all they want, show violent Islamic videos on their web sites and call for Jihad and NOBODY NOTICES!!
This is made even more incomprehensible because the U.S. government was ALERTED BY THE RUSSIANS that one of them was DANGEROUS.
What do we need to do to get these agencies to start paying attention to these potential terrorists? DO WE NEED TO MAKE THEM WEAR A RED SHIRT?
If the IRS can keep track of every American and in 2 minutes call up their entire history of taxes, and the Department of Labor can calculate your benefit rates in less than 1 minute, and Social Security keep track of all your information – why can’t DHS and the FBI keep a contact database current?
Why can’t they have a person who scans these web sites and Facebook sites for Jihadist pages and then cross-references them with the site’s owner? Why can’t a trip to a violent region of the world trigger a PING, as I heard one congressman call it.
Every company in the world has a simple Contact database on their own customers and suppliers that gives them years of data. WHY CAN’T WE BE PROTECTED FROM THESE TERRORiSTS.
This one wasn’t hiding in the shadows – he was ON SOCIAL MEDIA! He wasn’t locked up in a cabin – he was traveling internationally, his brother was getting a scholarship. And they did this FOR YEARS!!
This intelligence failure is just exactly like 9/11 all over again. These agencies are so procedural that they cannot connect the dots. Ok – they’re human. But we have super computers that CAN connect the dots and do profiles and create alerts…
Maybe we should call Google and get some help. We obviously need it.