Repeating Sept. 11: Security Service Amateurs' Mistakes

Those who feared a gap are dealing with a chasm likely to produce the same effects of Sept. 11 if it were exploited; instead of a frustrated immigrant and a manipulated little brother, it could have been a well-rehearsed commander of al-Qaida.

This time, though, Michael Moore and a Fahrenheit 4/15 will not arrive to explain the ineptitudes of the Obama administration and its security services. And yet the incipiencies which allowed Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to strike the heart of America are the same. The first and most evident is the indifference of the FBI to Tamerlan, a Muslim Chechen immigrant who, on Jan. 12, 2012, packed his bags and returned for six months home to his father in Dagestan.

Since Chechnya was “normalized” and the Russians made pork meat of the Islamic militants, the real sanctuary of Caucasian fundamentalism is Dagestan. There Tamerlan learned to transform piñatas into bombs, to activate their detonators and to use pistols and shotguns. And yet on his re-entry on Aug. 17, 2012, there was no one waiting for him. The FBI — which had held him in its sights for years after the warnings of a foreign secret service, possibly Russian — did nothing. And yet suspicion would be due. The databases of the CIA claim that 80 percent of terrorists end up “totally excluded from the society in which they live.” Tamerlan surely was. Before heading to Dagestan he abandoned a promising boxing career, left his girlfriend and explained on Facebook that he didn’t have a single American friend. And already for several years he had dedicated himself, body and soul, to the diffusion of videos inspired by jihadist militants, with a particular predilection for those of Feiz Mohammed, a sheik with an Australian passport considered one of the most dangerous hatemongers of the jihadist galaxy. FBI agents did not seem too perturbed, though. They went to visit him; they asked his mother, Zubediat Tsarnaeva, to check on whom he frequents; they warned her that her son spent whole days on fundamentalist websites; but they didn’t lift a finger. According to the same FBI source, quoted yesterday by the American media, the agents of the Federal Bureau did not find anything “compromising” and decided to put the inquiry “to rest.”*

The “sleeping” inquiry didn’t even come out from under the covers after the massacre on Monday. From Monday to Thursday evening, when photos were released of the two suspects with small backpacks on their shoulders near the finish line, no one went to knock on Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s door.

The security services woke up from their slumber only after the sudden rash reaction of the terrorists who, having seen their own pictures on TV, ran to rob a shop to scrape together some money and sequester a Mercedes SUV to give themselves a means of transport. The ineptitude of the security services in the Obama era is not an isolated case. The older Nidal Hassan, Palestinian author of the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, almost killed 13 soldiers after long email exchanges, systematically intercepted, with Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist predicator of American origin who had fled to Yemen. And the Christmas 2009 attempt of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to hijack a U.S. airline with explosives hidden in his underwear had been signaled to the U.S. Embassy by the father of the attacker.

Nothing compared with the oversight of last September, when the ambassador in Libya was sent into the mouth of the terrorists hiding in Benghazi. The Boston blunder, though, risks revealing itself as fatal for Obama. After having lost the battle over arms, he risks seeing his reforms to immigration law also blocked. Before this step the “yes, we can” president risks arriving at the end of his second term without having realized even one of the many reforms with which he promised to change America.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.