Boston bombing could have been prevented

Robert Spencer on Real Clear Religion:

...Even after the bombing should have awakened the authorities to the glaring shortcomings of their investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, President Obama seemed at a loss to imagine how the FBI might have made better use of the Russian intelligence: “It’s not as if the FBI did nothing. They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother...are there additional things that could have been done in the interim that might have prevented it?”

One additional thing — among many — that could have been done was an investigation of the mosque attended by the Tsarnaevs. And not just by them. The Tsarnaev brothers were not the only jihad terrorists to attend the Islamic Society of Boston (now the Muslim American Society of Boston) mosque. Aafia Siddiqui, aka “Lady al-Qaeda,” who was convicted of trying to murder American soldiers and may also have been plotting a jihad terror attack against an American city, was also a member of that mosque, as were convicted jihad terror plotter Tarek Mehanna and his accomplice, Ahmad Abousamra. The renowned Muslim Brotherhood sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has praised Hitler and called upon Muslims to finish the führer’s job of putting the Jews “in their place,” was a trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston and has addressed the mosque congregation during fundraisers. Another imam who has addressed the Boston congregation, Yasir Qadhi, has called for the replacement of the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law and said that the “life and prosperity” of Christians “holds no value in the state of Jihad.”

On June 12, 2013, as the scandal of the Obama administration’s massive surveillance of law-abiding Americans was breaking, it was revealed that there was one place where people could be safe from surveillance: inside a mosque. Investor’s Business Daily reported that “the government’s sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

“Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover sting operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.”

This panel “was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel’s formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.”

And specifically: “The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.”

So the Federal Bureau of Investigation was warned by at least one foreign government that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a jihadist. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was attending a Muslim Brotherhood-linked mosque founded by a principal al Qaeda financier. And the FBI sent agents to that mosque — not to investigate Tsarnaev or any other possible jihad activity there, but to engage in “outreach” to Muslims and spend time “talking to imams”...