Startingwith 9/11, Washington has been quick to holler “no one’s connecting the dots!” whenever there’s been an attack. But when it comes to ensuring those dots are collected, it’s another story.
Now we have the bombings in Boston, and we are seeing the same dynamic. Of all the questions, surely the most salient are these: What could the FBI have learned, when could it have learned it — and would it have made a difference?
Many Americans seem to have the impression that our federal agents are Jack Bauers who do as they please as they pursue the bad guys. But the FBI follows the law, as interpreted by the attorney general and distilled into the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.
For example, to get a wiretap for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a technique that falls under the “very intrusive” category, the FBI would have had to go to a judge with evidence it does not appear to have had.
As a green-card holder, Tsarnaev enjoyed the constitutional protections of a US citizen. And one reason his case expired is that there’s a time limit if investigators don’t turn up any evidence.
Let’s recall too that the FBI guidelines have been under fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union and Muslim groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (echoing the attacks on the NYPD for its intelligence collection in Muslim communities).
Before this, we had a Bush administration besieged for every initiative aimed at collecting those dots — whether it was the terrorist surveillance program, the interrogation of al Qaeda operatives or finding out whether, say, people connected to a terror investigation were checking out books on bomb-making.
In an ideal world, our politicians would find out what prevented us from uncovering the Tsarnaevs’ plans and fix it.
But we don’t have an ideal world.
We have Washington, where the likely answer to the Boston bombings will be even more rules governing, more bureaucracies involved in and more lawyers overseeing our intelligence investigations.
We don’t blame Boston on President Obama. But when we hear him talking — as he did this week — about “additional protocols and procedures,” we’d like to hear someone ask a question posed by Carrie Cordero, a former Justice official who now serves as Georgetown Law’s director of national-security studies:
Was our failure to connect the dots in Boston due to the lack of protocols, procedures, agencies and lawyers — or the overabundance of them?