PrairiePundit

NBC News: The Russian government warned U.S. authorities that Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a violent radical Islamist more than a year and a half before the April 2013 bombing, but authorities missed multiple chances to detain Tsarnaev when he was traveling to and from Dagestan for terror training, according to a soon-to-be released Congressional report. In one instance, according to the report prepared by investigators for the House Homeland Security Committee and copies of documents reviewed by NBC News, Tsarnaev was supposed to be pulled aside for questioning at JFK airport because he was considered potentially armed and dangerous, but he slipped through undetected because someone had misspelled his last name in a security database. ... There is much more. That sounds like a deadly typo.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Congressman Louie Gohmert questions how thorough the FBI investigation was if they did not know that the mosque attended by the bombers was founded by an Islamic radical who is in jail.

Austin American-Statesman: The FBI has taken over a fatal shooting investigation in Orlando Wednesday. According to sister station WFTV in Orlando, gunshots rang out just before midnight at an apartment complex. Authorities said a suspect, whose name was not released, was shot and killed. A man claiming to be the suspect's friend told WFTV reporter Steve Barrett that the man was being questioned by investigators about the Boston bombings. However, authorities have not confirmed that information. ... He had been friends with the older Boston bomber.  The dead man was a MMA fighter and the friendship was alleged to be based on Tamerlan's career as a boxer.  It is not clear what he was doing in Orlando, Florida or how he got into a gun fight with the FBI.   The dead man's name suggest a connection with Russia or the Caucuses--Ibragim Todashev.  The man in the story who said he was the dead man's friend  is named Khusen Taramov.

McCaul says Tamerlan's wife was radicalized along with him.

Matthew Continetti: Fitting that the House held hearings within 24 hours on both the Benghazi attack and the Boston marathon bombing. The two seemingly disparate events, separated by time and distance and sophistication, share much in common. By the close of each sorry episode, four people had died. The villains in each case considered themselves soldiers of Allah fighting a holy war against America. In both instances the political correctness of government officials prevented discovery of the truth. Benghazi and Boston are symptoms of the same disorder. They are twin studies in evasion. On Wednesday the House Oversight Committee held its well-publicized hearing on the events in Libya on September 11, 2012. Do not get lost in the weeds of response times and autopens and security budgets and reports of weapons shipments. The issue here is simple. What makes Benghazi a scandal is the Obama administration’s concerted effort in the days and weeks after the attack to downplay the Qaeda co...

NY Times: Signs in Russia That Boston Suspect Sought Extremists Officials are investigating reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, may have tried to contact Islamist extremists. Some of those contacts may have been with relatives in Russia and others with people in radical mosques.  Finding out what assistance they may have given to Tamerlan could be a win-win for  the US and Russia who would be glad to send them to the US for trial.

Washington Post: Federal law enforcement officials are sharpening their focus on the widow of the dead suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings after finding al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and other radical Islamist material on her computer, according to law enforcement officials. The probe of the computer belonging to Katherine Russell, 24, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is part of the effort by investigators to determine whether Russell knew anything about the April 15 bombing plot or helped the Tsarnaev brothers hide from authorities, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the surviving suspect, has told investigators that he and his brother learned to build the pressure-cooker bombs from English-language Inspire magazine, and that they were partly influenced by the online sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda propagandist who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. According to offici...

NY Times : Suspects in Boston Had Planned July Fourth Attack The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told the F.B.I. that he and his brother had considered suicide attacks and had been influenced by the Internet sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, according to law enforcement officials. Apparently they couldn't wait for July and chose to bomb the marathon which probably generated more worldwide attention for their endeavors.   What seems clear is they wanted to make an anti American statement with a mass murder attack. One of the things I have noticed about radical Islam is the proponents have no concept of non combatants.  It is like they are still operating in the pre middle ages of warfare.  They also do not understand the concept of collateral damage when attacking combatants.  These failures to comprehend modern warfare put the terrorist outside the accepted norms and makes them more brutal and more focused on murdering and maiming the i...

Jake Tapper finds the Custom border Protection Service did not get the word that should have exclude some from coming back into the US.

Boston Globe: Two Kazakh men and a third man have been arrested by federal authorities in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings, a law enforcement official familar with the case said this morning. The two men, Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, came to America from the Central Asian nation to study at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was also enrolled. The law enforcement official did not release the name of the third person arrested. The three people arrested were connected to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the surviving bomb suspect, at the university and allegedly helped him after the bombing, a different source told the Globe. The Boston police Web page said that three additional “suspects” had been taken into custody. It emphasized that there was no threat to public safety. ...  The Washington Post reports the three are charged with disposing of evidence after the fact, by taking it to a Boston landfill.  Earlier reports had...

Washington Free Beacon: Muslim extremists with ties to al Qaeda have been using Massachusetts and the city of Boston as a jihadi headquarters since at least 1993, according to a recent report by a top terrorism analyst. At least 26 residents were found to have ties to al Qaeda, according to the report by the Henry Jackson Society . The activity dates from before the Tsarnaev brothers, radical Muslim immigrants to the United States, were identified as the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. Jihadist activity has taken place in Massachusetts since at least 1993 and includes in-state fundraising for terrorism, “those convicted of planning jihad, and even those who have been killed while fighting abroad,” according to the report by terrorism analyst Robin Simcox . “The city [of Boston] and state of Massachusetts has a long history of ties to AQ [al Qaeda] and AQ-inspired militancy,” the report states. “Even prior to last week’s Boston bombing, there had been twenty six individuals ...

Daily Mail: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document. The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen. Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the source said. Tsarnaev's plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed. The Saudis' warning to the U.S. government was also shared with the British government. 'It was very specific’ and warned that 'something was going to happen in a major U.S. city,' the Saudi o...

WSJ: Investigators have found female DNA on at least one of the bombs used in the Boston Marathon attacks, though they haven't determined whose DNA it is or whether that means a woman helped the two suspects carry out the attacks, according to U.S. officials briefed on the probe. The officials familiar with the case cautioned that there could be multiple explanations for why the DNA of someone other than the two bombing suspects—Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar—could have been found on remnants of the exploded devices. The genetic material could have come, for example, from a store clerk who handled materials used in the bombs or a stray hair that ended up in the bomb. On Monday, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were seen leaving the Rhode Island home of the parents of Katherine Russell, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The elder brother died after a shootout with police four days after the April 15 bombings. Ms. Russell has been staying with her parents ...

Washington Times: The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says that evidence suggests the Boston bombing suspects had help in the attack and that he is concerned about a “wider conspiracy.” “Given the level of sophistication of this [explosive] device, the fact that the pressure cooker is a signature device that goes back to Pakistan and Afghanistan … leads me to believe there was a trainer,” Rep. Michael T. McCaul , Texas Republican, told “Fox News Sunday.” “The question, where is that trainer or trainers? Are they overseas in the Chechen region, or are they in the United States. And [with] my conversations with the FBI , that’s the big question.” Mr. McCaul says U.S. officials are casting a “wide net” worldwide to find anyone responsible for aiding the suspects, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev , who is in custody, and his brother, Tamerlan , who was killed in a shootout with police during the manhunt for the two. The lawmaker said he believes the mother of suspect Tamerlan Ts...

Michael Goodwin: According to a relative of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Chechen immigrant believed there is “oppression of the Muslim population around the world.” The relative described Tsarnaev to The New York Times this way: “He was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.” Bombing the Boston Marathon was the Tsarnaev brothers’ way of defending Islam. To say their argument boomeranged, however, isn’t fully true. Not as long as the Obama administration puts religious blinders on the defenders of our homeland. At its core, the Boston case reveals two fundamental truths. One, not all Muslims are terrorists. Two, in recent times, almost all terrorists are Muslims. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Police didn’t catch him by staking out lemonade stands. By the same logic, preventing terrorism requires close scrutiny of Muslim men leaning toward violent jihad. Had they followed that logic, the FBI could have prevented the bombing. But with each p...

Judge Jeanine has a tough reaction to the mother of the bombers.

CNN: House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said stopping questioning to read surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights may have kept investigators from getting valuable intelligence. McCaul, R-Texas, said the complaint could have been filed later and suggested a change in the Miranda laws allowing American citizens accused of terrorist activities to be questioned for at least 48 hours. "Having been a federal prosecutor, I think this rush to Mirandize cost us valuable intelligence in terms of other plots that may be out there," McCaul told reporters on Capitol Hill on Friday. "Remember that before he's Mirandized, he does discuss the fact that he's going to Times Square to detonate these other IEDs that were found in his older brother's apartment. "The only other avenue we had to get this intelligence is through this emergency exception to the Miranda warning," he said. "But in my judgment, the FB...

Daily Mail on Sunday: How carjacking victim of Boston bombers left his iPhone in his Mercedes so police could track them and thwart their plans to drive to New York I think that is pretty clever.  Police were apparently able to track the car.

AP/Politico: Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call. In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials said. The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family. As it was, Russian authorities told the FBI only that they had concerns that Tamerlan and his mother were religious extremists. With no additional information, the FBI conducted a limited inquiry and closed the case in June 2011. ...  The mother does seem to be untethered from reality and deeply into Islamic religious extremes. ...

Judith Miller questions the rush to charge which led to a hurried reading of Miranda warning which shut off the intelligence from the bomber.