Saudi Official: Saudi Arabia Warned About Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Now it appears TWO countries warned us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

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.

Crap. How many countries have to warn about a non-citizen before deport his ass?  Saudi Arabia banned him from going to Mecca, and we give him welfare benefits?  Really?

Yet again, this is another major terrorism failure of the Obama Administration.

And this is a snooze media fail, too.  What, is the U. S. noos media so busy swooning over Obama that the U. K. media has to do the actual work of journalism for them?

Ed Morrissey has more background on this story.  Our DHS denies knowing of any warning from Saudi Arabia.  And we all know how credible and competent DHS is.

Russia warned FBI “repeatedly” about Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Some may think I overstated matters when I called the Boston Bombing another failure of the Obama Administration.  It now appears I understated matters.

For it now appears Russia did not warn the FBI once about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but repeatedly:

Russian authorities contacted the US government with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev not once but “multiple’’ times, including an alert it sent after he was first investigated by FBI agents in Boston, raising new questions about whether the FBI should have paid more attention to the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, US senators briefed on the inves­tigation said Tuesday.

The FBI has previously said it interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 after it was initially contacted by the ­Russians. In their review, completed in summer 2011, the bureau found no ­evidence that Tsarnaev was a threat. “The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from” Russia, the agency said last week.

Following a closed briefing of the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday, Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said he believed that Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev in “multiple contacts,” including at least once since October 2011.

Again, the Boston Bombing is yet another major terrorism failure of the Obama Administration.  Ignore that if you like.  I won’t.

The Boston Bombing IS an Immigration Issue

Amnesty proponents, both Demorats and RINOs, are defecating on those who insist that we take a hard look at the Boston Bombing and take any immigration failures into consideration before proceeding further with importing Democrats immigration reform.  These rats say Boston has nothing to do with immigration issues at hand.

The hell it doesn’t.

First, we let the lovely Tsarnaev family come to the U. S. in the first place.  Then we let them all stay – even after Russia warned us about at least one of them – even after they got on welfare – even after one of them started posting jihadist videos on YouTube.

Year after year, we grossly mishandled the Tsarnaevs though there were obvious signs several of them were undesirable and worthy of deportation. The Tsarnaevs are one of a multitude of failures of our immigration system. And yet we can supposedly handle adding 11 million illegals into the immigration system in a way that improves the country?

With the Tsarnaevs we imported the ills of Chechnya and area.  With so-called immigration reform we will import more of the ills of North Mexico, including drug cartels.  I should say we are importing since the promise of amnesty has increased the flow of illegal immigration.

After Boston, “immigration reform” and amnesty in particular should not only be delayed, it should be stopped.

When stopping the import of terrorists, criminals, and looters becomes the focus of immigration reform, then we can do business.

Another Obama Administration Failure to Prevent Terrorism

Late Friday, the FBI released a statement that shows the Obama Administration has once again exercised inexcusable negligence and failed to prevent terrorism:

…in early 2011, a foreign government asked the FBI for information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.

In response to this 2011 request, the FBI checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.

So this foreign government (Russia?) contacted the FBI and told them the older Tsarnaev brother was a radical Muslim and was traveling overseas to join “underground groups”.  Tamerian was not a U. S. citizen.

So why the heck did we allow him back into the country?  And why was he not questioned when he later began posting jihadist videos on YouTube?  Again, he wasn’t a U. S. citizen.  By that time, he was an obvious candidate for deportation if not worse.

Of course, Obama himself did not make these decisions.  And micromanaging FBI investigations and DHS decisions is not his role.  But it happened under his watch and was influenced by his leadership.

(To be fair, the Russians failed in this episode as well.  Putin, a former KGB agent, cannot be happy about it.)

This episode is hardly in isolation.  The Obama administration has looked the other way in other cases of terrorism.  Benghazi was a spontaneous protest against a dumb YouTube video, remember?  The truth, of course, is that our people in Libya warned Washington about the danger and begged for more protection . . . and got less instead.  And Ft. Hood was “workplace violence.”  There were abundant warning signs beforehand in that case as well.  This attitude of negligence beforehand and head-in-the-sand afterwards has trickled down through the Obama administration . . . with deadly consequences.

Although I was on to this failure early on twitter (All the more reason to endure my rantings there.), I am now far from alone in my concern.  Although I do not think he called out Obama, Former CIA Director Jame Woolsey called the Boston Bombing “a government failure” on CNBC this morning.  No reasonable person can now question that the ball was dropped.  Strange how often that happens on poorly led teams.

Even in his strangely detached post-arrest statement, Obama spoke as if the motives behind the Boston bombing were still a mystery.  They are not at all.  The main motive is Jihadist Islam. 

Combine those brands of Islam with the Obama administration’s negligence, and you get Benghazi and Boston.

Why the Chick-fil-a Fight is Important

When I posted on the Chick-fil-a controversy last week, I mentioned that I did not pay much attention to it at first.  I thought it was just more lib city silliness.  But the more I think about it, the more I see its importance.

The bullying of Chick-fil-a brings together the Left’s wars on freedom of speech and freedom of religion.  The business is being attacked because the CEO, out of his deeply held Christian beliefs, has publicly supported traditional marriage and supported groups that share those values. That governments are joining in on the attack makes this all the more important.

Now the mayors of Boston and of Chicago are backing down somewhat.  Perhaps advisors whispered in their ears that Obama has not abolished the Constitution yet.  But the dangerous nature of their attacks remain.

For Leftist governments and activists in the West are using two tactics that we see in this controversy.  First, they are attacking freedom of religion while insisting they are doing no such thing.  They do this by “defining religious liberty down” by defining it as “freedom of worship” (as I’ve warned over a year ago), that you can worship in private as you please, but to actually live out your religious beliefs out in the world is another matter.  In daily life, the Almighty State is a jealous god that must be served, regardless of one’s petty outdated religious beliefs.

Second, they are attacking freedom of speech, both directly as the city governments of Boston and Chicago threatened to do, or indirectly by defining politically incorrect speech as “bigotry” unworthy of protection and worthy of vicious attack.  The bigot card is becoming more and more common in attempts to demonize opponents and shut down debate. 

William Jacobson opines that the use of the bigot card is accelerating now that Obama is on the politically correct side of the gay marriage debate.  But it is hard to miss that its use was becoming more frequent well before then.  Voicing traditional conservative views on social issues practically guarantees being smeared as a “bigot.”

Now people with backbones can handle the insults of the evil and of the stupid.  But with the mentality of the Left, it is a short step from attacking “bigoted” speech to banning it with the force of the government, as Christians and conservatives in the West have already experienced.

So this is why I hope Christians and conservatives do not let up in defending Chick-fil-a and in counterattacking the mayors of Boston and Chicago and their ilk.  The Left must taught and taught well that if you attack freedom of speech and freedom of religion in America, there is hell to pay.  Those moral midgets who hate freedom must be put in their place for the sake of the rest of us who still value freedom.

Chick-fil-a banned in Boston? “This is how fascism works.” UPDATE: Now Chicago.

When the news first came out that the Mayor of Boston wanted to ban Chick-fil-a from his fair city because CEO Dan Cathy refused to toe the politically correct line on gay marriage, I did not pay much attention to be honest.  I figured lib cities on the coasts do silly things, and this was just another silly thing.

But as I have reflected on it, I have become alarmed.  For governments discriminating against people and their businesses simply for openly holding traditional conservative views is reason for alarm.  Do we really think it will stop with Boston?  Or with the issue of gay marriage for that matter?

Now if individual Bostonians, or Lisa Henson for that matter, want to be jerks and boycott Chick-fil-a for political incorrectness, that is their right.  Others of us will in turn give the chain more business.  Heck, I love their sandwiches, waffle fries, and lemonade.  Annoying the Left will just make my meal more delicious.

But for a government to bully a business over religious or political views?

The Anchoress puts it very well:

If people are no longer entitled to their own opinions, or to think what they think, then we are not free people, at all. Period. Full stop. That’s a fundamental as it gets.

Further she says what the Mayor of Boston is doing “reeks of fascism.” And I completely agree.  Yet there are plenty of people cheering him on.

When Jonah Goldberg came out with his book Liberal Fascism, both the title and the thesis seemed a bit over the top.  But people of the Left even in the United States are acting more like fascists all the time.  The Nazis boycotted the businesses of Jewish people.  Many on the Left apparently want to imitate that episode and, with the support of government, boycott the businesses of conservative Christians.

Whatever happened to “tolerance”?  Methinks that word has been used and abused as a euphemism for crushing those who disagree with political correctness.

But then fascists always have had a talent for euphemisms.
----

MORE: I should have noted that the quote in my post title comes from The Anchoress herself.  Again, I commend her post to you.

UPDATE: Now Chicago is going fascist, too.  An alderman will attempt to block a permit to open a Chick-fil-a in the 1^st Ward.  He has the support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said in a statement, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.”

You got that right, fascist.