Ambassador James Woolsey, who ran the CIA under President Clinton, tells Newsmax TV that U.S. law enforcement appears to have failed to use all of the tools at its disposal to monitor Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

“This is not an intelligence matter,” said Woolsey in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “This is a law enforcement matter. It’s not the CIA’s business to try to prevent crime in the United States or arrest people or any of that.”

While the Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed the 26-year-old bombing suspect, who was killed in last week’s dramatic shootout with police, they presumably concluded that the older brother did not pose a danger or risk to the United States.

Woolsey, who now serves as the chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that the FBI might have been able to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to keep a watchful eye on Tsarnaev, particularly since Russian authorities had attempted to alert the U.S. to his ties with radical Islam.

“The Bureau might have gotten a warrant from a FISA court and been able to follow what Tamerlan was doing for several years given the fact that the Russians had taken the trouble to warn us about him,” Woolsey explained. “I don’t know why they didn’t’ use the FISA warrant. I don’t know why they closed the investigation but it doesn’t look to me as if we — the law enforcement side — used the tools that they had under American law.”

Meanwhile, he said, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police “did a much better job” of keeping tabs on two unrelated suspects who allegedly had been plotting to blow up a train bound from Toronto to New York.

“They’d been keeping up with them for a couple of years and they decided to move and to arrest them, presumably for conspiracy, because they were worried that they might take action,” said Woolsey, who was director of America’s top spy agency from 1993 to 1995.

“The Canadians didn’t close their file after they started looking into it,” he observed. “They kept at it.”

Woolsey said he could not fault the CIA since it is not the agency’s job to watch American citizens on U.S. soil.

“The CIA doesn’t spy on people in the United States,” he explained. “If anybody is going to have an informant inside an organization here in the US to keep them up to speed on what a potential terrorist might do in the US, that’s law enforcement.”

He praised New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for being “very aggressive” in tracking down potential threats to his city.

“They run operations in New York to keep track of what’s going on in potential terrorists and they do a very good job of it,” according to Woolsey, who has been labeled a neoconservative Democrat.

“What happened in 9/11 was that there was not good communication between the CIA and the FBI,” he recalled. “That’s true, but that detailed communication was in very many ways barred by a Justice Department ruling that was put out during the Clinton administration that build a so-called Chinese wall not only between intelligence and law enforcement, but between parts of the FBI to where the people doing criminal investigations in the bureau were not able to talk to the people who were doing counterintelligence.”

He said it was a “very close call” as to whether the Obama administration should have treated surviving suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.

Woolsey could only recall one case of U.S. citizens being arrested, prosecuted, and executed on American soil during World War II.

“World War II was a different kind of war than we are in now and some people would say we’re really at peace and these are just isolated incidents,” he said. “And so we ought to deal with each terrorist as if he were a bank robber and give him all the rights that an American criminal defendant has, whereas an illegal combatant overseas, say in Afghanistan today, obviously does not have those kinds of rights.”

While the Tsarnaev brothers may have posed a legal tightrope for law enforcement officials, the Obama administration has stretched “political correctness” in a number of cases, according to Woolsey.

“The administration really, really stretches the political correctness there to try to make it look as if they’ve already won the war on terror and this is just something else,” he said, pointing to the case of the Ft. Hood shooter, whom the administration classified under workplace violence.

“He has a business card that effectively calls himself a jihadi, and when he kills the 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood, he’s shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Woolsey recalls. “Now, it’s pretty hard to think of that as workplace violence but that’s what the administration has done and the report on Major Hasan never even mentioned the words ‘Islam,’ ‘jihad,’ or anything like that.”

WASHINGTON — The FBI and other law enforcement agencies were aware of at least one of the Boston terror suspects for several years, and even failed to deport him after a domestic violence conviction in 2009.

The FBI in 2011 interviewed one of the brothers suspected in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, a disclosure that raises questions about whether the government missed potential warning signs about the men’s behavior.

The brothers had not been under surveillance as possible militants, U.S. government officials said. But the FBI said in a statement on Friday that in 2011 it interviewed Tamerlan at the request of a foreign government, which it did not identify.

“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,” the FBI statement said.

The matter was closed because interviews with Tamerlan and family members “did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign”.Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed early Friday in Boston after an overnight shootout with police. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, was taken into custody on Friday evening in the Boston suburb of Watertown after a dramatic, day-long manhunt, Boston police said.

Bleeding and in serious condition, Dzhokhar is in a Boston hospital, a Massachusetts State Police spokesman said.

A spokeswoman for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Kelly Lawman, confirmed on Saturday that Tsarnaev was being treated there, but declined comment on his condition.

The revelation that the elder Tsarnaev was on U.S. law enforcement authorities’ radar screens seemed likely to raise uncomfortable questions for the Obama administration about whether it could have done anything to detect and stop the plot.
“It’s new information to me and it’s very disturbing that he’s on the FBI radar screen,” Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said on CNN late Friday.

In an interview with Russian state television broadcaster RT, the mother of the bombing brothers said Tamerlan, the older of the two suspects, had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout with police a day before his brother’s capture yesterday, was accessing extremist sites and was closely monitored by the FBI, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said in a phone interview in English from Makhachkala, in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, posted on the channel’s website.

“My son would never do this,” Tsarnaeva said. “He was controlled by the FBI for three to five years, they knew what my son was doing, they knew what actions, on what sites on the Internet he was going,” she said. “So how could this happen? They were controlling every step of his.”

Tsarnaeva, whose younger son Dzhokar, 19, was captured after an almost 24-hour manhunt that shut down Boston and surrounding cities, said she had been interviewed by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents about Tamerlan, who had described him as an “extremist leader.”

The brothers’ father, Anzor, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, said he was present when the FBI interviewed Tamerlan in Cambridge. He said they visited for what they called “prevention” activities.

“They said: ‘We know what sites you are on, we know where you are calling, we know everything about you. Everything,’” he said as cited in the interview.

Tamerlan, a legal resident of the U.S., flew out of the country on a flight bound for Russia in January 2012 and may not have returned until July, said two law enforcement officials briefed on his travel.

U.S. intelligence agencies reviewing international communications and other terrorism intelligence found no signs that the suspected bombers were members of, or inspired by, any foreign terror group, said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified because those matters are classified.

The Tsarnaev brothers and their two sisters moved to the Dagestan region of Russia in October 2001 from the central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan as refugees, and left for the U.S in March 2002, said Emirmagomed Davudov, director of Gimnasium Number 1 in Dagestan, where Tamerlan went to the seventh grade and Dzhokhar to first grade.

Ruslan Tsarni, their uncle in Gaithersburg, Maryland, said his brother’s children arrived in Cambridge when they immigrated in 2003. Asked for a possible motive for the attacks, Tsarni said they were “losers not being able to settle themselves and thereby just hating everybody who did.”

National security and law enforcement authorities said on earlier Friday that they had not turned up any evidence that the Tsarnaevs had contacts with al Qaeda or other militants overseas.

The brothers were in the United States legally. But Tamerlan Tsarnaev could have been deported after an alleged domestic violence arrest in 2009, the website Judicial Watch reports. It is unclear whether Tsarnaev was convicted in the case, but the arrest alone would have been sufficient for deportation, the site reports.

Tsarnaev came to this country in 2006 on a tourist visa, which means his alleged crime occurred within his first five years in the U.S.

According to Federal Immigration Law, anyone who commits a crime of “moral turpitude,”  including violent crimes such as assault and battery, during the first five years after being admitted to the country can be deported if the crime was punishable by a one-year jail sentence.
Violent plots involving a single individual or small groups who self-radicalize and have minimal dealings with other militants can be extremely difficult to detect in advance, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials and private experts.The revelation about the FBI contacts with the elder Tsarnaev came as U.S. officials told Reuters that investigators are scouring government data banks to determine if spy and police agencies missed potential clues that might have alerted them to the two brothers, originally from the Russian republic of Chechnya.
Another top priority for investigators is to determine whether the brothers had any confederates either inside the United States or overseas, one U.S. official said. This official and others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Three people were taken into custody for questioning in New Bedford, Massachusetts, police said on Friday. Two men and a woman are being questioned by the FBI “on the assumption there is an affiliation with” Tsarnaev, Lieutenant Robert Richard of the New Bedford Police said.
One official said the possibility that the U.S. government had information that should have raised questions about the Tsarnaev brothers before the attack could not be ruled out. Other officials said they were unaware that such material had turned up.
In several recent cases, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies failed to put together clues that, in hindsight, might have led them to pre-empt a plot.
In 2009, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hassan killed 13 people and wounded another 32 at Fort Hood, Texas. Prior to the shooting spree, Hassan had email contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric and leader of al Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.
U.S. authorities had investigated Hassan’s emails, but concluded they posed no threat of violence.
The father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber” who tried to bring down a U.S. jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, reported suspicions about his son’s activities to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. But Abdulmutallab’s U.S. visa was never revoked.
A report by the Senate intelligence committee heavily criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to act on available information in that case.
But Brian Jenkins, a respected terrorism expert at the RAND Corp., dismissed the idea that the Boston bombings represented an intelligence failure.
People will inevitably ask, “did we miss something in intelligence?” said Jenkins, speaking before the news of the 2011 FBI interview with Tamerlan Tsarnaev become public.
“Some people will label it an ‘intelligence failure.’ But that’s because people have come to expect 100 percent security,” he said.
© 2013 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.