Watch List Bombshell: FBI “Deep Dives” in Chechnya, Dagestan
The federal storyline surrounding the Boston Marathon bombing continues to evolve with the revelation that American state security agencies conducted “deep dives” into the cyber data of persons in Chechnya and Dagestan in the wake of the April 2013 attack.
These electronic “scrubs” resulted in the addition of thousands of names on the secret federal terror watch list. Evidence of this aggressive response contradicts previous accounts which, citing federal sources and documentation, asserted that although leads involving those regions were followed in the aftermath of the bombing, little of interest was found by federal investigators.
Specifically, government documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the federal Terrorist Screening Database ingested a “Chechnya Dagestan Scrub” as a part of US counterterrorism efforts in 2013. The cryptic Directorate of Terrorist Identities is the name of the federal database charged with processing tens of thousands of personal IDs for terrorists connections. The leaked documents state with regard to the Boston bombing:
Immediately following the incident, DTI contributed to FBI deep dives, identified potential suspects, and delivered information to national leadership as well as coordinated with the FBI on biometric holdings in TIDE.
TIDE is short for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. Federal authorities have insisted that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not IDed until his body was fingerprinted days after the bombing, despite claims from local law enforcement sources that the ethnic Chechen Tsarnaevs were identified prior to their firefight with police, which resulted in Tamerlan’s death.
In addition, the leaked details of a deep biometric “scrub” of Dagestan stand in contrast to reports of a post-bombing FBI investigative visit to the Central Asian country in June 2013. That visit did not focus on possible terrorist associates of the Tsarnaev brothers, according to previous reports. The definitive December 2013 backgrounder of the Tsarnaevs, compiled by the The Boston Globe with the cooperation of federal sources, especially the FBI, portrays US investigators as disinterested in associates of Tamerlan Tsaraev during his visit to Dagestan in the summer of 2012:
If US investigators suspected that Tamerlan had actually met with insurgents, Magomedov [Kartashov] and other members of the Union of the Just said, they never brought it up when they interviewed Tamerlan’s friends in Dagestan in June. The friends said they were never asked about Nidal or Plotnikov. This claim is supported by a three-hour recording of an interview by two FBI agents with one of Tamerlan’s friends in June, which the Globe was able to listen to. The names never come up.
Both William Plotnikov and Makhmud Mansur Nidal were regarded by Russian authorities as terrorists and were killed by Russian security assets – Nidal in May 2012 and Plotnikov in July 2012, days before Tamerlan returned to the US from Dagestan. Tamerlan was allowed in back into the US, despite the active terror watch list and Tamerlan’s previous interview with the FBI in 2011, which was prompted by a Russian tip.
The new documents also reveal that the CIA, via its project Hydra, dumped additional “clandestinely acquired foreign government information” into TIDE. This means that the CIA was – and presumably still is – performing a counterterror role that involves IDing likely threats to the US based on personally identifiable biometric data – acquired from foreign sources.
Taken as a whole, the new watch list leaks suggest that US security forces were in a position to process much greater detail on the pre-bombing activities of the Tsarnaev brothers than previously known. What is unknown is the extent to which federal authorities simply missed that data – or willfully ignored it in service of some other goal.
18 Notes/ Hide
- ashesxx0 reblogged this from thefreelance
- masasam liked this
- inktablet liked this
- frostyalert reblogged this from ladyjeanne
- frostyalert liked this
- ladyjeanne reblogged this from meenamaekay
- meenamaekay reblogged this from pandora-the-curious
- gardens-of-secrets-blog liked this
- thefreelance posted this