What did Ted Cruz mean when he said the feds missed the marathon bombing because of ‘political correctness?’
Fact-checking a line from Tuesday’s GOP debate.
Why didn’t U.S. authorities foresee the attacks on the Boston Marathon in April 2013?
During Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas posited a new answer.
“It’s not a lack of competence that is preventing the Obama administration from stopping these attacks. It is political correctness,’’ Cruz said. “The Tsarnaev brothers, the elder brother made a public call to jihad and the Obama administration didn’t target it.’’
The reference to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s “public call to jihad’’ immediately drew skepticism from Asma Khalid, a reporter for NPR who covered the bombings. What public call?
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The closest publicly available evidence of a social media account is his YouTube page, on which Tsarnaev created a playlist of favored videos titled “Terrorists.’’ Officials did not publicly identify a Facebook or Twitter account as belonging to the elder Tsarnaev.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger brother and co-conspirator, did use social media. He mostly used Twitter to post teenage musings on food, music, partying, and school.
It’s possible Cruz actually meant to refer to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s little-used second Twitter account, which was identified during his death penalty trial.
The account published fewer than 10 tweets in March 2013, a month before the bombings. The tweets praised al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki and expressed a desire to achieve “the highest levels of Jannah,’’ the Islamic conception of heaven.
An FBI analyst testified during Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial that these were evidence of his radicalized mindset ahead of the bombings.
A Cruz spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for clarification.
The FBI itself did have an eye on Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the bombings.
In 2011, Russian intelligence officials told the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother were likely adherents of radical Islam, according to an unclassified congressional report released in 2014. The Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Cambridge in 2011 and discovered “no link or ‘nexus’ to terrorism.’’ Still, his name was entered into law enforcement watch lists.
However, customs officials failed to search or interview him when he boarded a flight to Moscow in early 2012, the report found. And because of a misspelled last name and a mis-entered date of birth, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not pulled aside for questioning when he returned to the U.S. in July 2012, the report found.
“I came here to get involved in jihad,’’ Tamerlan Tsarnaev told his friend Magomed Kartashov while in Dagestan, according to Kartashov’s comments to the FBI.
The congressional report argued that if proper protocol had been followed, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing attacks could have been prevented. In addition, the report criticized the lack of communication between the FBI and local police forces.
Gallery: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death penalty trial, in courtroom sketches:
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