The F.B.I. has concluded that there was little its agents could have done to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, according to law enforcement officials, rejecting criticism that it could have better monitored one of the suspects before the attack. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/us/fbi-said-to-conclude-it-could-not-have-averted-boston-attack.html?ref=us That conclusion is based on several internal reviews that examined how the bureau handled a request from a Russian intelligence agency in 2011 to investigate whether one of the suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had been radicalized during his time in the United States.
F.B.I. officials have concluded that the agents who conducted the investigation were constrained from conducting a more extensive investigation because of federal laws and Justice Department protocols. Agents cannot use surveillance tools like wiretapping for the type of investigation they were conducting.
The officials have also determined that had the agents known that Mr. Tsarnaev had traveled to Russia for months in 2012, they probably would not have investigated him again because there was no new evidence
Members of Congress have contended that the F.B.I. should have done a more extensive investigation of Mr. Tsarnaev in response to the Russian request. And they have said the bureau should have followed up with Mr. Tsarnaev after he returned from a trip to Russia in 2012.
Representative William Keating, Democrat of Massachusetts, sent a letter to James B. Comey, the incoming F.B.I. director. In the letter, Mr. Keating demanded that the bureau respond to several questions about its actions in the years before the attack. “Without forthright information from the F.B.I., we are prevented from taking the critical steps needed to protect the American public.”
Mr. Keating said in a telephone interview that the F.B.I. had refused three requests by the House Homeland Security Committee to testify about the attack, citing an investigation. “Until they give us facts that we can review as an independent branch of government, I don’t think that’s particularly useful what they think,”
The F.B.I. first learned that Mr. Tsarnaev may have been radicalized in early 2011, when Russian intelligence officials sent a letter to F.B.I. agents stationed at the American Embassy in Moscow. The letter, according to the F.B.I., said 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 Russia to join a terrorist group.
