Unaware of Tsarnaev warnings, Boston counterterror unit tracked (OWS) protesters
http://www.justiceonline.org/press-coverage/unaware-of-tsarnaev-warnings.html
In the fall of 2011, a key Boston police counterterror intelligence unit -- funded with millions of dollars in U.S. homeland security grants -- was closely monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations, including tracking the Facebook pages and websites of the protesters and writing reports on the potential impact on "commercial and financial sector assets" in downtown areas, according to internal police documents.
The police monitoring of the activities of Occupy Boston -- an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the country in 2011 -- came during a period after the U.S. government received the second of two warnings from the Russian government about the radical Islamic ties of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis told a congressional panel Thursday that his department was never alerted by any federal agency to the information about Tsarnaev, but added that it was "hard to say" whether it would have made any difference in preventing the bombing. FBI officials have insisted that the intelligence about Tsarnaev was vague and uncorroborated and that their own assessment at the time produced no "derogatory" information that justified opening a full-scale investigation.
But the internal Boston police documents, recently obtained by a civil liberties group, could raise fresh questions about the role of Homeland Security-funded "fusion centers" like the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, or BRIC, which conducted the monitoring. The Boston unit is one of 72 such units set up to collect, analyze and share intelligence about potential terror threats. While Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called the units “one of the centerpieces” of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, congressional critics have questioned their effectiveness and accused them in some cases of writing "useless" reports that infringed on civil liberties.
(More at the link.)
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