Sen. Lindsey Graham says America’s national-security apparatus broke down, both before and after the Boston bombings, and let political correctness get in the way of monitoring potential terrorists.
“I think political correctness is not monitoring these people’s Facebooks and websites,” Graham said Wednesday on on Fox News' Sean Hannity show.
“What gets me is that it was not hard to understand [TamerlanTsarnaev] was becoming radical before our eyes, but nobody really picked it up.”
Graham criticized the lack of information sharing between national-security and law- enforcement agencies after Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers believed to be responsible for the bombings.
“Information sharing doesn’t exist the way it should. When he leaves the country, [Department of Homeland Security] picks it up, but they don’t share with the FBI, the CIA,” said the South Carolina Republican. “That’s the 9/11 stove-piping.”
Graham said the signs were obvious that Tsarnaev was becoming a radical Islamist after he returned from Russia.
“When he got back in June of 2012, he created a YouTube channel on his Internet site, on his Facebook page, and he embraced radical Islam for the world to see,” Graham said.
After the Boston bombings, the FBI was slow to connect the dots, he added.
“When we found the photos of the two guys after the bombing, how could that not alert the system? You’d already interviewed this guy,” Graham said.“When they were asking the whole country, 'Do you know these two guys?', the question is, why didn’t the FBI know they had already talked to him?”
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