I agree — the various terrorist watch lists are both oppressive and pointless. We should be working to narrow their scope and eliminate them, not apply them to yet another area.

I suspect that’s most likely true.

MA has among the strictest gun laws in the nation (see http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/education/hed/hed_gun_laws.htm for details). I suspect that’s the reason the Tsarnaev brothers committed a bombing rather than a mass shooting.

You have yet to enumerate any good reasons, either legally or in the context of the FBI’s many other priorities.

The FBI doesn’t have infinite resources. Do you think they have the resources to tail every last person who’s attracted the enmity of an authoritarian regime somewhere? Do you think they should spend their resources on that rather than on investigating crimes that certainly have occurred? Do you really want a national criminal investigative agency with those kind of resources and that kind of reach?

Also, placing tracking devices on someone’s car requires a warrant (per recent SCotUS rulings), and that requires probable cause. What’s the probable cause on either of the Tsarnaev brothers prior to Apr 15?

And if they had known he bought fireworks… they could have told the state patrol he bought some fireworks illegal to possess in MA. Big deal, that’s a misdemeanor that almost everyone I know who grew up in MA committed at least once (myself included). It’s about as normal a crime for his age and location as speeding or smoking pot.

Assuming your information is 100% true, all he did was discuss violent jihad in general terms. That is not a crime, nor should it be. It isn’t even evidence, in and of itself, of intent to commit a crime. Talking about how you’d like to kill some people in the abstract is a million miles from actually killing people.

The closest thing to direct evidence I have seen that either of the Tsarnaev brothers committed a crime prior to Apr 15 is this report from the NYDN (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tamerlan-bought-bombs-article-1.1325504) of Tamerlan buying fireworks on Feb 6. That would count as an overt act in the furtherance of a conspiracy, and therefore a crime. But you’d never detect without surveillance pervasive enough to know every conversation that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had. Even people on house arrest aren’t subjected to that level of panopticon surveillance.

I don’t consider the Russian security services to be especially reliable sources, especially when it comes to Muslims from the Caucus mountains. Besides, the specific enmity of authoritarian governments is the sort of thing folks in my circles use to pick up attractive members of the appropriate sex. It’s certainly not evidence of criminal activity.

When was the conspiracy hatched? What specific actions did either of the Tsarnaev brothers take that represented probable cause for the FBI to suspect that a crime had been committed?

His mother said the FBI interviewed Tamerlan. That sounds like ‘looking into it’ to me.

The FBI is chartered to investigate crimes, not unsavory opinions or associations. The FBI is doing wrong when they investigate people or organization for activities which are not criminal.

You and your fellow travelers haven’t presented any evidence that either of the Tsarnaev brothers committed any crime whatsoever prior to April 15. No crime, nothing for the FBI to investigate. Or do you want them investigating people merely for having unsavory ideas or being unpopular with foreign governments? I certainly don’t, and I consider it to be a travesty when they do so.

I’m shocked how many people want to shove the Tsarnaev brothers into some sort of international terrorism box when just about all the evidence points to this attack being a variation on the all too common mass shootings in this country. Some white dude, depressed about his prospects, decides to slake his inchoate rage at the world by killing a bunch of people. Usually, they use guns because those are the easiest weapons to get in most of the US. But not in MA, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation and is surrounded by states with strict gun laws. The fact that he happens to have been a Muslim rather than a Christian doesn’t really change the overall calculus.

What are you suggesting they should have been investigating him for? Being unpopular with Putin’s goons? This Saudi nonsense has been denied by all parties and no evidence worthy of the name has been presented to back it up.

Decent people consider the number of citizens and permanent residents the US gov’t surveils already to be a very bad thing. Adding more people at the behest of foreign goons, as you propose, makes it worse, not better.

The FBI didn’t ignore it. They talked to him and found no evidence of criminal activity. Leaving him alone after that was the appropriate response to that set of facts.

Both the Russian and the Saudis will jail you (or deny you a visa, or pass nasty notes about you) for having the wrong political opinions. In the US, that’s not a crime, despite the best efforts of far too many people. It is not a crime to joke with your friends about doing horrible things outside of some very narrow circumstances. It is not a crime to read about how to commit a crime on the tubes It is not a crime to believe in theocracy, or that one ought to engage in violence to bring that about. Only the violence itself and the actions required to facilitate it are crimes, and that is as it should be.

The fact is that the Tsarnaev brothers could have easily refrained from committing any arrestable crime whatsoever until the morning of the bombing had they chosen to do so.

This is more nonsense from the Daily Fail — there was no such letter.

And for those who think Tsarnaev should have been investigated more thoroughly based on the Russian report… Do you really want Putin’s goons (and by extension, every other band of authoritarian goons who happen to be in charge of a government) to have the power to harass US citizens and permanent residents with a simple email? REALLY?

What happened is that giving a bunch of people who don’t talk to each other and don’t much like each other a common boss doesn’t result in them magically talking to each other and getting along. Anyone who’s ever been through (or even observed) a corporate re-org already knows that. Why would you consider that surprising?

There’s no evidence that the FBI bungled anything. The fact that the KGB (or whatever it is they call themselves these days) claims someone, especially someone from the Caucus, is a terrorist proves nothing of substance. The FBI asked the guy a few questions, found nothing they could act on, and let him go. For all you or anyone else can prove, he posed no threat to anyone other than his long-suffering wife a few years ago.

For those of you who think that was the wrong course of action… do you really want Putin’s goons to have the power to harass random US citizens and permanent residents with a phone call? REALLY?

Alex Jones conspiracy theories and a fraud site… great research, Holmes. Pull the other one.

That was sixty years ago, and a very different China. S. Korea is now one of China’s major trading partners — their bilateral trade exceeds N. Korea’s GDP by a very large margin. The arch-pragmatists who run the show in Beijing today base their foreign policy decisions on business, not ideology.

S. Korea is a major regional industrial and military power in its own right. A S. Korea consumed with re-integrating and re-building the northern half of the peninsula and its population would be substantially weaker than S. Korea today.

Please explain, in 100 words or less, why on Earth you think China would choose N. Korea over S. Korea in a military confrontation.