‘Ultimate blame’ on White House for Boston attack, says Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Thursday that the Obama administration was ultimately to blame for failing to prevent last week's attack at the Boston Marathon.

The South Carolina lawmaker was asked if he believed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was responsible for terror suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev avoiding detection by federal law enforcement. American authorities were tipped off by Russian intelligence that Tsarnaev had ties to overseas terror groups.

"I have no idea who bears the blame. I just know the system is broken. The ultimate blame I think is with the administration," Graham said.

"The FBI and the CIA are ... they have great people, but you know we're going backwards in national security. Benghazi and Boston to me are examples of us going backward."

Tsarnaev was killed last Friday after a shoot-out with police in the Boston suburbs. His brother, Dzhokhar, was arrested hours later and has been charged as a co-conspirator in the terror attack that left three dead and hundreds wounded.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was interviewed in 2011 by the FBI and reportedly put onto a terror watch list by the CIA. Other reports have suggested that his naturalization application was halted after the Russian tip.

"That’s system failure, 12 years after 9/11," Graham said. "And it gets worse, the suspected radical Islamist, the person we got warning letters about is openly on the Internet for months talking about killing Americans and engaging in radical jihad against the United States and we were unable to connect the dots and pick that up. The rest is history."

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that the government's handling of the Tsarnaev terror tip was "under investigation."

"The issues related to this case and procedures and how they worked, what we learned in a warning from Russia, for example, and the action that sparked the FBI to take and to look into Tamerlan Tsarnaev — all of these issues are obviously under investigation," Carney said.

In a statement, the FBI said the Russian government had provided them "information 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 the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups."

The agency said it investigated Tsarnaev's phone records, online activity, known associations, travel history and education. The FBI also interviewed Tsarnaev and his family.

"The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2001," the agency said in a statement.

- Jeremey Herb contributed. Updated at 2:28 p.m.

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The Ultimate Treachery

I’m at a loss for words; I’m really not sure what to think of this.

What word would you use to describe someone from party A asking members of party B to vote down a member of party A for supporting a fundamental view of party A?

Politico’s Maggie Haberman is reporting that the leadership-affiliated Young Guns Network has sent out mailers asking Democrats to vote for Dick Lugar (not exactly a young gun) in the Indiana Republican primary against Richard Mourdock on May 8.  But that’s not all.  They are stirring up Democrats by referring to Mourdock as extreme.  In what way is he extreme?  He wants to eliminate the Department of Education!

Do you want to know what is really extreme?  The creation of the Department of Education, after surviving almost 200 years without it.  Since the DOE was created, the cost of college tuition has increased over 439% adjusted for inflation!  The rate of increase is almost exactly commensurate with the rate of growth of DOE subsidization.  As you can see from this chart, the government-induced housing bubble pales in comparison to the government-induced Big Education bubble.

US News and World Report

Remember that the Department of Education began operating on May 16, 1980.  Imagine how extreme the inflation in education costs would have been had the extremists thwarted the creation of the DOE back in 1980?  Come to think of it, what would we have done had Dick Lugar failed to vote to create the Department of Green Energy in 1977?  I guess that part was left off the mailer.

This is all economics 101 for Republicans, but I guess they feel they can say anything to an audience of Democrats, as long as they serve the purpose of reelecting an 80-year old liberal.  The real irony here, as Bill Kristol points out, is that Young Guns was created to “chart a new course for the center-right movement and the House majority.”  Lugar is neither new, center-right, or in the House!

Heaven forbid me to label this as Republican-In-Name-Only behavior, but let’s just call it plain old treachery.

Cross-posted from The Madison Project

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