GOP Senators Concerned About Problems with Information Sharing
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Darren McCollester/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — After a two-and-a-half hour briefing with the FBI on the Boston Marathon bombing investigation, Republican Senators of the Senate Intelligence Committee said they are concerned some of the pre-9/11 problems of information sharing of have returned.
“I’m very concerned that there still seems to be serious problems with sharing information, including critical investigative information and that is troubling to me that this many years after the attacks on our country in 2001 that we still seem to have stove pipes that prevent information from being shared effectively not only among agencies but also with the same agency in one case,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said after the classified briefing.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the ranking member of the Committee, said that they will continue to investigate if all the information among agencies was adequately shared, and if it wasn’t, they’ve got to fix those problems.
“Post 9/11 we thought we had created a system that would allow for the free flow of information between agencies and I think there has been some stone walls and some stove pipes reconstructed that were probably unintentional but we’ve got to review that issue again and make sure that there is the free-flow of information,” he said.
Chambliss said in his briefing it was “pretty obvious that these were somewhat sophisticated weapons” that the Tsarnaev brothers used.
Chairwoman of the Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said that during the briefing with the FBI there was a long discussion on proper intelligence sharing among agencies and within agencies. The chairwoman said, however, that she will withhold judgment on any problems until the investigation is complete.
“We need to keep at that and we need to see if there any loopholes and if there are loopholes then we need to fix those loopholes,” she said.
Feinstein said as of now the FBI are still “trying to reconstruct what happened, how it happened, where the materials came from, did someone help, where the expertise came from, was it inspired, was it more sophisticated than that, what did he [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] do when he went to Dagestan, did he sit in his family’s house for six months or was he out there talking to people, what happened to people when he came back, was he radicalized, if so how, what were the experiences he had, what happened at the mosque — all of these things.”
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