After all, the feds ignored critical warnings from Russia about the older Chechen terrorist (Tamerlan Tsarnaev) and the FBI even kept the information from Boston Police, which could have kept a closer eye on him. Additionally, Judicial Watch reported days after the bombings that Tamerlan, 26, and not a U.S. citizen could have been deported years ago after a criminal arrest.

Adding insult to injury, the other bomber, little brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was rewarded with American Citizenship on September 11, 2012 in Boston, according to a JW source. The 19-year-old was granted asylum in Arlington Virginia on September 27, 2002, JW’s source reveals. This week a mainstream media outlet reports that Dzhokhar left a note claiming responsibility for the bombings as retaliation for America’s actions against Muslims.

Americans have the right to know how their government handled the immigration applications of these two Muslim terrorists. At least that’s the argument used by the Boston newspaper that requested the information from DHS. The paper asked for the records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a tool often used by Judicial Watch to force transparency in government. In fact, JW is also investigating the Boston bombings and has filed several FOIAs in the case.

As is the common in many of these situations, obtaining records will be an uphill battle because the government can utilize a number of excuses to withhold information from the public. In this particular case, DHS is claiming an exemption in federal law that shields records or information “compiled for law enforcement purposes, the release of which could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

In a rejection letter to the paper, the senior director of FOIA operations at DHS writes that he has determined that the records are part of an open and ongoing law enforcement investigation. “Accordingly, those documents are being withheld,” he says. The DHS FOIA director did not elaborate on how the release of the terrorists’ civil immigration records could possibly interfere with the criminal probe, especially in the case of the dead brother.

Thankfully, the media and independent watchdog groups like JW work to keep the government in check by using important tools like FOIA as well as the legal system. The job is getting tougher and tougher because the Obama administration is using unprecedented intimidation tactics behind the scenes. This includes using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as a political tool against conservative groups like JW and unscrupulous spying on a major news conglomerate (Associated Press).

It actually gets better; when the feds finally got a clue the spy, Marta Rita Velazquez, fled to a northern European country that doesn’t extradite citizens accused of espionage so she’s over there flipping the finger at Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, Velazquez got charged nearly a decade ago with conspiracy to commit espionage and this week the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally unsealed the indictment.

It’s essentially a worthless piece of paper, but it reveals embarrassing details of how the U.S. government let a foreign spy, who collaborated with a fellow spy that’s currently in prison, get away. A graduate of a prestigious Ivy League university, the Puerto Rican-born Velazquez worked at several government agencies, earned top secret security clearance and represented the U.S. at embassies in two Central American countries.

The feds say she started spying for Cuba, which for years has appeared on the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, around 1983. Velazquez conspired with others to transmit to the Cuban government and its agents documents and information relating to U.S. national defense, with the intent that they would be used to injure the United States, according to the indictment.

Though she ran this operation for decades, the FBI only heard about Velazquez in 2002 because her partner in crime, Ana Belen Montes, a former Defense Department analyst, pleaded guilty to spying for Cuba for 17 years. Montes, who’s serving a 25-year prison sentence, ratted out her buddy. Both women spied for the Cuban Intelligence Service.

When Velazquez discovered she was being investigated, she took off to Stockholm because she obviously knew that a treaty between the U.S. and Sweden prohibits extradition for spying. If she were tried and convicted, she could face life in prison. It’s unlikely that will ever happen because the U.S. let her get away. And you wonder why our “intelligence” agencies can’t keep track of domestic terrorists, even when a foreign government spoon-feeds us valuable information?

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence arrest and conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity to deport Tsarnaev but evidently didn’t feel he represented a big enough threat.

Other reporting confirms Tsarnaev’s arrest for domestic violence but we’re seeking confirmation of a conviction. Nevertheless he would have been subject to removal for the arrest itself.

Adding insult to injury, the other bomber, little brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was rewarded with American Citizenship on September 11, 2012 in Boston, according to JW’s source. The 19-year-old, who is still on the run, was granted asylum in Arlington Virginia on September 27, 2002, JW’s source reveals.

Years before these Chechen terrorists carried out the Boston Marathon bombings Judicial Watch uncovered critical intelligence documentsdetailing al Qaeda’s activities in Chechnya, including the creation of a 1995 camp—ordered by Osama bin Laden—to train “international terrorists” to carry out plots against Americans and westerners.

The goal, according to the once-classified documents obtained by JW in 2011, was to “establish a worldwide Islamic state capable of directly challenging the U.S., China, Russia, and what it views as Judeo-Christian and Confucian domination.” Further, radical Islamic regimes were to be established and supported everywhere possible, from “sea to sea,” including Chechnya. “Terrorist activities are to be conducted against Americans and westerners…” according to the report issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

In other words, it was only a matter of time before terrorists from the predominantly radical Islamic republic carried out an attack on U.S. soil. Chechnya declared independence from Russia in 1991 and Chechen militants are quite the savvy terrorists because they’ve successfully targeted Moscow with bombings and hostage plots for more than two decades.

In 2004 Chechen Islamic militants attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia and they murdered 380 children, parents, teachers and visitors after holding more than 1,000 captive for three days. Judicial Watch also obtained intelligence documents from the government detailing that terrorist attack. Jointly released by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the October 12, 2004, report analyzes the Beslan terrorist attack with a view toward gleaning lessons for potential attacks on schools in the United States.

There’s no telling how many of these Chechen terrorists have infiltrated the United States or how many opportunities the government has missed to protect the country by deporting them. Osama bin Laden specifically chose Chechnya as a terrorist training camp because it’s an “area unreachable by strikes from the west,” according to the intelligence report obtained by JW years ago.

More than 4.9 million have passed the various background checks and scrutiny to access some of the nation’s most sensitive information and many more will soon enjoy the privilege, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the broad agency that serves as an umbrella for the intelligence community and advises the president. In all the ODNI is composed of more than a dozen spy agencies, including Air Force, Army, Navy, Treasury and Coast Guard intelligence as well as the CIA and FBI.

In the last year alone, 54,199 new government employees received security clearance to access classified information, representing a 1.1% increase over the previous year. Of the overall clearances, 791,200 government workers, 483,263 contractors and 135,506 designated as “others” hold top-secret clearances. The figures are outlined in an annual ODNI report that marks only the third official count of security-cleared personnel in the U.S. government.

“It is possible that there were more security-cleared Americans at some points during the Cold War, when there was a larger standing military with more cleared military personnel than there are today,” the report says. “But until 2010, no comprehensive account of the size of the security clearance system had ever been produced. So the new 4.9 million figure is the largest official figure ever published.”

The ODNI was actually forced to provide the information that for years it successfully kept from the public. However, in 2010 the Intelligence Authorization Act established a requirement for the president to submit an annual report to Congress on the security clearance process. It must include the total number of security clearances across government and in-depth metrics on the timeliness of security clearance determinations in the Intelligence Community (IC).

This essentially forced the ODNI to provide the information, which is has long resisted doing. In fact, it pushed hard and actually convinced a Senate Intelligence Committee to eliminate the reporting requirement all together. A government watchdog blog broke the story last summer and rounded up several public interest groups to protest the move by writing to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to preserve the annual reporting requirement. Otherwise, the information would be top secret.

The ODNI has long been embroiled in controversy over its failures involving the 9/11 attacks. In 2009 a scathing internal report blasted the agency for having the same mismanagement, turf battles and communication breakdowns that were blamed for the failures leading to the terrorist attacks years earlier. Yet nearly eight years after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, the audit revealed that the spy agencies were still prone to disastrous intelligence failures that put the country at risk.

Earlier this year, Judicial Watch sued the ODNI for records involving the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. JW was forced to file the lawsuit because the ODNI failed to respond to a public records request under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that dates back to mid-October 2012. Under federal law, the agency was supposed to respond by November 26, but has failed to do so.

If it wasn’t so scary it would certainly be funny. As we approach the 12^th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history, our elected officials are making these seemingly empty promises to once and for all secure our borders with these measures which should have been implemented long ago. This is almost comical.

After duking it out for weeks, the bipartisan group of U.S. Senators crafting an immigration reform bill is ready to announce its plan to the American people. Here are the key points, which are being heavily touted by Florida Republican Marco Rubio, one of the geniuses working on the bill. Border security would finally be tightened in the coming years, the outdated foreign visa system that let several of the 9/11 hijackers remain in the country to plan their attack will be modernized and employers who hire undocumented workers will be punished.

A draft of the bill will include a number of measures to achieve “real border security, including fencing,” Rubio said in a national media interview. “If the Department of Homeland Security does not secure the border, does not meet the metrics of 100 percent awareness [of illegal border crossings] and 90 percent apprehension [of those crossing the border illegally] within in the first five years, then they lose control of the issue,” Rubio explained. “Then it goes to a border commission made up of people that live and have to deal with the border and they will take care of that problem. And it’ll be funded to ensure that that happens.”

Sure sounds like a lot of rambling. Let’s move on to the modernized visa system, which Rubio claims will monitor foreigners that enter with temporary visas but don’t leave when they expire. Government audits have for years exposed how the U.S. loses track of millions of visa over stayers but little has been done to correct the problem. In fact, nearly half of the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants actually entered the U.S. legally but overstayed their visa, according to a federal report. The new law will have an entry and exit system to track visas, Rubio promises without offering specifics.  

The mandatory employment verification system, known as E-Verify, has been floating around for years but it hasn’t been very effective because it’s not consistently enforced. Rubio says this will change under the plan he’s promoting. In fact, he assures that illegal immigration will be discouraged by creating a forbidden job market for undocumented workers. Illegal immigrants simply “wont’ be able to find a job” if they can’t pass the E-Verify check, the senator asserts. It gets better; employers will have a “strong disincentive” to hire illegal aliens because they will finally face consequences for doing so, Rubio says.

Geez, why didn’t anyone think of this before? Promoting these common-sense measures that should have been implemented long ago as a grand immigration reform plan is insulting. Makes you wonder if Rubio has been out in the scorching Florida sun too long, after all he represents the Sunshine State in the Senate.

This is a guy who was convicted in federal court for planning to wage a “war of urban terrorism” against the United States, including the attack of a military installation on Staten Island and other New York landmarks like the United Nations building, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, a federal office building in Manhattan and the George Washington Bridge. His name is Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and he’s also known as the blind sheik.

In 1993 he masterminded the World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured about 1,000 when terrorists detonated a truck bomb in the parking garage of the center’s north tower. Three years later the sheik was sentenced to life in prison and his home is a solitary confinement cell in North Carolina. For many Muslims he’s a hero and in his native Egypt he’s like a rock star. In fact, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi has vowed to free the blind sheik.

Thanks to a sophisticated social media messaging machine the terrorist sheik is more popular than ever and his devoted followers can stay connected to his radical Islamist teachings while Uncle Sam supports him in prison. A political news conglomerate broke this enraging story, citing the work of a respected nonpartisan organization (Middle East Media Research Institute—MEMRI) that analyzes Middle Eastern and South Asian media.

The terrorist sheik is on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and he has a Chicago-based website (Sheikh-omar.com) dedicated to getting him released from jail. His official website was created in June 2010, according MEMRI, and it’s administered by one of his sons, Ammar Omar Abdel-Rahman. The Sheik’s Facebook page includes video footage of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, endorsing the kidnapping of Americans overseas.

So why isn’t the U.S. government taking any action? Federal authorities say they can’t do anything about the convicted terrorist’s social media escapades because there’s nothing illegal about it. Never mind that the various posts, all included in MEMRI’s report, advocate the convicted sheik’s jihadist acts against Americans. Unless there is a direct terror threat made by those running the site, the U.S. can’t act, according a source quoted in the story.

In the meantime Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) goes around shutting down internet websites that help users download copyrighted music and movies. It’s part of the administration’s effort to regulate the internet and control its content, though the official explanation from Washington is that the government simply wants to protect intellectual property by cracking down on piracy. Dozens of file-sharing music and movie websites have been shut down by DHS as part of a program called “Operation in Our Sites.”

The case comes out of Texas and it is quite serious. A special agent in charge of DHS’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), Eugenio Pedraza, directed agents to engage in a scheme to falsify documents in open criminal investigative case files, including numerous probes in which DHS employees were suspected of participating in the illegal smuggling of undocumented aliens and/or narcotics into the United States.

The cover up is believed to have affected at least seven investigations into Customs and Border Protection officers and Border Patrol agents (both are DHS agencies) accused of taking bribes to allow drug shipments and illegal immigrants through ports of entry in the U.S. between 2009 and 2011. Pedraza was trying to conceal severe lapses in the field office, including the deficient investigative standards of the OIG he ran, according to federal authorities.

Additionally, authorities say Pedraza was trying to cover up his failure to provide his subordinates with adequate training and supervision and his failure to ensure the FBI was being appropriately notified of inspector general investigations. This is how the plan worked, according to the feds; at Pedraza’s direction, DHS employees created and placed into investigative files backdated memoranda of activity that falsely reflected investigations that never occurred; worksheets that falsely reflected supervisory case reviews by Pedraza with his agents and backdated, unsent letters were signed by Pedraza that purported to inform the FBI of an inspector general probe.

Pedraza has been charged with six counts of falsification of records in federal investigations, five counts of obstructing an agency proceeding, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of conspiracy. Another agent, Marco Rodriguez was also charged with two counts of falsification of records in federal investigations, two counts of obstructing an agency proceeding and one count of conspiracy.

At least five other federal agents have been implicated but were not criminally charged this time around. Besides Pedraza and Rodriguez, another DHS special agent (Wayne Ball) involved in the scheme previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to falsify records in federal investigations. In federal court appearances this week both Pedraza and Rodriguez pleaded not guilty.

It’s bad enough that corrupt federal agents are putting national security at risk by selling U.S. entry to the highest bidding drug dealer or illegal immigrant smuggling ring. This case exposes an even scarier scenario; that the watchdog charged cracking down on it is instead part of the problem. There are 64 inspector general offices that work to rout out federal government waste, fraud and corruption. As per a 1978 law, they are required to act independently when they investigate their respective federal agencies.

Unbelievable, but true; while the government meddles in areas that it shouldn’t, it fails miserably to fulfill its duties. Critical safety and security risks identified years ago at labs that deal with deadly bioterror germs have been largely ignored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), leaving the nation dangerously vulnerable to a chemical attack.

There are around 3,500 facilities throughout the country that conduct research with potential bioterror germs and a DHS branch called Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) is responsible for assuring that they are secure under a special program known as Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS). This has not happened, according to several federal audits that date back to 2007.

In the latest probe, released just weeks ago, investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, reveal that the DHS has essentially been derelict in its duties. Despite previous reports exposing serious security problems at the facilities, DHS has done little to address the issue, according to the latest GAO report.

In fact federal officials have for years failed to develop national standards for lab design, construction and operation, the GAO says, even though investigators called for the standards more than three years ago. “Since 2007, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) has assigned about 3,500 high-risk chemical facilities to risk-based tiers under its Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program, but it has not fully assessed its approach for doing so,” the report says. “The approach ISCD used to assess risk and make decisions to place facilities in final tiers does not consider all of the elements of consequence, threat, and vulnerability associated with a terrorist attack involving certain chemicals.”

A separate federal audit released months ago also determined that federal officials have failed significantly to detect security and safety violations during actual inspections of bioterror labs. The missed violations include the transfer of anthrax and plague to an unauthorized facility and allowing workers at multiple research labs to remain on the job with expired security risk assessments.

 ”As a result, there is increased risk of the misuse of select agents and the potential for serious security violations going undetected,” according to that report, which was issued last November by the inspector general at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Investigators recommended the obvious; a revised inspection procedure and the establishment of effective security policies.  

This is a dire issue that doesn’t appear to be taken seriously by the feds. After all, facilities that produce, store or use toxic or hazardous chemicals could be used by terrorists to inflict mass casualties in the United States. That’s precisely why a law was passed requiring DHS to regulate and establish security standards for “high-risk chemical facilities.” More than a decade after the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, it still hasn’t occurred.

Only a handful of U.S. allies—including Canada, Mexico, South Korea and the Netherlands—currently enjoy the perk while other American partners like Germany and France are still excluded. Incredibly, the Obama administration has cut a deal with Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 2001 terrorist attacks, to enjoy the privilege under a program called Global Entry.

It’s not the kind of story you’ll see in the mainstream media, but a research center dedicated to investigating radical Islamic terrorist groups, their operations and funding, brought much-needed attention to it this week. Citing Homeland Security sources, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) reveals that it will mark the first time that the Saudi government has a direct role in vetting who is eligible for fast-tracked entry into the United States.

This is a “slap in the face,” according to IPT, which posts a number of in-depth reports on its website on topics ranging from American jihadist terrorism to the influence of Islamic law on law enforcement and the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the investigations that relate to this particular issue is a 2011 report documenting how textbooks long used in Saudi Arabia’s schools promote religious violence. Keep in mind that most of the 9/11 terrorist and Osama bin Laden himself were born and educated in Saudi Arabia.

It’s downright outrageous that the Obama administration is now making it easier for Saudis to enter the United States. Consider that just three years ago the U.S. government actually placed Saudi Arabia on a list of 14 countries whose travelers would face enhanced security when entering the country. Why? Because a Saudi national named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. commercial airliner on Christmas Day in 2009.

Around the same time Judicial Watch reported that a Saudi Arabian “rehabilitation” program that supposedly reforms terrorists jailed at Guantanamo Bay has instead served as a training camp for future jihadists. Regardless, the Obama administration supports the program and has sent a number of Guantanamo detainees its way even though many have rejoined terrorist missions that target Americans.

Demanding an end to the Gitmo-Saudi pipeline, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that the list of failed participants in the rehab program reads like a “who’s who” of Al Qaeda terrorists on the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, eleven Guantanamo detainees who graduated from the laughable Saudi rehab appear on a list of most wanted terrorists published by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry.

Here’s another crucial detail; a boatload of money flows from Saudi Arabia to finance international terrorist activities. In fact, a report published by the Congressional Research Service says “Saudi donors and unregulated charities have been a major source of financing to extremist and terrorist groups over the past 25 years.” It also reveals that Saudi Arabia “was a place where Al Qaeda raised money directly from individuals and through charities” and that “charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship” may have diverted funding to Al Qaeda. Considering these alarming facts, it’s definitely not a good idea to relax security standards for Saudi Arabians who want to come to the United States.

This is the same generous city—Oregon’s most populous—that also offers public workers gender reassignment surgery. In this case local taxpayers will continue paying Reaz Qadir Khan’s $60,091 annual salary while he chills at home waiting to be tried on very serious terrorism charges.

Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was involved in a terrorism plot that killed 30 people and injured 300, according to a federal indictment. The Portland wastewater treatment operator sent money to Ali Jaleel, a Maldivian man who claimed responsibility in a pre-recorded video for a 2009 bombing at the intelligence headquarters in Lahore, Pakistan. Khan also exchanged electronic mail with the suicide attacker, according to the feds.

The Pakistani national is a flight risk and a danger to the community, according to federal prosecutors who argued against bail at a recent hearing in federal court. Incredibly, the judge, Michael Mosman, a George W Bush appointee, allowed Khan to walk free from the federal courthouse pending trial. Judge Mosman ordered that Khan remain at his southwest Portland home and that he must wear an ankle bracelet that monitors his whereabouts.

Because he’s accused of sending large chunks of cash to Islamic terrorists, Khan is also forbidden from conducting financial transactions greater than $500 and monitoring devices will be placed on his computer since he exchanged emails with the suicide attacker. Besides funding terrorist plots, Khan’s city salary also permitted him to stash what the judge referred to as “a fair amount of money” in Pakistan.

“Those who provide material support to terrorists are just as responsible for the deaths and destruction that follow as those who commit the violent acts,” said Greg Fowler, the FBI’s top agent in Oregon, in a statement. The region’s top federal prosecutor, an Obama appointee, made sure to point out that terrorism is not defined by Muslims targeting non-Muslims, but rather by violent extremists targeting anyone they perceive as a threat to their oppressive agenda without regard for the religion, race or nationality of their victims.

This case illustrates the growing threat of homegrown terrorism, a crisis that’s been dismissed by the Obama administration in the name of political correctness. In fact, a PC revolution has led the U.S. government to ignore a surge in Muslim-Americans radicalized by the violent Islamist extremist ideology promulgated by al-Qaeda and its affiliates, according to a report released last summer by the House Committee on Homeland Security.

The administration considers the issue taboo because it fears Muslims in the U.S. will be alienated. The bottom line is that Middle Eastern terrorists are using U.S.-based Muslim radicals, like the Portland city employee, to plan mass casualty attacks. “Homegrown radicalization is now the vanguard of al Qaeda’s strategy to continue attacking the United States and its allies,” congressional investigators state in the report.