Wasn’t there something eerily and disgracefully familiar about the news that the FBI had a highly specific warning about the murderous intentions of Nikolas Cruz, the gunman who has confessed to shooting and killing 14 students and three adults at a Florida high school Wednesday?
Doesn’t it remind you of the way that after nearly every single one of the Islamist terror attacks of the last few years – whether in America, in Britain or elsewhere – a devastating phrase soon emerges? The attacker was “known to the authorities.”
Just take the case of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers. We learned soon afterwards that the Russian authorities handed the FBI a file on one of them, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in 2011 detailing his links to radical Islam.
In congressional testimony, the then-director of the FBI – yes, it was our old friend Robert Mueller – also admitted that Tsarnaev had come to the attention of the FBI on two previous occasions. Worse, the FBI received two tips in 2012 regarding Tsarnaev’s links to extremists connected to a Boston mosque.
And now this: last September, the FBI received a tip about someone called “Nikolas Cruz” who was boasting online about his plans to become a “professional school shooter.” In January, there was an even more specific warning.
It’s worth reading the FBI’s statement in full:
“On January 5, 2018, a person close to Nikolas Cruz contacted the FBI’s Public Access Line (PAL) tipline to report concerns about him. The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting. Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life.
“The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken. We have determined that these protocols were not followed for the information received by the PAL on January 5. The information was not provided to the Miami Field Office, and no further investigation was conducted at that time.”
And then the unforgivably pathetic response from FBI Special Agent Robert Lasky, that he and his colleagues “truly regret any additional pain this has caused.”
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