Hearing that the FBI questioned the older brother 2 years ago.

[bighart]

Do we have another failure of the intelligence community?

[Bjorn Against]

1. They probably had no evidence on him

If they have no evidence they can't justify keeping an open file on him. It may look like a bad decision to close the file now but it probably was the only right decision at the time.

[bighart]

2. I am not familiar enough with what can land one on the terrorist watch list

or would allow someone to be either kept on it or eliminated from it.

[dkf]

3. Maybe the point is when another country notifies us someone here is questionable...

We should keep a file open,.

If this was Russia who has been all over the Chechnya jihadists, we may have taken things too lightly.

[Bjorn Against]

7. I don't like the idea of foreign governments...

telling our government to place people on watch lists. Maybe you wish they had in this case, but unfortunately in many if not most cases it would result in innocent people being watched.

[dkf]

8. We don't have to tell them anything, but that's a red flag.

[Bjorn Against]

9. You need pretty strong evidence to justify years of surveillance

It seems unlikely they had enough evidence to justify a long term warrant for surveillance.

[bighart]

10. I just really hope he survives so he can be questioned and maybe we can find out why.

[FreakinDJ]

11. Sure if you want the other country to watch the wrong people

send them a long list of people you don't care for so they are to busy to watch your spys

[Posteritatis]

4. Maybe, maybe not

For all we know he could have only started getting really radicalized, say, a year ago; if that's the case then an interview a couple of years earlier wouldn't have helped much.

That said, if the only word about his meeting the FBI is from his mother, I'd take the claim with a whole salt mine.

[bighart]

6. Seems to have been confirmed that they questioned him in 2011.

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI in 2011 interviewed one of the brothers suspected in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, a U.S. law enforcement source said on Friday"

[treestar]

5. They found no derogatory information on him at the time.