Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

What FBI Should Tell Us Now About Boston Bombings

Sharing information with a public eager to know more about Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev could calm national security fears and nip in the bud accusations that the U.S. government is looking to hide something.

April 22, 2013 at 2:51 PM UTC

By Tobin Harshaw

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

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We don't know exactly what Tamerlan Tsarnaev did during his visit to Russia in 2011. We do know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has told us very little about its inquiry at that time into the man now accused of bombing the Boston Marathon.

No, I'm not expecting the FBI to divulge specifics that would in any way compromise its investigation -- some things will have to wait until charges are filed and the national security threat has passed. But the FBI initially bungled its disclosure of the inquiry, first telling the news media on Friday that it had no record on either Tamerlan or his brother, Dzhokar, then quickly retracting and explaining that a foreign intelligence agency had asked it to investigate the older Tsarnaev. As we saw in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, botched communications from the government quickly become fodder for political grandstanding and conspiracy theories.