'Too early to call Boston blasts an intelligence failure'

The twin blasts at the Boston marathon claimed three lives, but according to a counter-terrorism expert this would neither mean an escalation of security systems in the US and nor signify an intelligence failure. The Boston blasts happen to be the first bomb attack in the nation since the 2001 terror strikes on the World Trade Centre.

“At the end of the day this is an attack that killed a small number of people and the body count may rise but it is nothing on the scale of 9/11,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Senior Fellow at the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Firstpost from The Hague, Netherlands.

“This is something that is a reminder that there are people who want to carry out terror attacks,” he said, adding it wouldn’t cause a call for increase in security spending or something of the sort.

Gartenstein-Ross also said that it was too premature to call it an intelligence failure given there was no clarity on who had carried out the attack.

“These kinds of acts of violence can take place…It’s hard to call something like this an intelligence failure right now,” he said.

Any time there is a a successful act of terror there will be questions about what the intelligence community knew in advance, but given that there were multiple bombs used in this attack there will be a lot more attention on the Boston blasts, Gartenstein-Ross said.

“Given the number of threats that are out there, I would say it is very difficult to tackle all of them and one of them will get through,” he said.

The major impact he sees the blasts having is on sporting events, particularly on the spending on security at such events.

“After this attack at the marathon there may be a call to ramp up security further,” he said.

He also said it was too early to speculate on the identity of the suspects in the case.

“It’s not clear that there are suspects. At the very least there are persons that we call persons of interest, and one that has been widely reported is a Saudi national who is a person of interest. A person of interest could have a wide range of meanings particularly in a case like this,” he said.

“When there’s a major attack at a public place there are going to be a lot of persons of interest the investigators are going to be speaking to,” Gartenstein-Ross said.