Excerpt:
Last Thursday, adding insult to injury in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, the administration of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick stonewalled efforts by the Boston Herald to determine the extent of government benefits provided to the Tsarnaev brothers, particularly attack mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The Patrick administration's absurd stance, with its preoccupation with the "privacy rights" of non-citizen Tamerlan — an alien terrorist — is a reflection of the kind of inept leadership and dogmatic thinking that led to the success of the attack in the first place. The egregious intelligence failures and uniform chorus of jihad denial following the attack have left little question that leftist political establishment, from state agencies to the Oval Office, does not recognize the true nature of the threats America faces. Nor does it take them seriously.
Gov. Patrick was careful to ensured a united front of silence on the government's potential role in subsidizing Tamerlan Tsarnaev's lifestyle during the period he was becoming radicalized. Several different state agencies and others thwarted the Herald's information-gathering efforts. When the paper asked about the brothers' Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card usage, state welfare spokesman Alec Loftus would only say that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, along with his wife and daughter, received benefits ending in 2012. Labor department spokesman Kevin Franck contended that whether Tamerlan received unemployment compensation was "confidential and not a matter of public record." Regarding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's college aid, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth spokesman Robert Connolly contended that "student records…cannot under federal law be released without a student's consent." The FCC cited privacy in declining to reveal if the brothers had been issued government-subsidized cell phones. Their landlord dodged questions about whether they used Section 8 housing vouchers to subsidize their living arrangements.