Working the Gap

"There was nothing to keep the investigation going forward"

And with that, the FBI declared Omar Mateen's ties with Moner Mohammad Abusalha were minimal and lacked the identifiable type of significance which would drive them to keep the case open.  Mateen's case entered the gap, that place where something's not quite right, but there isn't enough evidence to keep pushing forward.  A year later, we learned otherwise.

It's easy to Monday-Morning Quarterback these things, much harder to predict the future.  In Mateen's case, the intelligence community cannot claim total shock that this person went from jihadist wannabe to the proverbial bomb-thrower.  After all, he did warrant actual investigation, passing over the required baby steps of a tip, a lead, a concerned citizen report, a fusion center analysis, or some other set of facts which required the local FBI office to assign an agent to the matter.  Twice.

But in today's world of counterterrorism investigations, if the first pass of telephone analysis, social media data review, and interviews with associates do not produce the profile of a bomb-thrower, financier, or host to other active terrorists or known plots, cases like Mateen's take the back burner and soon simmer down.  If it rears its head again, the second run may include some physical surveillance or a broader look at the data in context of current themes.  But there's a time limit to these things: regardless of the case agent's gut feeling about the subject, if the facts don't add up to something that could convince a FISA court to order covert surveillance and advanced techniques or some sort of sting operation with a budget, the case will shut down with the catch-all phrase of, "Well, if he does something else more substantive, we can always open the case back up."

On June 13, 2016, that doesn't satisfy us very well.  Orlando suffered the cost of our collective inability to predict future crimes bottled up inside a single person.  Horrible.  "If only we had just been able to...." 

Justice is always in retrospect, something to "get" after the injustice becomes manifest.  Will the justice in this case will improve our ability to meet the challenge we face?  That remains to be seen.  Our hearts bleed for Orlando.  And San Bernardino.  And every other place this ugly reality has raised its head.  With each incident, our target's identity becomes more clear.

Let's get to work.