Al Qaeda Magazine Praises Boston Bombings
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: "OUTFRONT" next, new developments in the Boston terror investigation. The man shot by police in Florida, why did police open fire while trying to question him? And how terrorists are using the Boston bombing to recruit for al Qaeda. Plus, an American woman jailed in Mexico for drug smuggling has new hope. What her lawyers say a videotape showed. Let's go OUTFRONT. I'm Jake Tapper in for Erin Burnett. OUTFRONT tonight, new details on the fatal shooting by the FBI of a man being questioned about his relationship to Boston marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Ibragim Todashev was shot and killed early May 22nd during questioning at his Orlando home. And now Todashev's father says his son's death doesn't add up. Alina Machado has the details.</s>ALINA MACHADO, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Holding photos of his son's body, Abdulbaki Todashev, had harsh words for the</s>FBI. ABDULBAKI TODASHEV, FATHER OF IBRAGIM TODASHEV (through translator): At the moment, I want justice. I want there to be an investigation so that these people are tried under American law. These are not FBI agents but bandits. I cannot call them anything else and they must be tried.</s>MACHADO: It's been more than a week since Ibragim Todashev was shot and killed in his Orlando home while being questioned about his relationship with dead Boston marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.</s>TODASHEV (through translator): It's absurd. There were four or five armed well trained people from the FBI or police. Couldn't they handle my son?</s>MACHADO: A U.S. government official tells CNN that two Massachusetts state detectives and a Boston FBI agent were interviewing Todashev in a room where there was a samurai sword. According to the official, Todashev who was trained in mixed martial arts suddenly flipped the table knocking the FBI agent back into a wall. The official says Todashev then pulled out a long handled object and came at the agent prompting the shooting. Todashev's family as well as an attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations believed Todashev was not armed.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We received confirmation that he was, in fact, unarmed when he was shot seven times, once in the head. The best claim they have is that there was a decorative sword in the room somewhere. My question is if they really thought that sword was a threat, why would they interrogate a suspect that they thought committed murder in four hours of a room with what they perceive as a weapon?</s>MACHADO: A law enforcement source has said Todashev implicated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple homicide in Massachusetts during the questioning. That source also says Todashev confessed to having a direct role in the crime.</s>RENI MANUKYAN, EX-WIFE OF IBRAGIM: This is absolutely not true because they can even check the phones and everything. They were not in conversation. They were not texting 24/7 to each other. Maybe once in a couple months she shoot text message, how are they doing and that's it, but never calls.</s>MACHADO: An FBI internal review team has been investigating and looking into the circumstances of the shooting since last week.</s>MACHADO: That team of investigators is made up of members of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, Todashev's father says he hopes to get a visa by tomorrow so that he can fly to the U.S. to get his son's body -- Jake.</s>TAPPER: Alina, thanks. OUTFRONT tonight, Tim Clemente is a former FBI agent in counter-terrorism and Mitch Silber is the former director of the NYPD Intelligence Divisions Analytic and Cyber Units. Tim, I'll start with you. You heard Todashev's father in that piece. He said couldn't they handle my son? The agents knew Todashev had mixed martial arts training. Should they have been better prepared to handle a confrontation with him?</s>TIM CLEMENTE, FORMER COUNTERTERRORISM FBI AGENT: Well, Jake, that's hard to say. I mean, in the circumstance and from what we've heard, an agent was thrust against the wall by the table. The individual was reaching for something, a long object, possibly that samurai sword whether it was decorative or not. When you're in that circumstance, there is no time to stop and reason with someone like this. This guy has a history of violence. He's been arrested for assaults and extenuating circumstances, a traffic stop where he attacked somebody over a parking space. And he's a mixed martial arts fighter. You don't want to get into a tussle with a guy that is a mixed martial arts fighter when he knows you have a weapon on your belt. At that point I'm sure the agent drew his weapon according to the FBI's use of force policy. He would have been well within his rights to use deadly force if this individual was attacking him and going anything that may have been used as a weapon. It didn't have to be a gun for him to have been able to use deadly force against the agent and the cops. The cops, their only alternative at that point if they can't immediately contain him is to use deadly force.</s>TAPPER: Well, Tim, if that's true, should he not have been in handcuffs?</s>CLEMENTE: If it was a confrontational interview and interrogation, he was arrested and detained, that's possible. But if he was in his home and it was not a detention, it was an interview then it's not customary to put somebody in handcuffs. They had him in a situation that was contained originally and then something obviously made his temper rise and that rising of his temper caused him to get violent. And apparently it happened in the blink of an eye so it's not something they anticipated, obviously. And they don't want to -- you don't want to handcuff somebody when you're trying to get their cooperation. They're talking to this guy over several hours. He's obviously admitting to things he may have been involved with the Tsarnaev brothers. So it's critical to keep him comfortable in that interview. That's apparently what they were trying to do.</s>TAPPER: Mitch, does it look to you like the use of deadly force was justified here?</s>MITCH SILBER, EXECUTIVE MANAGING DIRECTOR, K2 INTELLIGENCE: You know, it's hard to say, Jake, having not been in the room when this situation happened, but I think as Tim mentioned, context means a lot. Here's an individual who is being interviewed based on his relationship with someone we know was a terrorist and committed the Boston attack. Also he is being interviewed in the context of being involved in this awful triple murder. So the fact that is the context and this individual has a violent history. If he's coming at with you a weapon that could be deadly, it would be unreasonable for the agents to have acted the way they did.</s>TAPPER: Mitch and Tim, I want you to stay here for a minute while we take a look at another developing part of the story. New evidence today that the Boston bombing is already becoming a key recruiting tool for al Qaeda, the terror plot is front and center in the latest issue of al Qaeda's English language magazine "Inspire." The magazine praises the Tsarnaev brothers as heroes and encourages readers in the United States to follow their example. As it said on page 17, quote, "The Boston bombings have uncovered the capabilities of the Muslim youth. They have revealed the power of a lone Jihad operation," unquote. The magazine also highlights the attack in London, another recent lone wolf type terror incident. So, Tim, I want to bring you back here. Today the State Department submitted this report on terrorism to the U.S. Congress. The key line in the first paragraph of Chapter One, the AQ core's ability to direct the activities and attacks of its affiliates has diminished as its leaders focus increasingly on survival. This would see to speak directly to what we're seeing in this latest issue of "Inspire," the threat that al Qaeda is now pushing is these lone wolf, home grown attacks. Is this in your view the real future of al Qaeda terrorism?</s>CLEMENTE: I believe it's been the past and the future of al Qaeda. Al Qaeda has never been about regimented attacks although they have planned long term planning for attacks like September 11th. That's not the norm for them. The norm for them is radicalizing individuals and getting those individuals to come up with plots on their own. The 9/11 attack was conceived of by Mohammed Atta and planning with his uncle and they were, you know, they were individuals that came up with we think question do this. That's al Qaeda's method. It's guerrilla warfare. So a planned attack doesn't have to be something that involves the entire organization from the top down. Any individual anywhere can be inspired by al Qaeda, the movement of "Inspire" magazine, from Anwar Awlaki and his followers. And that inspiration is just to fight the west. It's to fight our beliefs and our way of life. If you look at "Inspire" magazine, some of those articles other than just lauding the Boston bombers, they talk about the cost economically to our way of life by doing these attacks. The increased security, the increased security in the London marathon weeks later because of the Boston attacks and that's what they're really proud of. They're hurting us economically as well as making our people bleed and killing innocent civilians on the streets of Boston.</s>TAPPER: Mitch, according to analysts, the explosive devices used in the Boston bombings had striking similarities to a bomb recipe in the first issue of "Inspire" June 2010. The article "Make A Bomb In The Kitchen Of Your Mom." Now the magazine is essentially touting the success of that issue in its new edition. How difficult will it be for law enforcement to stop this type of "Inspire" born lone wolf terror? What more needs to be done?</s>SILBER: It's a significant challenge for law enforcement and intelligence. One of the things about the larger al Qaeda plots that we saw in the years after 9/11 were that there are multiple people and there was communication back and forth between the group overseas in Afghanistan and Pakistan and their operatives who are in London or who were in New York. And that was a way can you disrupt these plots. To some degree, U.S. counterterrorism success in thwarting plots and disrupting al Qaeda core has resulted in al Qaeda deciding to embrace this lone Jihadist operation. Partially it is opportunistic. It's difficult to carry out the complicated plots that they sought to do in 2005 and 2006. So for law enforcement intelligence, now you're dealing with plots that don't give off many signatures. If you're looking for one or two individuals, how are you going to detect them? Unless you're in that location, in that chat room, in that mosque where these individuals are getting radicalized, going to be very difficult for you to detect them. And in many ways that was the challenge in Boston. How law enforcement intelligence going to detect these two individuals if they weren't communicating with some overseas terrorist group and not part of a larger conspiracy?</s>TAPPER: All right, Tim Clemente and Mitch Silber, thank you so much. Still to come, an Army sergeant allegedly kills 16 civilians and his attorney says it was due to what the army gave him to inject, our exclusive interview coming up next. Plus, first New York City Mayor Bloomberg and now President Obama, who is sending poison to our elected leaders? And then an update from the investigation in Cleveland, new images of the house where Ariel Castro held three women for more than a decade. And the shocking video of a collision between a freight train and a commercial truck.