At least the political blame game first chapter is closed in the investigations of accused Ft. Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan.
Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins determined from their investigation that the FBI and Pentagon committed a “string of failures” knowing Hasan was communicating with an Islamist extremist, his peers describing him as a “ticking time bomb” and his Army superiors never disciplined or furloughed him.
Excuse me, but we have read this before in published reports. I suppose the senators have given those reports a stamp of official Congressional approval.
Worst of all, with a few facts in evidence, we use our 20-20 hindsight powers to chastise those who failed to connect the dots some describe as a terrorist act of treason.
Hasan, 41, a U.S.-born Muslim of Palestinian origin, was an Army psychiatrist in November 2009 at the Texas military post where witnesses said he killed 13 and wounded 32 people while he was yelling in Arabic “God is great.” He was shot and paralyzed from the chest down. The Army is preparing a general court-martial.
Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau reporter for the Los Angeles Times, quotes the Lieberman/Collins analysis conclusion: “The Ft. Hood massacre should have been prevented.”
That’s a relief. Too many times we hear the hollow pledge as we have heard from President Obama on far too many occasions, that legislation must be crafted for these tragedies (pick your genre) never happen again.
Lieberman and Collins chaired a Homeland Security subcommittee whose staff encountered stonewalling from the FBI, Department of Justice and Pentagon. At one point the committee threatened subpoenas to produce documents which could later be used in the prosecution against Hasan.
Another possibility: The government underlings doing what they do best, that ancient two-step CYA dance.
One focus of the report, according to the Times account, was directed at how future “lone-wolf terrorists” could be spotted and dealt with.
The Times:
Lieberman and Collins said their “basic conclusion” was that the FBI and the Defense Department never had specific information of a time or place when Hasan might attack. But, they said, the agencies “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed to understand and to act on it.”
Furthermore, they said, “our investigation found specific systemic failures in the government’s handling of the Hasan case and raises additional concerns about what may be broader systemic issues.”
The bottom line, they said, was that “the FBI and DOD together failed to recognize and to link the information that they possessed about Hasan.”
They determined that federal law-enforcement agents, “to the FBI’s credit,” did flag Hasan for additional scrutiny by the FBI after learning of his radicalization.
Much of that occurred after Hasan had contacts, often by e-mail, with Anwar Awlaki, an American-born Yemen-based Islamic cleric with suspected ties to Al Qaeda.
Yet “not only was no action taken to discipline or discharge him, but also his Officer Evaluation report sanitized his obsession with violent Islamist extremism into praiseworthy research on counterterrorism.”
… The FBI also decided the evidence against Hasan was “slim,” and agents “dropped the matter rather than cause a bureaucratic confrontation,” the report said.
It is the “broader systemic issues” the senators’ report raises that concern me in terms of enforcing rules and protocols dealing with potentially mentally disturbed persons who have committed no crime other than suspicious guilt by association.
On one hand, we have a Muslim highly respected at least for his rank and specialty who could become a threat to our national security. He gets a pass.
On the other, we have had Army officers serving on the front lines in Afghanistan whose private emails were intercepted exposing them to the rule regarding Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. They were fired.
For sure, one was suspected. The others “caught.”
These “systemic issues” are directed at unpredictable human behavior and administered by another set of humans pressured by both politically external and personal biases.
(Courtesy MSNBC file photo)
Jerry Remmers worked 26 years in the newspaper business. His last 23 years was with the Evening Tribune in San Diego where assignments included reporter, assistant city editor, county and politics editor.