How The FBI Blew Fort Hood
Mariah Blake has a terrific piece in Mother Jones about how Nidal Hassan, the mass-murdering Muslim at Fort Hood, might have been stopped, had the FBI not had their collective heads up their ass. About the email exchanged by U.S. Military officer Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Islamic cleric with ties to the 9/11 hijackers:

While officials claimed that they were "fairly benign," the FBI blocked then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman's efforts to make them public as part of a two-year congressional investigation into Fort Hood. The military judge in the Hasan case also barred the prosecutor from presenting them, saying they would cause "unfair prejudice" and "undue delay."

As it turns out, the FBI quietly released the emails in an unclassified report on the shooting, which was produced by an investigative commission headed by former FBI director William H. Webster last year. And, far from being "benign," they offer a chilling glimpse into the psyche of an Islamic radical. The report also shows how badly the FBI bungled its Hasan investigation and suggests that the Army psychiatrist's deadly rampage could have been prevented.

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Hasan first appeared on the bureau's radar in December of 2008--nearly a year before the Fort Hood massacre--when he emailed Awlaki to ask him whether serving in the US military was compatible with the Muslim faith. He also asked whether Awlaki considered those who died attacking their fellow soldiers "shaheeds," or martyrs.

At the time, Awlaki, who was killed by a US drone strike in 2011, was emerging as Al Qaeda's chief English-speaking propagandist. He was also known to have ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers, two of whom attended his mosque in San Diego.

The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, which was tracking Awlaki, intercepted Hasan's December email, along with another sent in January. A search of the Pentagon's personnel database turned up a man named Nidal Hasan who was on active military duty and was listed as a "Comm Officer" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Hasan first appeared on the FBI's radar when he emailed Anwar al-Awlaki to ask if he considered US servicemen who died attacking fellow soldiers "shaheeds," or martyrs.
Normally, when the FBI unearths this kind of raw intelligence, it issues an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), which is shared with law enforcement agencies and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (This system was designed to prevent the kind of information bottlenecks that allowed the 9/11 plot to go undetected.) But the San Diego agents misinterpreted the "Comm Officer" label in Hasan's file to mean "communications officer" (in fact, it meant "commissioned officer") and believed that a person in this role might have access to IIRs. To avoid tipping him off, they skipped the report and sent a detailed memo requesting an investigation directly to the Washington, DC, Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multiagency team overseen by the FBI that investigates terrorism cases in the capital. The message noted that Hasan's "contact with [Awlaki] would be of concern if the writer is actually the individual identified above."

The file languished for nearly two months before it was assigned to an agent for the Defense Criminal Investigative Services, who was on the task force. According to a 2011 report on the Fort Hood shootings by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, DCIS--a law enforcement agency within the Pentagon, which normally deals with fraud and cybercrime among military personnel and contractors--was ill-equipped to tackle a counterterrorism investigation.

Meanwhile, Hasan kept writing Awlaki. Between January and May 2009, he sent the radical cleric more than a dozen emails, and received two relatively benign responses. In one message, ostensibly about Palestinians firing unguided rockets into Israel, Hasan asked Awlaki whether "indiscriminately killing civilians" was acceptable.

If the FBI can't stop terrorist attacks with all the evidence they had, do we really think giving up our civil liberties to get groped by hamburger clerks at airports will do the job?

And about unconstitutionally spying on all of our communications -- when the FBI has beyond obvious signs of a threat, they do fuck all with it. It helps national security how for them to have my conversation with my auntie?

And it helps us how to have the government referring to Hasan's murder for Islam as "workplace violence"? The guy didn't go nuts. He reportedly went "Allah akbar!"