Pentagon On Nidal Hasan: “Not It!”

“A failure to connect the dots.” Sound familiar? The 9-11 Commission declared that such a failure left our nation exposed to 19 lunatics with boxcutters. It seems we still have the same failure to communicate amongst our national intelligence and defense agencies. It’s becoming clear that Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan massacred 13 people in an act that was preventable. Now the FBI, the Army and the Pentagon are pointing fingers at each other for staying quiet in an environment where red-flagging Hasan could get them “crucified”.

The Pentagon is saying that no one told them Hasan was pen-pals with known Al Qaeda operatives, foremost of whom being Imam-To-The-Hijackers Anwar al-Aulaqi. The Wall Street Journal reports that:

…it was never notified by U.S. intelligence agencies that they had intercepted emails between the alleged Fort Hood shooter and an extremist imam until after last week’s bloody assaults, raising new questions about whether the government could have helped prevent the attack.

A top defense official said federal investigators didn’t tell the Pentagon they were looking into months of contacts between Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and Anwar al-Aulaqi. The imam knew three of the Sept. 11 hijackers and hailed Maj. Hasan as a “hero” after the shooting last week at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead. …

A person familiar with the matter said a Pentagon worker on a terrorism task force overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation was told about the intercepted emails several months ago. But members of terror task forces aren’t allowed to share such information with their agencies, unless they get permission from the FBI, which leads the task forces.

In this case, the Pentagon worker, an employee from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, helped make the assessment that Maj. Hasan wasn’t a threat, and the FBI’s “procedures for sharing the information were never used,” said the person familiar with the matter.

So an officer in the United States Army is emailing not just ANY old Al Qaeda recruiter, but one well-known to the 9-11 Commission? And the whole matter gets tossed into the lap of a staffer… who either decides it isn’t worth the bureaucratic hassle it would require to alert superiors, or is so handcuffed by a PC culture in the military that he just lets it go? This happens AFTER Hasan gives this sermon on Islam (emphasis on the jihad and infidels) to his peers and superiors at Walter Reed? Seriously?

Anwar al-Aulaqi gets several mentions in the 9/11 Commission report, including this one:

Another potentially significant San Diego contact for (hijackers) Hazmi and Mihdhar was Anwar Aulaqi, an imam at the Rabat mosque. Born in New Mexico and thus a U.S. citizen, Aulaqi grew up in Yemen and studied in the United States on a Yemeni government scholarship. We do not know how or when Hazmi and Mihdhar first met Aulaqi. The operatives may even have met or at least talked to him the same day they first moved to San Diego. Hazmi and Mihdhar reportedly respected Aulaqi as a religious figure and developed a close relationship with him. (p. 221)

The Commission makes it clear in their report that they suspected Aulaqi of a significant role in 9/11, and that counter-terrorism agents shared that suspicion. This was not your everyday radical imam, but a man suspected of assisting the massacre almost 3,000 people, in the worst terrorist attack in the history of our country.

We’re still having failures to “connect the dots”. Is it because of turf-wars between intelligence agencies and the Pentagon? Political correctness? Incompetence? All of the above? Officials are now saying (anonymously) that Hasan had connections with others under FBI surveillance. The FBI says it gave the info to the Army, but Department of Defense officials deny the claim. Much finger-pointing, not much dot-connecting. Meanwhile, the Taliban promises a repeat. Our men and women in our armed services deserve so much better.

Share this Right Soup with others: