Costs of War: Fort Hood’s 9/11 Déjà Vu
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
In the aftermath of 9/11, it soon became clear that two of the hijackers had been on the radar of US intelligence agencies as possible terrorists before they entered the US. The CIA, it was said - in a phrase which soon became synonymous with the most significant US intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor - had not managed to “connect the dots.”
The result was a succession of increasingly wide-ranging and damning inquiries into what was known by US agencies before the attack about the hijackers, their organization and its intentions and capabilities. It culminated in a series of overhauls of US law enforcement, intelligence and executive agencies, all designed to ensure that next time, they would not fail to “connect the dots.”
But now, as more information leaks out about alleged Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan - especially his contacts with radical cleric Anwar Aulaqi in Yemen - it’s beginning to look as if that phrase might come to sum up a new failure.
The exact configuration of Hasan’s motives is likely to be a central issue at his trial - especially if, as external pagehis lawyer has hinted, he pleads insanity. It has already become a central issue in the broader discussion about the shootings, and whether or not they were an act of terrorism.
external pageBrian Jenkins, a consultant to for the RAND Corp think tank, said “At a glance, Maj Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood looks a lot like what used to be called ‘going postal.’” It was "a deepening sense of personal grievance culminating in a homicidal rampage directed against co-workers - in this case, fellow soldiers.
"For Hasan, 'going jihad' reflects the channeling of obvious personality problems into a deadly fanaticism," he told a Senate committee hearing.
But external pagehe added that "These are not mutually exclusive categories […]. Terrorism doesn't attract the well-adjusted."
Whatever complex of personal and ideological or religious motives turns out to have driven Hasan, President Barack Obama’s administration is already facing accusations of trying to cover up a failure based on political correctness.
The external pagepresident’s decision to order “an immediate inventory […] of all intelligence in US Government files that existed prior to” the shooting was widely reported. And he tasked his most senior counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, with “an immediate review […] to determine how any such intelligence was handled, shared, and acted upon within individual departments and agencies and what intelligence was shared with others.”
'Connecting the dots'
What was not widely commented on was the fact that the order, though published a few days later, was actually issued on 6 November, the day after the shooting. The White House, in other words, was almost immediately aware that something might have gone badly wrong somewhere.
There are at least two congressional investigations already underway - Armed Service Committee Chairman Senator external pageCarl Levin said Sunday his panel would wait for closed-door briefings from military and other agencies before it embarked on public hearings, but would hold them.
And the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held an external pageinitial hearing last week. Committee chairman, Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman - who received a classified briefing last week with other lawmakers - told reporters afterward that there was enough information available to different agencies to raise alarm bells. "Had it been gathered on one desk, someone might have said 'Nidal Malik Hasan is dangerous,'" he said.
Indeed. external pageABC News reported that Hasan’s e-mail exchanges with Aulaqi included the hope that he would be able to continue their conversation in the afterlife. And the Dallas Morning News external pageuncovered a probe of alleged wire transfers to Pakistan.
But most explosively of all, the Washington Post external pagereported a second batch of e-mails to Aulaqi intercepted by the FBI’s San Diego task force.
Hasan “clearly became more radicalized toward the end,” an anonymous source told the paper. “He was interested in taking action."
The Post said that second batch of intercepts had never been shared with another task force in Washington, where the determination had been made that the first batch were benign.
No wonder external pageFBI Director Robert Mueller has ordered an internal review “to determine all of the facts and circumstances […] and whether, with the benefit of hindsight, any policies or practices should change based on what we learn.”
That makes five investigations, if you’re counting. The sixth is the Department of Defense’s own review, external pageordered just last week by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The Defense Department appears off the hook as far as the e-mails are concerned - but it has problems of its own. Hasan was giving off warning signs at work, as well.
“There are questions that need to be answered” about the way the issue was handled by the military, Levin said Sunday.
And all that is in addition to the continuing criminal investigation being carried out in Texas by the FBI and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Hasan, who was paralyzed by one of the shots that ended his alleged rampage, remains in hospital, where he has been charged with 13 murders. He will be tried by a military court and could face the death penalty.
The Republican narrative
The debate over the Fort Hood shooting and any failures that might have stopped authorities from preventing it raises the specter that - even after all the reforms that followed 9/11 - US law enforcement and intelligence agencies are still unable to “connect the dots.”
Should information about Hasan’s e-mails have been more widely shared and should his conduct at work have been more closely questioned?
Unfortunately for the administration, these two key issues fit very well into Republican attack narratives: that the president is a prisoner of the civil rights lobby on issues of surveillance and privacy; and that the US military, in common with so many national institutions, is paralyzed by political correctness when it comes to detecting extremists in its ranks.