Lost amid the wall-to-wall coverage of Egypt are the results of the Senate’s investigation into the Ft. Hood terrorist attack. The report spotlights the incompetence of both the Army and FBI in preempting the threat. From the Houston Chronicle:
“This is not a case where a lone wolf was unknown to the FBI, unknown to the military officials until he struck – and that is the tragedy of this case,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs that conducted the most thorough public inquiry to date.
Just look at how, exactly, they decided to handle the investigation:
But the task force in Washington waited more than six weeks before assigning the investigation to an analyst, a Defense Department employee loaned to the joint FBI-CIA task force. The analyst then waited 89 days to complete his inquiries before writing a final assessment of Hasan in just four hours, effectively ending further FBI inquiry.
This is the face of counter-terrorism in America. We’ve got the FBI and the CIA working together. A joint counter-terrorism task force. Yet we’re very far from what TV shows would have us believe about our capabilities. Law enforcement had the information that clearly indicated something was up. But did they alert the Fort Hood commander, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, about the intercepted communications showing Hasan was in contact with suspected al-Qaida affiliates overseas? No. So the one person who needed to know this information, who would have, without question, said, “Get this man off these premises,” wasn’t alerted.
A curiosity remains:
Was this report the consequence of political correctness run amok? Why else would an officer evaluation report be so far off from what was really happening? If we’re supposed to find threatening people, is it becoming taboo to describe them as such?
