How Hasan slipped through the cracks of security

Investigations reveal deadly errors

Americans gave up their privacy in ways that are only now becoming understood after more than a decade of war, only to see a betrayal of colossal proportions in a merciless onslaught of soldier on soldier violence perpetrated at Ft. Hood on Nov. 5, 2009, in the name of Islamic jihad.

How did it happen?

FBI headquarters

The facts uncovered in two government investigations will figure heavily in a massive civil lawsuit filed in District Court in the District of Columbia seeking redress for the victims of what the Department of Defense refuses to call anything other than “workplace violence.”

Families of 13 slain in premeditated murder and 32 others wounded in an attempt to snuff out their lives seek to prove negligence on the part of the directors of the FBI, CIA, the Secretary of Defense, and the malice of the former psychiatrist, Nidal Malik Hasan, a man convicted of murder and sentenced to death by a General Court Martial.

Those who sat through the day to day evolutions of the trial of Nidal Malik Hasan witnessed a colossal struggle between prosecutors, who were bent on getting as much evidence of Hasan's murderous, twisted religious fervor on the record as possible, and the judge, Colonel Tara Osborn, who made adroit use of the Rules of Courts Martial and evidence to limit the trial record to only those items of proof that would lead to a conviction through strict proof that Hasan is the shooter who is guilty of 13 specifications of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.

In the end, the abundant evidence considered by a panel of 13 senior officers focused not so much on the why, but on the how, the ways in which Hasan arranged to launch his handgun attack based on jihad.

In the civil suit, Manning, et.al. v. McHugh, et.al., in which more than 180 plaintiffs will seek damages from the government, there is abundant evidence supplied by two massive unclassified government reports that explain exactly how investigators from the FBI and most other alphabet soup security agencies overlooked the signals that Hasan and other members of the Islamic community of jihad warriors sent each other over a period of years.

Offices of the National Security Agency

Judge Osborn ruled jurors could see evidence and hear testimony about internet searches Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan made – some on the day he gunned down 13 unarmed victims – for material that justifies deadly violence in the name of jihad. Power Point presentations Hasan made while training as a psychiatrist in 2007-2008 were made to third parties and “will only confuse the issue.” All such evidence was excluded from court proceedings and redacted from stipulations of fact previously agreed by Hasan and the Army prosecutors.

Similarly, e-mails Hasan exchanged with the fiery Imam, Anwar al Awlaki, in which he urged the Army officer to engage in violent actions against fellow soldiers, were excluded for the same reasons.

A commission chaired by former FBI Director William H. Webster makes an intensive study of how investigators failed to see the significance in Hasan's correspondence with Awlaki, a leading Islamic cleric who taught principles of Islam with a slant toward jihad at a mosque in San Diego and also at Falls Church, Virginia, before he quit his native America for Yemen. Both he and his son were killed in rocket attacks launched by unmanned aerial vehicles last year.

The Pentagon 

Logs of Hasan's e-mails to the radical Imam, who was a native of Las Cruces, New Mexico, carried the abbreviated reference to the sender as a “comm. Officer” at Walter Reed Army Hospital. The label was misinterpreted by agents as “communications officer,” a post they thought might give him access to intelligence reports. Instead, it meant “commissioned officer.” They chose not to make him the subject of a joint task force investigation for that reason.

One may read about it in an unclassified report published in 2012 at this URL:

http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/final-report-of-the-william-h.-webster-commission

Confirmation of this slip-up may be found in a Senate report issued in 2011 by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee chaired by Sen. Joseph Lieberman at this URL:

 http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/Fort_Hood/FortHoodReport.pdf

In that report, the authors make note of the chilling fact that the chairman of psychiatry at Walter Reed wrote that Hasan had done research on Islamic beliefs that contained “extraordinary potential to inform national policy and military strategy.”

According to the lead plaintiff attorney in Manning v. McHugh, Reed Rubenstein, “A U.S. Army major is writing to this imam and essentially asking for religious sanction to kill American soldiers, and the FBI's Washington field office doesn't even interview the man or make a phone call to his superiors. It's utterly incomprehensible.”