The Keystone Cops by Ira Schwartz

Today was a somber day at Ft. Hood Texas as the soldiers and civilians killed and wounded in the horrific shooting there were honored. It was just last week on November 5th at 1:34 pm (CST) that the mundane routine of the sprawling military base in Killeen Texas was shattered by the sound of gunfire. When the smoke cleared 11 were dead and 32 lay wounded (two of the wounded later died at the hospital). The gunman, U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was himself seriously wounded by two civilian police officers. Unconfirmed reports flew across the media and internet; was this yet another terrorist attack or a crazed gunman acting on his own? Now that a fair amount of the facts have surfaced it appears to be a little of both.

So why would an Army Major, trained to treat combat related psychological injuries, calmly walk into a readiness area and start shooting.

Military records show Nidal Malik Hasan received his appointment to the Army as a first lieutenant in June 1997 after graduating from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Six years later, he graduated from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences' F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, and was first an intern, then a resident and finally a fellow at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Soon after, signs of a growing problem within Hasan began to surface. Several colleagues reported that Hasan was consistently expressing his opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars. Nothing was ever done.

In 2007, Hasan turned a medical presentation at Walter Reed into tirade on Islam. He said, according to the Washington Post, "It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims." Again nothing was done.

It appears our intelligence community also knew about Hasan troubles. The FBI began an “assessment” of him in December of 2008 that continued into early 2009. They deemed him not to be a threat. Does this sound familiar? If not, it should. Our intelligence community was caught napping before 911 too.

According to “The Washington Post” Federal authorities (FBI) were aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad.

Cox News – reported a memo written by a Phoenix FBI agent two months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks linked Arab flight students to a radical Islamic group in England that has ties to alleged "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid. And the list goes on.

Now 8 years later it has happened again. Let’s check and see what piqued the FBI’s curiosity with Nidal Malik Hasan.

Military officials told CNN that intelligence agencies intercepted communications from Hasan to Anwar al-Awlaki and shared them with other U.S. government agencies. Anwar al-Awlaki is a former imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington suburb and is the center where Hasan went to pray. Al-Awlaki, who left the United States in 2002, was the subject of several federal investigations dating back to the late 1990s. Even with this information the federal authorities dropped the inquiry into Hasan's communications when a member of one of its Joint Terrorism Task Forces determined "that the content of those communications was consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center [in Washington]."

So according to the JTTF it’s okay for a Major in the US Military, who’s feelings are known to be against the war in the Middle East, to communicate with a known terrorist collaborator not once, not twice but some twenty times. Also a search of Hasan’s computer uncovered that he had been visiting several Islamic extremist websites.

Sadly it appears we have learned nothing in the eight years since 911. Despite the creation of The Office of Homeland Security, the catch all basin for terrorist threats, important information still seems to be slipping between the cracks. Well, maybe not slipping between the cracks as much as being brushed aside. Maybe our intelligence experts aren’t all that intelligent or all that expert. Maybe it’s time our government took a long, hard look at exactly who is responsible for gathering and processing the data that concerns the welfare and security of the American people.

Thirteen people are dead and thirty are wounded. Nidal Malik Hasan may have done the shooting but our Intelligence Community certainly put the bullets in the gun.

As a post script to this story FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that his organization will be investigating itself to see if the Bureau mishandled the investigation into Hasan. Nothing like an organization investigating itself to find the truth. Now there’s a report I’d love to see.

©2009 by Ira Schwartz. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.