Senate Committee Indicts FBI, DOD for Fort Hood killings, Posted by Meosha Eaton and Williams Ekanem

Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins, taken by MACTV

By Williams Ekanem and Meosha Eaton

The United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs  has indicted  both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Defense (DOD) saying the Fort Hood massacre which left 13 dead and 32 wounded could have been avoided.

It attributes the November 2009 incident to what it calls poor coordination at the FBI and failure to acknowledge violent Islamic extremism  at the DOD.

Addressing Congressional media on the report of the Committee Thursday at the Capitol, chairman of the Committee, Senator Joe Lieberman said the Fort Hood massacre, which left 13 dead and 32 wounded could have been prevented.

This is because, according to Lieberman, “evidence of accused killer Nidal Hassan’s growing drift toward violent Islamist extremism was on full display during his military medical training, although his superiors took no punitive action.”

Besides, the report adds that “a slipshod FBI investigation into Hassan, coupled with internal disagreements and structural flaws in the agency’s intelligence operations also contributed to the government’s failure to prevent the attack.”

The report stated that both the DOD and FBI collectively had sufficient information necessary to have detected Hassan’s radicalization to violent Islamic extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.

“our investigation found specific and systemic failures in the government’s handling of the Hassan case and raises additional concerns about what may be broader systemic issues,” the report stated.

In particular, the Senate Committee report indicted the DOD for failing to intervene in Hassan’s growing radicalization so many years before he attacked.

This is because at “various times while he was at Walter Reed, Hassan suggested revenge might  de a defense for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and expressed sympathy with violent Islamist extremists and bin laden, for example two officers described Hasan during his medical residency and fellowship at Walter Reed Army Medical centre as a, “ ticking time bomb.”

“ The officers who kept Hassan in the military and moved him steadily along knew well of his problematic behaviors,” the report found.

On the FBI, the report said, “on January 7, 2009, the San Diego Joint Terrorist Task Forces (JTTF) sent a memo to the Washington JTTF about Hasan’s communications with a known terrorist already under investigation but despite the red flags, this should have raised, the Washington JTTF waited more than six weeks before assigning the investigation to an analyst from the DOD who was attached to the Washington JTTF, the analyst then waited until the last day of the customary 90-day deadline for completing inquiries and wrote his report in four hours, without considering the investigation from a counter intelligence perspective.”

The committee, which tagged its report, “A Ticking Time Bomb” then recommended amongst others that DOD policies against extremism among service members must explicitly cover violent Islamist extremism, military equal employment rules and religious accommodations must clearly differentiate between violent Islamist extremism and protected religious observance.

The committee also recommended that the FBI needs to integrate its field offices and must systematically update how it conducts its investigative activities and use intelligence analysts more skillfully.

In particular, the report recommends that the government must develop a national strategy to counter domestic terrorist radicalization.