Foot Hood tragedy could have been prevented. Pictured here: A grieving wife of one of the victims weeps at the memorial service held for victims and their families at Ft. Hood, Texas.
After more than a year of investigating the Fort Hood massacre, Chairman Lieberman and Ranking Member Collins on February 3, 2011, released their report, “A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack.’
The report concluded that the November 5, 2009, terrorist attack, which took the lives of 13 people and wounded scores more, could have been prevented.
The report found that accused killer Nidal Hasan’s growing drift toward violent Islamist extremism (VIE) was on full display during his military medical training, although his superiors took no punitive action. Two of his associates said he was a “ticking time bomb.’ He had defended Osama Bin Laden and suggested Muslim Americans in the U.S. military might be prone to commit fratricide.
But, a slipshod Federal Bureau of Investigation investigation into Hasan before the shootings 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 found `compelling evidence that Hasan embraced views so extreme that he did not belong in the military.’ It also found that FBI organizational problems impeded the agency’s full use of intelligence analysts, concluding that the FBI’s `transformation into an intelligence driven, domestic counterterrorism organization needs to be accelerated.’
The Department of Defense and the FBI `collectively had sufficient information necessary to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it,’ the report states. `Our investigation found specific and systemic failures in the government’s handling of the Hasan case and raises additional concerns about what may be broader systemic issues.’
The report recommended ways to strengthen our defenses against homegrown terrorism, including by adding to the Department of Defense policies against extremism among service members the specific category of violent Islamist extremism. This is too important to be subsumed within policies aimed at `violent extremism’ in general or `workplace violence,’ the report said.
Two weeks after release of the report, the Committee held a hearing on February 15, 2011, to examine the findings and recommendations contained in the Senators’ report. Chairman Lieberman and Ranking Member Collins asked expert witnesses for their views on how to combat the ideology that fuels violent Islamist extremism and how to correct the negligence, missed communications, and failure to share information at the two Federal agencies leading up to the attack.
A former top Homeland Security intelligence officer noted that the U.S. Intelligence Community does not even have `minimum essential requirements’ for how to collect information about violent Islamist extremism. The internet provides a virulent message to susceptible people all day, every day, he said, and `for us to not call it for what it is and deal with it directly will be more damaging in the long run.’
Former four-star Army General Jack Keane–who was involved in an investigation of racial extremism in the Army–said that racial extremism has been brought under control because military commanders, officers, and enlisted men and women were trained how to recognize that particular brand of extremism and how to contend with it. `Take the burden off the soldiers and officers and make it a duty to report it,’ he urged.
And former FBI Deputy Director of National Security Phillip Mudd called homegrown terrorism a `metastasized threat’ that requires more involvement by State and local law enforcers who can detect activity in their jurisdictions early on. `The police, the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security should all be training together,’ he said.
Less than one month later, the Army disciplined nine officials, sending a clear message to everyone that the Army will not tolerate such negligence and passivity in reaction to clear signs that a soldier is radicalizing to violent Islamist extremism.
On March 10, 2011, Senators Lieberman and Collins reacted to the discipline. `Our Fort Hood report documents Major Nidal Hasan’s drift towards violent Islamist extremism and the poor judgment of his superiors who failed again and again to take disciplinary action against him,’ Senator Lieberman said. `Unbelievably, they distorted his radicalization into an advantage for the Army and the United States. The FBI relied on these reports to conclude Hasan was not a threat, when, in fact, he was a traitor and a terrorist. The discipline which the Army has imposed on these nine of Hasan’s superiors will send a clear message to everyone that the Army will not tolerate such negligence and passivity in reaction to clear signs that a soldier is radicalizing to violent Islamist extremism.’
See report: http://www.hsgac.senate.gov//imo/media/doc/Fort_Hood/FortHoodReport.pdf?attempt=2
On July 19, 2012, Chairman Lieberman and Ranking Member Collins responded to the declassified version of the report from the independent investigation led by former FBI Director William Webster on the causes of the Fort Hood shooting.
The Webster report reinforced many of the same conclusions reached by the Senators. But they were concerned that the report failed to address the specific cause for the Fort Hood attack: violent Islamist extremism. They were also skeptical that FBI analysts had become well-integrated into the FBI’s operations, as the report stated.
See report: http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/final-report-of-the-william-h.-webster-commission
Source: Congressional Record
See related video: Ft. Hood shooting incident – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkJv0bvoeq4