It doesn’t sound like the Pentagon has gotten the message yet — they still insist on referring to the Fort Hood Massacre as an act of workplace violence, NOT Islamic terror.
(WaPo) — A Senate investigation into the Fort Hood shooting faults the Army and FBI for missing warning signs and failing to exchange information that could have prevented the massacre.
The report concludes that systemic and cultural problems caused military officials to fail to recognize signs that the alleged shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was becoming increasingly radical before the 2009 shooting.
It also concludes that the FBI failed to share information with the Army — notably, e-mails that Hasan exchanged with a “suspected terrorist,” a likely reference to Anwar al-Aulaqi, an Islamic cleric well known for his extremist views. The report says the agency might have dismissed such clues to avoid causing “a bureaucratic confrontation.”
The FBI did not have an immediate response to the report. An Army spokesman said in a statement that officials have already implemented numerous preventative steps since the Fort Hood shooting.
“We appreciate the committee’s efforts to examine circumstances surrounding the Fort Hood shooting incident, and we will closely examine the report’s findings and recommendations,” said the spokesman, Col. Tom Collins.
The report was the latest in a series of investigations looking into the Fort Hood shootings, which left 13 people dead. Last year, a Pentagon review found that several officers failed to intervene in Hasan’s career as an Army psychiatrist despite widespread signs of his radicalization and shortcomings as a soldier. As a result, the military began requiring soldiers to report behavior by fellow soldiers that might indicate extremism. That information will be included in a database maintained by the Army’s head of counterintelligence.
Yet another report – this one commissioned by the FBI — identified several areas in which the FBI could improve its efforts to share information and improve training in its Joint Terrorism Task Force, the same group criticized in the study released Thursday.
That study, which was issued by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was led by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who have long pointed to the Fort Hood shootings as evidence of wider systemic problems in the fight against domestic terrorism.
Their report highlighted one contentious issue that has been debated with each new investigation — whether the Fort Hood shooting was an act of terrorism. Lieberman and Collins’s report highlighted the debate on the issue, noting that the Defense Department “still has not specifically named the threat represented by the Fort Hood attack as what it is: violent Islamist extremism,” but instead defined it as workplace violence or described it as being under the larger umbrella of extremism.
In their report, the senators argue that the Pentagon’s avoidance of the “Islamist extremist” in the Fort Hood case underlines its failure to train officers to distinguish the peaceful practice of Islam from its violent extremist branches.
As proof, the Senate report points out an instance in which Hasan’s higher-ups “sanitized his obsession with violent Islamist extremism into praiseworthy research on counterterrorism.”
The argument reflects a larger political debate over how far authorities can and should go in combating homegrown terrorism.