Jan 08 2010
Classified Ft. Hood Massacre Report Is Also Damning
As the repercussions of the disastrous news concerning how our new national security team screwed up (why didn’t anyone ask about why these people were wasting time with the war on global warming??) continue to reverberate CBS News is reporting on disturbing results in the still classified Ft Hood post-action report:
Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.
…
According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.
Let me stop here and pick up the theme I noticed in yesterdays briefing. Emphasis mine in order to point out the fact that in the waning days of the Bush administration, and due to NSA intercepts surrounding al-Awlaki, there was a terrorist task force investigating Hasan under FISA Court rulings. This investigation of Hasan’s emails, etc was made possible by the changes President Bush made in the FISA-NSA relationship, wherein an NSA developed lead on a threat garnered from monitoring known terrorists overseas could be used as probable cause for investigation. This is the same change to the rules many in the Obama Administration opposed with a vengeance – including Holder and Brennan as well as the President himself.
The terrorist task force investigations were suspiciously shutdown about the time Holder would be required to renew the FIS Court warrants (they all have short timer periods and can only be renewed by the Attorney General or his designated representative). The way they were shutdown was by sending the few emails they had to an Army Intelligence analyst – working in a group that does not do that kind of analysis – and getting a conclusion that was wildly naive of the threat of al-Awlaki.
CBS News continues:
After the Washington task force decided Hasan was not dangerous, it never asked to see his subsequent communications with Alwaki.
“I think it’s a real problem that you didn’t have in one place at one time all of the communications being evaluated,” said CBS News security analyst Juan Zarate.
It is especially a problem if those later emails were the ones which indicated Hasan had gone over to the dark side. The lame excuse CBS News reports for why the lone army intelligence analyst came to a benign conclusion is really incomprehensible:
None of the e-mails specifically mentioned Hasan’s plans for a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but because he was a member of the military the FBI showed them to a Pentagon investigator with the note “comm” written on it. To the FBI that meant “commissioned officer.” The Pentagon investigator thought it meant “communication.”
I fail to see what this has to do with anything, but it does sound like someone is trying to cover some tracks. Why is it important to make the claim the Army analyst thought it ‘com’ meant ‘communication’? Are we to believe the analyst was never told the person being investigated was US Army? This smells really fishy to me, but that seems to be the latest excuse for closing down the FIS Court approved monitoring of the man behind the Ft Hood Massacre:
As a result, there were no red flags that an army officer was e-mailing a radical cleric suspected of being a talent spotter for al Qaeda.
Sounds to me like the Bush haters decided undoing President Bush’s hard work was more important than monitoring the threats. As I noted many times, John Brennan openly said during the campaign he wanted to dial back our hair trigger responses to possible threats. I think he and the President did just that, and 13 Americans were murdered as a result.
It is also interesting this report snuck out while the big mea culpa show on Flight 253 was attracting everyone’s attention. But I doubt Congress will miss this – at least I hope they don’t.
AJ,
With 1 in 6 Americans looking for work not finding it, nothing less than a four figure death count terrorist attack with really 9/11/2001 visuals will make the American public pay attention to poor protectin from foreign terrorism.
What is really damning, and what the American public is paying attention too, is the Dec 2009 BLS jobs report that fiscal and regulatory policies by the Obama Administration and Democratic Congressional legislation are causing.
We now have hard documentation of the small business and big capital investment strike informed people predicted that Democratic policies would cause in Sept 2008:
See this link from the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624711732528426.html
Congressional “reforms” of the American health delivery system have gone through dozens of versions. The separate bills passed by the House and Senate worry small businesses, in particular. They fear their labor costs will increase because of mandates to spend much more on health insurance for their employees. The resulting reluctance of small businesses to invest, expand and hire harms households as well, because it slows the creation of new jobs and the growth of labor incomes. …
Even though some of the proposed antibusiness policies might never be implemented, they generate considerable uncertainty for businesses and households. Faced with a highly uncertain policy environment, the prudent course is to set aside or delay costly commitments that are hard to reverse. The result is reluctance by banks to increase lending–despite their huge excess reserves–reluctance by businesses to undertake new capital expenditures or expand work forces, and decisions by households to postpone major purchases.
Several pieces of evidence point to extreme caution by businesses and households. A regular survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) shows that recent capital expenditures and near-term plans for new capital investments remain stuck at 35-year lows. The same survey reveals that only 7% of small businesses see the next few months as a good time to expand. Only 8% of small businesses report job openings, as compared to 14%-24% in 2008, depending on month, and 19%-26% in 2007.
and it has killed job creation for as long as those Democratic policies are either in place or in serious consideration of being emplaced:
Government statistics tell a similar story. Business investment in the third quarter of 2009 is down 20% from the low levels a year earlier. Job openings are at the lowest level since the government began measuring the concept in 2000. The pace of new job creation by expanding businesses is slower than at any time in the past two decades and, though older data are not as reliable, likely slower than at any time in the past half-century. While layoffs and new claims for unemployment benefits have declined in recent months, job prospects for unemployed workers have continued to deteriorate. The exit rate from unemployment is lower now than any time on record, dating back to 1967. …
These facts suggest that it was a serious economic mistake to press for a hasty, major transformation of the U.S. economy on the heels of the worst financial crisis in decades.
Leon Panetta was on vacation after 7 CIA agents were killed in Afghanistan. Some of those agents were part of the bin Laden unit in the 1990’s. They had families and deep experience tracking terrorists. Where is the outrage from the left, 7 Americans in one bombing, in a country where the Pakistani leadership is iffy and the Afghani leadership is the same. MSM is silent, if Bush had been President MSM would have been calling for immediate retreat, or his head.
Then 13 American’s were killed by a radical, a little press, little outrage. A plane load of Americans almost blown out of the sky, some polite outrage.
Obama gets a little grief, because MSM loves him and thinks he has the right balance between protecting lone terrorists and the Muslim community or something. Yes it would be bad to have Americans killed…….but from a MSM point of view I wonder how bad? The briefing with Brenner and Napolitano was pathetic, it sounded like they were taken by surprise. Did they get briefed on their new posts or did the Obama administration skip the briefings because they thought Bush was way too extreme. I think that they thought they knew the job and skipped the briefings.
Obama tells us again the we are at war with al Queda, not all Muslims……..like he just realized the problem. How many time in the last 8 years have we heard the same talk? Then he tells us we will keep vigilant. Please, just do it stop talking, I don’t believe him anyway…….words are his thing……doing something, not so much.
Have been reading Strata-Sphere off and on for awhile. Had to comment because you are head and shoulders above every other blog I frequent in your coverage of the current continuing intelligence failures and their causes. Far as I can see, you pretty much “own” this area. Thanks for breadth and depth of your insights and coverage.
The incompetence displayed by this administration is just staggering. The ONLY thing they seem to be good at is looting the Treasury.
many thanks marybel – you made my day!
I found this at WISBANG, it says what I was trying to say……the guys protecting us are down right pathetic.
When I saw the president’s speech yesterday and the follow up comments by John Brennan and Janet Napolitano, it became painfully clear that these folks actually believed that there really was no terrorism threat and that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were making it all up or at least exaggerating the threat for political gain. This explains why Obama, Panetta, and National Counter Terrorism Center director Michael Leiter didn’t cut their vacations short and rush back to Washington once they learned of the Christmas Day almost-massacre. It also explains why Napolitano couldn’t believe how determined al Qaeda is and that they would use a single suicide bomber.
It was surreal to see Obama, Brennan, and Napolitano stand in front of the American people and the world and act all shocked that radical Islamic terrorism actually does exist and that we are at war against terrorists who are determined to destroy our way of life.
On the one hand it is a relief to know that they finally understand what we are up against. But on the other hand, I’m angry because 13 soldiers were needlessly slaughtered at Fort Hood and 287 more people could have been killed on Christmas Day because of their ignorance and naivete.
And now President Obama and his team have to rebuild the anti-terrorism intelligence network – the very network that kept us safe for seven years – because they dismantled it after President Bush left. President Obama can’t say he wasn’t warned. Dick Cheney tried to tell him a number of times to not mess with the system that was already in place.
Ft Hood was yanked from the news faster than anything I have seen since they AF1 flew over NYC. Ft Hood is the one they should have been hammered on but “zap” it was shut completely down.
Their magic is what they keep quiet. MSM.
[…] More on the disturbing results from the classified Fort Hood report over at Strata-Sphere blog. […]
[…] My friend AJ Strata has more from a CBS News report on the review. Read it all; he concludes: As I noted many times, […]
[…] the time of the suspected decision to suspend the Hasan investigations. It dovetails well with the reported fact that the  last of the emails between Hasan and al Aulaqi had not been analyzed by the task […]