UPDATES BELOW!

There were plenty of warning lights flashing on Major Hasan, who killed 13 Americans and one unborn child in a terrorist massacre at Ft Hood. For example, here is a good list of what should have been discovered when the emails between Hasan and radical Imam al-Aulaqi operating in Yemen activated two task forces – whose charter is to detect and thwart attacks inside the US:

• Hasan had business cards that proclaimed him an “SoA (SWT).” The first part means Soldier of Allah. The second part is an acronym for “Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala,” which means “Glory to God.”
• He had an e-mail address using the first name “Abduwall” – “slave of” God, in Arabic.
• He had contacts with radical Yemeni Muslim cleric and Al Qaeda recruiter Anwar al Awlaki – contacts intercepted but never determined to be actionable by law enforcement.
• He made statements online, according to reports, justifying the actions of suicide bombers as similar to American soldiers who hurl their bodies on exploding grenades to protect others.
• A former colleague said Hasan made outlandish comments in person. “He said maybe Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor,” retired Col. Terry Lee told Fox News.
• An officer said Hasan was very vocal about “holding Sharia law above the Constitution.”
• While at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Hasan gave a presentation in which he warned fellow physicians that to avoid “adverse events,” the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors.
• Also while at Walter Reed, he reportedly was reprimanded for trying to convert patients to Islam, while criticizing those with drug and alcohol problems for their “unholy” behavior.
• And Friday, reports said authorities were examining whether Hasan had sent money to Pakistan.

The only way to miss all theses flashing red dots, in my opinion, is to shutdown the investigations prematurely. I have long wondered why anyone in the FBI would rush out to media on the day of the attack to claim this incident was not a terrorist attack. I can understand caution on concluding this was coordinated effort or just a ‘lone wolf’. But I cannot fathom what drove them to such a bold and preemptive move to spin this story in a particular direction.

I am also now suspicious about how quickly the Hasan-Aulaqi emails hit the President’s desk:

Shortly after the Nov. 5 shootings, Obama reportedly saw e-mails that Hasan had sent to a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen whom the FBI has investigated since the 1990s for possible terrorist ties.

Why would the President of the United States be looking at these emails at the same time his people are trying to cast the incident as something other than an Islamist massacre? Were the emails the ONLY evidence the Joint Terrorism Task Force had at the time? Or were the emails the excuse used to shutdown the dot connecting by a far left administration bent on pushing its ideology no matter what the cost in American lives? Could this be ineptitude:? I guess, but then why all the press briefings focused on preserving the right of free speech for Major Hasan while the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was snuffed out for 14 other human beings?

The argument AG Holder has made many times when it comes to the changes President Bush initiated after 9-11 to protect this nation from infiltration and deadly attack was protecting free speech. Here are Holder’s own words on monitoring US Citizens as potential terrorist threats:

Stop domestic search and seizures without warrant and end wiretapping of citizens.

“We have lost our way before,” Holder told the 350 attendees at the Friday evening session. “Now we must step back into the shining path envisioned by our founding fathers in such icons of liberty as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Eric Holder was quite non-committal in his confirmation hearing when it came to the FISA changes, he hedged on his previous strong stances against the FISA changes. Just enough fog to get confirmed. But he never committed to uphold those changes.

What I don’t think Holder and Obama expected was that they would shutdown an investigation that was actually on the trail of a future mass murderer. I think they are scrambling to recover from the fact someone shutdown the Hasan investigation and it resulted in mass murder.

Along those lines, the Washington Post has a very disturbing interview (sort of) with Imam al-Aulaqi, where more dots come through:

In his first interview with a journalist since the Fort Hood rampage, Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi said that he neither ordered nor pressured Maj. Nidal M. Hasan to harm Americans, but that he considered himself a confidant of the Army psychiatrist who was given a glimpse via e-mail into Nadal’s growing discomfort with the U.S. military.

Apparently al-Aulaqi was viewing different emails than the JTTF and President Obama. How could Hasan’s growing discomfort with the US military be confused with his ‘research’?

There’s more:

But Aulaqi’s statements reflect the increasingly radical path he has taken since settling in Yemen in 2004. Print, video and audio files of his words have been found on the private hard drives of terrorism suspects in Canada in 2006 and in the United States in 2007 and 2008. He also wrote congratulations to al Shabaab, an Islamic extremist group leading an insurgency in Somalia, after it apparently used the first U.S.-citizen suicide bomber last fall.

“Fighting against the US army is an Islamic duty today,” Aulaqi allegedly wrote on his Web site after Hasan’s ties to him were reported after the shootings. “The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

On Dec. 23, 2008, days after he said Hasan first e-mailed him, Aulaqi also posted online words encouraging attacks on U.S. soldiers, writing: “The bullets of the fighters of Afghanistan and Iraq are a reflection of the feelings of the Muslims towards America,” according to the NEFA Foundation, a private South Carolina group that monitors extremist Web sites.

This doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect these dots. Hasan emails the Imam, who responds not directly but with a public post reasserting the idea that a good (radical) muslim will commit violent and cowardly acts in the name of Jihad.

And there is more:

In the e-mails, Hasan appeared to question U.S. involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and often used “evidence from sharia that what America was doing should be confronted,” the cleric told Shaea.

Woah, how could the JTTF miss this? Did our President read these emails after the massacre and conclude “its all free speech – too bad so many had to die”?

I doubt it. But I can see damage control going on. I can see efforts to try and hide the fact that someone shutdown the Hasan investigation prematurely – this we now know indeed did happen. What we don’t know, but hope we learn this week in congressional hearings, is what other evidence did the JTTF have in hand and where they pressured (through lack of DoJ support) to close up their work based on liberal ideological views.

I just can’t believe we detected and stopped so many other incidents of terrorism and this one was so handled with such ineptitude. It would be the odd exception to the track record, which tells me some other factor was probably involved.

Update: Ed Morrissey notes how the ‘it was innocent research’ defense just went out the window with this reporting.

Update: OK, this really nails it. While a single FBI Supervisor was shutting down the Hasan probe …

The official says a Defense Department worker and an FBI supervisor agreed to end the assessment of Nidal Malik Hasan earlier this year.

Note the supervisor and ‘the worker’ agreed to end the investigation. More likely the supervisor ordered the worker to end it. All the while the FBI was investigating a reverend who exercised his free speech rights outside the chinese consulate:

Federal agents came to the home of Rev. Mahoney to question him about laying roses and praying in front of the Chinese Embassy on June 4th of this year.

The purpose of the prayer vigil was to honor and remember the heroic students who were brutalized in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago and to call upon the Chinese government to protect human rights and honor religious freedom.

Yeah, this really stinks.

Tags: al-Qaeda, FISA, Ft Hood Massacre, Hasan, Holder, Obama