At Least 7 Dead, 12 Wounded in Shooting at Ft. Hood in Texas

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Connecting the Dots

The shooting at Fort Hood was no 'mystery.'
It was an act of terrorism waiting to happen.

by Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn

11/23/2009, Vol 15, #10

… a little more than a week after the shooting we know that Hasan justified suicide bombings in an Internet posting. He lectured colleagues using the rhetoric of jihad. He warned darkly about "adverse events" if Muslims were not allowed to leave military service. He repeatedly sought counsel from a radical imam with known ties to al Qaeda. He tried to convert some of his patients to Islam--many of them soldiers troubled by their near-fatal experiences with jihadists. He printed business cards that made no mention of his military service but instead identified him as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.

And U.S. authorities knew about some of this well before the attack at Fort Hood. At Walter Reed -- where Hasan spent the six years before his posting to Fort Hood in July --his superiors wondered whether he might be "psychotic" and worried that he consistently sided with jihadists over his fellow soldiers. The FBI had intercepted emails Hasan had sent to Anwar al Awlaki, an al Qaeda supporter with strong ties to three 9/11 hijackers

[…]

The U.S. government was concerned enough with Awlaki and his jihadist connections that it continued to monitor his activities once he was back in Yemen. He broadcast his sermons on the Internet, his fluent English making it possible for him to reach audiences that other radical clerics couldn't penetrate. He regularly called for violent jihad against the United States--his native country.

In 2006, the U.S. government asked the Yemenis to detain Awlaki. The jihadist-friendly government in Yemen complied, for a while anyway. But by 2007, Awlaki had been freed and was using his recent confinement as a propaganda tool to expand his reach. Thousands downloaded his lectures and pledged fealty to his radical cause.

Among those he influenced were the six Muslim immigrants who plotted an attack on Fort Dix, a U.S. Army base in New Jersey, in 2007. ABC News reported that court documents show that at least two of the men said they drew inspiration from Awlaki's fiery rhetoric. Major Nidal Malik Hasan drew on the same source.

In December 2008, the NSA intercepted a series of emails--as many as 20--sent by Hasan to Awlaki. There was no investigation

[…]

it may very well be the case that Hasan was not taking direct orders from Awlaki. But that misses the point. Even if the content of the communications was benign, their mere existence should have been troubling: A Muslim officer in the U.S. Army was seeking guidance--spiritual? academic? -- from an openly pro-jihad cleric whose past was so troubling he had been investigated by the U.S. intelligence community on three separate occasions and whose words had inspired a plot to attack a U.S. Army installation.

A February 2009 report from a respected counterterrorism think tank called the NEFA Foundation released at approximately the same time the JTTF was reviewing Hasan's communications with Awlaki, described the imam this way. "There is no other comparable pro-al Qaeda American figure who has such tremendous access to audiences or who has such credibility." Awlaki, the report concluded, "may be a key player in al Qaeda's efforts to radicalize and incite American Muslims to commit terrorist acts." It is no wonder, then, that Awlaki praised the Fort Hood attack in a blog posting, calling Hasan a "hero" and a "man of conscience."

If Hasan's communications with Awlaki were disturbing on their own, they were even more worrisome seen in the context of his increasingly bizarre professional behavior over the past several years.

Hasan had long been known as a quiet, somewhat detached man. But as the United States fought two wars in Muslim lands, he became more outspoken and more radical in his religious expression.

During one particularly disturbing June 2007 presentation at Walter Reed, first reported by the Washington Post, Hasan showed a slide that raised questions about the ability of Muslims to serve. "It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims." (Awlaki has repeatedly made similar claims, saying that the war on terror is really a "war on Islam.")

Hasan lectured at Walter Reed about the evolution in Islamic thinking on jihad. At first, Hasan said, the Koran was filled with mainly peaceful verses and "Muslims were not permitted to defend themselves/fight." But as the situation on the ground changed, so did the verses. After the Muslim emigration to Medina, "Self defense was allowed" and then "offensive fighting was allowed." As a result, "Later verses abrogated former ie: peaceful verses no longer apply."

Hasan followed this line of thinking through to its natural conclusion by citing a passage that calls for uncompromising warfare:

"Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."

This is standard jihadist thinking--subjugation of all those who refuse to convert to Islam is a divine commandment. But Hasan took it a step further. In the June 2007 presentation, he echoed the martyr's call to action: "We love death more then you love life!"

The Department of Homeland Security has demonstrated a decided aversion to actually securing the US. They consistently work against securing the borders, and are prone to seeing monsters in the closet where there are none, as in the spurious Fusion Center reports targeting American Citizens as terrorists, while leaving the true dangers unattended to.

I would take anything at all coming from Chertoff, Napolitano, or any other DHS bureaucrat with a very large chunk of salt. DHS is there just to be "there", and has no serious function other than to curtail the liberties of US citizens. Other departments of the US government, most notably (but not limited to) the FBI and CIA actually do all the heavy lifting of "fighting terrorism" in the US. That sucks, too because CIA isn't even supposed to be active inside our borders. Some one HAS to, though, and DHS isn't up to it. I have my doubts that most DHS bureaucrats would know a terrorist if they were beheaded by one.