Lieberman, Collins: FBI and Pentagon could have stopped the Fort Hood shootings. A 14-month Senate committee’s investigation of the Fort Hood killings has concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”
It also concludes that the FBI did not share information with the Army – notably, e-mails that Hasan, an Army psychiatrist and practicing Muslim, exchanged with a “suspected terrorist,” a likely reference to Anwar al-Aulaqi, an Islamic cleric known for his extremist views. The report says the agency may have dismissed such clues to avoid “a bureaucratic confrontation.”
Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused in the murders of 13 people and the attempted murders of 32 others in the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, appears to be the toughest kind of terrorist to spot: a lone wolf who plots without the overt support of domestic cells or foreign sponsors.
