By DEVLIN BARRETT
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — The Army psychiatrist accused of the Fort Hood massacre is believed to have acted alone despite repeated communications — monitored by authorities — with a radical imam overseas, U.S. officials said Monday. The FBI will conduct an internal review of its handling of the information, they said.
An investigative official and a Republican lawmaker said Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam released from a Yemeni jail last year, 10 to 20 times. Despite that, no formal investigation was opened into Hasan, they said.
Investigative officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said it was his understanding Hasan and the imam exchanged e-mails that counterterrorism officials picked up.
Hasan, awake and talking to doctors, met his lawyer Monday in the Texas hospital where he is recovering under guard from gunshot wounds in the rampage Thursday that left 13 people dead and 29 injured. Officials said he will be tried in a military court, not a civilian one.
FBI Director Robert Mueller has ordered an internal inquiry to see whether the bureau mishandled worrisome information gathered about Hasan beginning in December 2008 and continuing into early this year.
Based on all the investigations since the attack, including a review of that 2008 information, the investigators said they have no evidence that Hasan had help or outside orders in the shootings.
Even so, they revealed the major had once been under scrutiny from a joint terrorism task force because of the series of communications going back months. Al-Awlaki is a former imam at a Falls Church, Va., mosque where Hasan and his family occasionally worshipped, and runs a Web site denouncing U.S. policy — a site that praised Hasan’s alleged actions in the massacre as heroic.
Military officials were made aware of communications between the two, but because the messages did not advocate or threaten violence, law enforcement authorities could not take the matter further, the officials said. The terrorism task force concluded Hasan was not involved in terrorist planning.
Officials said the content of those messages was “consistent with the subject matter of his research,” part of which involved post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from U.S. combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A law enforcement official said the communications consisted primarily of Hasan posing questions to the imam as a spiritual leader or adviser, and the imam did respond to at least some of those messages.
No formal investigation was ever opened based on the contacts, the officials said.
They said the decision to bring military charges instead of civilian criminal charges against Hasan did not mean it wasn’t a terrorism case. But it is likely authorities would have had more reason to take the case to federal court if they had found evidence Hasan acted with the support or training of a terrorist group.
Investigators tried to interview Hasan on Sunday at the military hospital where he is held under guard, but he refused to answer and requested a lawyer, the officials said.
On Monday afternoon, Hasan’s new civilian and military attorneys met him for about half an hour at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, said retired Col. John P. Galligan, who was hired by Hasan’s family.
Galligan said Hasan asked for an attorney even though he is on sedatives and his condition is guarded.
“Given his medical condition, that’s the smart move,” Galligan told The Associated Press on Monday night. “Nobody from law enforcement will be questioning him.”
Galligan said both he and Maj. Christopher E. Martin, Fort Hood’s senior defense attorney, met Hasan. Galligan questioned whether Hasan can get a fair trial at Fort Hood, given President Barack Obama’s planned visit to the base on Tuesday and public comments by the post commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone. Galligan also said he plans to raise the issue of Hasan’s mental condition.
The most serious charge in military court is premeditated murder, which carries the death penalty.
The Army has not yet appointed a lead prosecutor in the case, said Fort Hood spokesman Tyler Broadway.
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Associated Press writer Angela K. Brown in Fort Hood contributed to this report.
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Posted today in the British Press:
"After the 7/7 London transport bombings woke at least some people up to the phenomenon of British ‘sleeper’ Islamic terrorism – and, equally important, to the way this was continuing to be denied by the British establishment – the reaction across the pond was, to say the least, complacent. What on earth had happened to the British lion? Americans asked, scratching their heads in amazement at how a country which had once stood united in determination to fight the enemies of democracy on the beaches was now apparently indifferent to the spread of jihadi fanaticism and support for religiously inspired violence amongst its own citizens. Americans were particularly astounded that Islamists were even being recruited to serve in the British police and other parts of the establishment.
The fact was, however, as I have written and said on a number of occasions, America was going in a similar direction, albeit more slowly and with a quite different demographic. While the vast majority of its Muslim citizens appeared to be people who really had come to the US to get a slice of the good life and had signed up to American values, there was a growing element amongst US Muslims which was becoming steadily radicalised. Worse still, the FBI and other counter-terrorism agencies had been influenced by their appeasement-minded British cousins in the security world peddling their wholly false analysis of Islamic terrorism as having nothing to do with religion, causing US officials similarly to downplay or passively allow the rise of US radicalisation. (See for example this story about the silence over a Hizb ut Tahrir conference in Chicago.)
Cont'd from British Press:
Now we have seen the horrific outcome – the Fort Hood attack which left 13 people dead and dozens more injured by army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who reportedly screamed the jihadi battle cry ‘Allahu akhbar!’ before he opened fire. There can be no doubt whatever that this was a jihadi attack upon America, not least from the evidence that has now surfaced of Major Hasan’s attitudes for months before his rampage – evidence that the US authorities simply ignored.
Yet not only did the US authorities ignore these warning signs that its army psychiatrist was an Islamist fanatic – it has been revealed that he was even a member of the Homeland Security panel advising on the presidential transition -- but much of the media reaction to the atrocity on both sides of the Atlantic has demonstrated an astounding state of denial. The BBC tried to close off any possibility that this was a jihadi attack and then appeared to lose interest in the story altogether; while the Guardian maintained that the victims of the atrocity were not the American military but the Muslim community, on the basis of revenge attacks against them of which, thankfully, there has been as yet not one sign. (This is the same Guardian that, week in, week out, runs mendacious or distorted pieces about Israel which contribute to a climate of frenzied hatred of Israel and its Jewish supporters which results in dramatic spikes in the number of attacks on British Jews).
See Robin Shepherd’s blog entry for an excellent analysis of this extraordinary coverage. See Robert Spencer and C Edmund Wright here for some discussion of Jihadi Denial Syndrome in the US.
Cont'd from the British Press:
"Now it has been further revealed that Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a ‘spiritual adviser’ to three of the hijackers who attacked America on 9/11. Nevertheless, people are still suggesting that he just snapped -- possibly under the impact of, wait for it, post-traumatic stress arising from military conflict. In other words, he was not a religious fanatic but was merely deranged. But religious fanatics are deranged. How else to describe the people who cut off the heads of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg and so many others; or who strapped suicide bomb belts onto hundreds of Iranian children to turn them into human bombs against the Iraqis; or who want to murder thousands of their fellow British citizens because the Islamists ‘love death’?
Oh I forgot; they are all just resistance fighters against Israeli oppression.
One really has to wonder, looking at this reaction to the fanatic psychiatrist whom the US authorities employed to counsel their soldiers, just who really needs the clinical treatment here."
It takes a British citizen(s) or Europeans who escaped Fascism and Communism to warn us repeatedly of what has come and what is yet to come. Do you listen? Do you vet your children's curriculum in school and University? I bet you don't. But there are plenty of others on these forums who will continue to spout the indoctrination of those who have undermined their own societies, stupidly and dangerously leading to their own destruction. Have a real nice day.