Below The Beltway

The more we learn about Major Nadil Malik Hasan, the signals he gave about his beliefs, and the reactions of law enforcement and the U.S. Army, the clearer it becomes that, through a combination of failure to communicate and political correctness, it’s quite possible that steps that could have avoided tragedy were never taken.

We learn today, for example, that Hasan’s contacts with a radical Islamic cleric with ties to 9/11 didn’t set off any alarm bells anywhere and that the so-called information sharing set up after September 11th didn’t work at all:

WASHINGTON — Last December, the vast electronic net of American intelligence captured queries that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan of the Army was sending by e-mail to a radical cleric in Yemen who has long been a target of American surveillance.

Trained in the connect-the-dots mantra since rival agencies failed to prevent the 2001 terrorist attacks, analysts recognized that the contacts were significant. The dozen or so messages to the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, were largely questions about Islam, not expressions of militancy or hints of a plot, government officials familiar with the messages said. Mr. Awlaki sent a handful of answers to Major Hasan that were cautious and said nothing to indicate that the two men knew each other, the officials said.

Still, the messages were quickly passed to a Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington, where a Defense Department investigator pulled the personnel files of Major Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who was charged last week with killing 13 people and injuring dozens more in a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex.

Those files, however, did not reflect the concerns of some colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center about Major Hasan’s outspoken opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his strong feeling that Muslims should not be sent to fight other Muslims.

The defense investigator also did not interview any of the psychiatrist’s superiors and co-workers. After studying the messages, which were sent between December and the early months of this year, the investigator wrote a report last spring concluding that the e-mail contacts were not a sign of a terrorist threat. The report was not shared with the Pentagon, or with anyone outside the task force.

(…)

a striking fact is that the system set up after Sept. 11, 2001, to make sure clues of a coming attack were not missed actually worked as intended — and still failed to stop the deadly episode. The question for investigators is whether the very fact that Major Hasan sent the e-mail messages to an imam with mysterious connections to the Sept. 11 hijackers and a Web site encouraging extremist violence should have set off greater alarms.

“The fact that they got these e-mails and acted on them shows that at least to a point, the system worked,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of “The Secret Sentry,” a new history of the National Security Agency. “Quite possibly someone dropped the ball down the line.”

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, said any contact with Mr. Awlaki should have raised red flags. “There’s no doubt that Awlaki is a vessel for the message of Al Qaeda whose goal is radicalizing others,” he said. “Any contact should generate serious concern.”

Gee, do you think ?

On the other side of the coin, the Army, which knew of Hasan’s Islamic beliefs but not his contact with Awlaki, decided that sending him to a seminar was the way to handle the problem:

Army psychiatrists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who supervised Maj. Nidal M. Hasan’s work as a psychiatric fellow tried to turn his growing preoccupation with religion and war into something productive by ordering him to attend a university lecture series on Islam, the Middle East and terrorism, according to a Walter Reed staff member familiar with Hasan’s medical training.

The psychiatric staff at Walter Reed did not discuss kicking him out of the service, according to the staff member. In fact, Hasan was initially considered a good medical school candidate because he had spent time as an enlisted soldier and had cared for his siblings after his parents died, both attributes that supervisors believed indicated he had a healthy work ethic.

An Army official also said that Hasan, who is believed to have killed 13 people last week at Fort Hood, Tex., did not formally seek to leave the military as a conscientious objector or for any other reason. It is unclear whether Hasan, whose aunt has said he sought to leave the military, made informal efforts to leave through contacts with his immediate superiors, and if so how his chain of command at lower levels might have responded to such efforts.

But any formal request by Hasan to separate early would have been submitted to the Department of the Army, according to the official, who saw Hasan’s file before it was recently sealed by Army investigators. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

The idea that Hasan attend the lectures, which he did late last year or early this year, came up during discussions among the psychiatric staffs of the hospital and the Army’s medical university about what was perceived as Hasan’s lack of productivity and his constant interest in Muslims whose religious beliefs conflicted with their military duties.

“You’re at an institution of higher learning. He seems to want to do work in an area no one knows anything about,” the staff member, who also requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak publicly, said of the order. “You don’t want to close him down just because it’s different.”

Yes, but if you’d known that in addition to being “different,” he was also trying to make contact with a known terrorist cleric ? ……

That, I think is the biggest issue coming out of this case right now.

Yes, Hasan’s penchant for radical Islam is an issue, but the bigger issue is how, eight years after the September 11th attacks, the law enforcement, intelligence, and military communities could so completely fail to communicate with each other.

Taken together, the information might have led to an investigation that could have averted tragedy.

As it stands, the U.S. Government was like the blind men trying to describe an elephant