Jennifer Hanin . com

The sil­ver screen is infa­mous for fea­tur­ing bum­bling intel­li­gence agents who hoard sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion from local agen­cies. This is not too far from the truth when it comes to the blood­bath at Ft. Hood. Con­sider the FBI mon­i­tored email exchanges released Sat­ur­day in the Wash­ing­ton Post. True to Oscar Wilde’s quote, “Real­ity imi­tates art far more than art imi­tates real­ity,” the inves­ti­ga­tion was amiss.

Here’s why. An FBI-led task force in San Diego inter­cepted emails between late 2008 and June 2009 between Hasan, the alleged Ft. Hood shooter, and a rad­i­cal Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Aulaqi. These emails dis­cussed covert finan­cial trans­fers and other steps that could trans­late Hasan’s thoughts into actions, accord­ing to sources briefed by the Post.

Keep in mind, news sources pub­lished in the wake of the tragedy that the semi-automatic Hasan pur­chased with cop-killer bul­lets was in August of 2009. It also brings up the ques­tion of why a mil­i­tary offi­cer would need a per­sonal semi-automatic. While there are plenty argu­ments against gun con­trol and wait­ing peri­ods, it might cre­ate a safety net if the armed forces knew when the sol­diers they’re train­ing for com­bat pur­chase semi-automatics on their own dime (or this case just over $1,000 for the FM 5.7 mil­lime­ter semi-automatic pis­tol Hasan toted not to men­tion the addtional cost of the per­sonal revolver in his other hand).

Fail­ure to Con­nect the Dots

Fail­ure to for­ward infor­ma­tion regard­ing a home­grown jihadist might seem pass­able in a Hol­ly­wood thriller but it is incred­i­bly irre­spon­si­ble in real­ity. While the media has not released any reports of civil cases against gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies to my knowl­edge, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if they multiply.

The Post also reported that while Hasan’s emails to the Iman began as reli­gious queries, the tone became more spe­cific before he relo­cated to Texas. Besides killing 13 in cold blood and injur­ing 30 more, who knows what addi­tional dam­age he may have caused the enlisted men and women he coun­seled. There have been reports of a high sui­cide rate at Ft. Hood. Just how many attempted or suc­cess­ful sui­cides were under Hasan’s care?

It would seem likely that if the intel­li­gence agen­cies had a pol­icy of open com­mu­ni­ca­tion and knew that high rank­ing offi­cials would hold them account­able then its plau­si­ble Ft. Hood could have expe­ri­enced another outcome.

A num­ber of peo­ple inter­viewed that knew Hasan said they observed warn­ing signs. How­ever, none of these com­plaints went to a sin­gle gate­keeper that could act on this infor­ma­tion. Sadly, if a sin­gle gatekeeper’s office tracked and assessed his actions there could have been an inter­ven­tion by authorities.

More than likely, no one is con­nect­ing the dots and iden­ti­fy­ing poten­tial human time bombs when they see them. Mil­i­tary per­son­nel from the high­est ranks down needs to know the poten­tial warn­ing signs that can lead to vio­lent acts like shoot­ing sprees,  suicides, etc. There are a num­ber of well-researched assess­ments that estab­lish sui­ci­dal and vio­lent behav­ior indi­ca­tors for adults as well as ado­les­cents. High schools on down have had to rely on such assess­ments after the Columbine case made know­ing the warn­ing signs manda­tory. It appears our mil­i­tary forces and national secu­rity agen­cies have some work to do to break away from their exist­ing silos, report warn­ing signs to a cen­tral assess­ment depart­ment, make trans­parency between agen­cies a real­ity and ulti­mately prac­tice mea­sures early-on that can save lives and pre­vent tragedies like Ft. Hood from ever occur­ring again.

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