WASHINGTON – Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Maine, Thursday responded to the declassified version of a new report on the causes of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, which took the lives of 13 people and wounded 32 others.
This latest investigation and its subsequent report were led by former FBI Director William Webster. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee issued a report in February 2011 titled “A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack,” which concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI had enough information to prevent the attack.
The Senators’ statement follow:
“We appreciate the hard work and thorough investigation conducted by Judge Webster and his team on the failures that led to the 2009 Fort Hood terrorist attack, which killed 12 soldiers and one Army civilian employee, and wounded 32 others.
“The Webster report reinforces many of the conclusions we reached and made public in our February 2011 report, including the inadequacy of the investigation conducted by the FBI’s Washington Field Office and the need for better information sharing between FBI and the Department of Defense. Ultimately, our report concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI had enough information to have detected Nidal Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism.
“We are concerned that the report fails to address the specific cause for the Fort Hood attack, which is violent Islamist extremism. And we are skeptical that FBI analysts are now well-integrated into the FBI’s operations, as the report states.
“We are appreciative that, for the first time, the report declassifies the communications between Nidal Hasan and Anwar al Awlaki so that all Americans, especially the families of the victims, can understand Hasan’s radicalization and the full scale of the tragedy for which he is responsible. We reviewed these communications as part of our investigation, and they informed our conclusion that the attack could have been prevented if DOD and the FBI had acted sensibly and responsibly based on the evidence they had of Hassan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism.”
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