The FBI in peace and war

By Clarice Feldman

Twice we have suffered slaughters of US citizens on American soil--once on 9/11 and again at Fort Hood. In both cases the FBI had advance information which might have stopped the plots and twice they failed to share it.

The first time they claimed it was because of the "Gorelick wall" although bureaucratic inertia and FBI problems with computers were claimed to have played a role as well. This time, it will be interesting to see the excuse.

The Washington Post reports today that the FBI had intercepted a number of emails from Fort Hood shooter Hasan which showed he was becoming increasingly radicalized by the same Yemeni preacher whose sermons were attended by some of the 9/11 hijackers, that he was even planning to send him money, and that the FBI failed to notify the military of this potential threat.

Carrie Johnson, Spencer S. Hsu and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post:

In the months before the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan intensified his communications with a radical Yemeni American cleric and began to discuss surreptitious financial transfers and other steps that could translate his thoughts into action, according to two sources briefed on a collection of secret e-mails between the two.
The e-mails were obtained by an FBI-led task force in San Diego between late last year and June but were not forwarded to the military, according to government and congressional sources. Some were sent to the FBI's Washington field office, triggering an assessment into whether they raised national security concerns, but those intercepted later were not, the sources said.

Aside from racing to the scene of the massacre and declaring that this was not an act of terrorism, what is the FBI's role in counter-intelligence? Isn't it time we stripped them of a task they regularly perform so poorly?