An Army investigator claimed he would have been “crucified” if he blew the whistle on Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s correspondence with a Yemeni jihadist.
“Had we launched an investigation of Hasan, we’d have been crucified,” one government investigator told Fox News.
He said investigators feared that a probe into Hasan’s embrace of militant Islam could be viewed as a violation of his First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech.
Since Hasan’s rampage against unarmed troops and civilians at the Fort Hood deployment center, which left 13 dead and 29 injured, the FBI and Pentagon have been pointing fingers over who should have seen it coming.
An FBI counter-terrorism task force intercepted e-mails that Hasan, 39, wrote to Anwar Aulaqi, a Yemen-based imam who is a propagandist for al Qaeda.
“[Hasan] appeared to be at a moral impasse, a moral dilemma who was reaching out for advice,” the investigator told Fox of the e-mails.
The startling new revelation counters previous reports that Hasan’s 10 to 20 e-mails to Aulaqi were merely for Hasan’s research as a psychiatrist studying war stress.
Pentagon officials also said Hasan never formally asked for an early discharge even though his family said he hired an attorney to get him out of deployment to Afghanistan.
Separately, Yemen authorities now say they’ve lost track of Aulaqi, who praised Hasan as a “hero” on his jihadist Web site.