What and when did US Army brass know about Maj. Nidal Hassan’s extremist views and his ties to a key jihadist cleric — and why didn’t they act before he gunned down 13 soldiers at Fort Hood six months ago?
It’s a simple question — and a very significant one, to boot.
But neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department wants that information made public.
Which is why the two top senators on the Homeland Security Committee — Joe Lieberman (I/D-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) — have subpoenaed stonewalling Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder.
“We have repeatedly sought your departments’ cooperation,” they wrote. “Our efforts have been met with delay, the production of little that was not already public and shifting reasons for why the departments are withholding [information] that we have requested.”
Before he went on his terrorist rampage, Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born imam who ministered to at least three 9/11 hijackers as well as the would-be Christmas Day underwear bomber.
Indeed, FBI and Army investigators reportedly intercepted those e-mails, and also knew that he’d been heard making statements justifying suicide bombing.
“Given the warning signals about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s extremist radicalism,” ask Lieberman and Collins, “why was he not stopped before he took 13 American lives?”
Why not, indeed?
The Pentagon conducted an internal investigation, and in January released an 86-page report that blamed what Gates called “20th-century processes and attitudes mostly rooted in the Cold War.”
Whatever the hell that means.
Astonishingly, there was not a word, as Lieberman noted, about “the specific threat posed by violent Islamist extremism to our military.”
Or maybe not so astonishing. After all, just hours after Hasan’s rampage, Army Chief of Staff George Casey said it would be “an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”
Both agencies have rebuffed the subpoena — as they have all other committee requests — by claiming that releasing the info would jeopardize Hasan’s criminal prosecution.
That’s nonsense: As the senators note, they are not investigating the massacre but rather “whether the government agents responsible for protecting our homeland . . . correctly did their jobs.”
Here’s hoping the committee keeps pressing this until Holder and Gates are forced to make the information available — no matter how embarrassing it may prove to be.