Military To Monitor “Self-Radicalized” Personnel

In an earth-shattering revelation, a Defense Department investigation into the Ft. Hood massacre has concluded that U.S. military facilities must protect from internal threats and better monitor “self-radicalized” enlisted personnel.

The in-depth probe also warns that protection measures focused solely on external threats are no longer sufficient to keep military bases safe and that each branch must create a system to identify and report insider threats, suspicious activity and “possible terrorism.”

The investigation was commissioned by U.S. military leaders after a radical Muslim Army psychiatrist (Major Nidal Malik Hasan) murdered 13 colleagues and wounded dozens of others at a Texas Army base last year. The result was recently delivered to military brass via a report titled “Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood.”

The idea is to raise red flags before another tragedy, though many were in Hasan’s case. During the murderous rampage Hasan chanted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great in Arabic) and federal agents had plenty of evidence of his ties to Islamic extremists. Authorities knew Hasan was connected to a radical mosque leader (Anwar al Awlaki) who promotes jihad against the U.S., attempted to contact al Qaeda associates prior to the attack and defended Islamic suicide bombers in comments he posted on the internet.

Earlier this year senators on a Homeland Security Committee requested documents from the Joint Terrorist Task Force in San Diego and the National Terrorism Task Force in Washington involving Hasan’s e-mail exchanges with al-Awlaki, a Yemen-based imam with links to three of the 9/11 hijackers. There were repeated signals that Hasan was a potential danger and the Senate panel wants to know why nothing was done about them.

Additionally, the FBI revealed that two Defense Department investigators had produced an assessment of Hasan after reviewing his emails with al-Awlaki, but chose not to further investigate. Who would have imagined that the U.S. government would sit idly as a military officer with radical Islamist views communicated with Middle Eastern terrorists?

Perhaps if political correctness didn’t run amok in government, military officials would have acted on the “internal threat” presented by Hasan. If you recall, the Obama Administration’s biggest concern after the Ft. Hood shootings was preventing a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States.