Senator Lieberman holds first Fort Hood hearing today

Senator Lieberman (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Today, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) made good on his promise to launch an immediate Senate investigation into the motives behind the Fort Hood shootings, the likelihood of similar attacks in the future, and the intelligence failures that allowed this attack to proceed.

Senator Lieberman's Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held its first hearing into the matter this morning at 10:00 a.m. EST, on the subject of "The Fort Hood Attack: A Preliminary Assessment." The Committee took testimony from five witnesses:

• General John M. Keane, USA (Retired), Former Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army
• Mitchell D. Silber, Director of Intelligence Analysis, New York City Police Department
• Frances Fragos Townsend, former Assistant to President George W. Bush for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism
• Juan Carlos Zarate, Senior Advisor, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism
• Brian Michael Jenkins, Senior Advisor, RAND Corporation

Major Hasan (AP Photo/The Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress)

Of the five witnesses, Messrs. Silber, Zarate, and Jenkins had submitted written testimony at the time of this writing. All three of these witnesses seemed to agree that Major Nidal Malik Hasan USA, the sole suspect in the shootings, must have acted alone and not taken any operational planning or direction from anyone else. But they also suggested that outside influences played a significant role in his decision to attack his fellow soldiers. Concerning what those influences might have been, the three agreed on one name: Anwar al Awlaqi, a radical Muslim cleric now living in Yemen, who runs an Internet outreach "ministry" that preaches jihad, or holy war, against all things non-Muslim and especially against the United States. They also agreed that Mr. Awlaqi is not the only preacher of violence to whom home-grown terrorists like (presumably) Major Hasan pay attention.

Mr. Silber reiterated his testimony given a year ago, in which he described four distinct phases of a transition from law-abiding citizen or lawful resident into self-styled mujahed (holy warrior): pre-radicalization (the background of the subject), self-identification, indoctrination, and jihadization (in which they turn doctrine into action). Mr. Silber stressed that the self-identification phase usually is associated with a precipitating event, something that calls into question all previously-held beliefs and causes the subject to turn to his faith for answers, answers that turn out to be a call to violent action.

(A previous discussion in these pages of Major Hasan's prior history includes many of the signposts invoked by Mr. Silber and, to a lesser degree, by the other witnesses.)

Mr. Zarate coined the term "lone wolf insider" to describe attacks on the US military by one of their own, as Major Hasan is alleged to have done. He also suggested that "lone wolf insiders" were often impossible to catch in advance. He cited Carlos Bledsoe, aka Abdulhakim Mujahed Muhammad, as an example: prior to killing an Army recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas, he had never committed any crime before his act, nor was he involved in any criminal or terrorist conspiracy.

Mr. Jenkins estimated that 100 such persons had been involved in individual or small-group attacks to date, and pointed out that in a community of 3 million Muslim citizens/residents of the United States, this represents one recruit in 30,000, a ratio he termed "not very successful."

The three witnesses had very few new remedies to suggest. Mr. Jenkins cited Salam al Maryati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council as an example of an American Muslim leader saying a laudable thing: that Muslim Americans must take a principled stand against violence. However, whether the fundamental principles of Islam are truly incompatible with violent jihad, as Mr. Maryati suggested in his November 12 post to The Huffington Post, is far from clear. A close read of multiple verses in the Koran suggests otherwise. For example:

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. (Surah 9:5)

Mr. Zarate recommended renewal and extension of three temporary provisions in US law regarding surveillance: Sections 206 and 215 of the USA-PATRIOT Act, and Section 6001(a) of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act.

Not a single witness addressed the most common factor in the planned attacks thus far, and especially at Fort Hood: that of an armed attacker planning and mounting an attack against a group of disarmed people.

The Homeland Security Committee site has posted no calendar of future hearings at this time. The Committee scheduled a business meeting for 2:30 p.m. EST today.

The Homeland Security also has available this 2008 report on the spectre of jihad in the United States, and the Internet's role in facilitating it.

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