Possible agency missteps debated
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Still, debate simmered even within FBI ranks about whether the bureau had been hampered by guidelines dictating when officials can open investigations, according to a government source.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president has directed agencies to evaluate what went wrong. And FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has ordered a "red team" of investigators to determine whether the bureau should have handled the information differently.
The FBI and Defense Department continue to assert that Hasan acted on his own, without direction from terrorists or radical elements, but they cautioned that the investigation could take "some time." Senior investigators have said that an alleged motive for Hasan, who has declined to talk to the FBI or the Army's Criminal Investigative Command, could long remain a mystery.
Irrespective of whether outsiders directed Hasan to allegedly commit the shootings, counterterrorism experts and former government officials say that the events indicate limits in the capacity to detect an actual terrorism plot, given that al-Qaeda has advocated infiltrating the U.S. and other militaries in the past, and that many attacks have involved people posing in uniform or using their military positions.
In a July 2006 propaganda video, for example, an al-Qaeda spokesman, California native Adam Gadahn, explicitly encouraged viewers with grievances against U.S. military actions in Iraq "to go on a shooting spree at the Marines' housing facilities at Camp Pendleton," according to the NEFA Foundation.
Investigators said that Hasan emerged last year only because he was in contact with Aulaqi, the subject of an investigation.