[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Going to the Washinton Post story linked just above:

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.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This might relate:

The Fort Hood tragedy: Why does it matter, or not, what we call it? Is it being politicized?

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James P. Pinkerton Fellow, New America Foundation :

If the Obama folks want to get a true sense of where they are, right now, they should look at the hard copy of the Washington Post this morning. On page one, above the fold, a Fort Hood story is headlined, "Possible agency missteps debated/Officials' handling of potential Hasan threat at issue." It's a damning account of failures of inter-agency cooperation, undoubtedly leavened with political correctness and ACLU-ish procedural punctiliousness. It's the same sort of blame-game story we read after 9-11. Instead of CYA, we could call it CYTI--Cover Your Tragic Incompetence.

Inside the story, terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann is quoted saying, "I find it unbelievable the FBI was not worried -- regardless of the content of the communications -- that an author in the U.S. military outside his job responsibilities was trying to contact somebody who is one of the world's most famous [English-speaking] advocates of jihad."