How intelligent can our Intelligence Community be when there is a question about the number of E-mails. 10 to 20?
I’ve been wondering (and will probably wonder forever, because I don’t expect we’ll ever get the whole truth on this) whether this whole thing was a massive misjudgement on the part of intelligence officials who knew full well Hasan had established some sort of relationship with Al Qaeda, and were sitting on it because they expected that by watching him, they’d be led to other “bigger fish”.
If they did think he was voluntarily being groomed by Al Qaeda, they wouldn’t have expected him to shoot up a few soldiers at an army base in Texas. Not to belittle the deaths and maimings that occurred there, but for Al Qaeda it’s an embarrassingly small follow-up to 9/11, and not something they would have condoned. IF they were grooming him, they were hoping for something bigger, to really make use of the prize of an insider in a military facility in Afghanistan, for example, to pull off something huge, that would put domestic political pressure on the US to pull out of Afghanistan completely. And the US intelligence people “watching” him would have been watching for that, i.e. planning to put intense covert surveillance on him starting when he left for Afghanistan, but not thinking anything more than casual surveillance of him (and probably more intense surveillance of his electronic communications) was needed while he was still in Texas.
You might want to ask Admin Mod to fix the typo in the title. It’s looks extra funny since the thread will no doubt focus on criticizing the community which is misspelled in the title :-)
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