Marty Peretz writes:

Well, yes, of course, you’ve read about the lecture Major Nidal Malik Hasan, M.D., delivered at Walter Reed Hospital in 2007. Hasan’s ostensible topic was “The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” It might as well have been titled, as the scholar Barry Rubin suggested, “Why I Intend to Murder 13 American Soldiers at Foot Hood.” But, since nobody in the higher-up military actually noticed that a very shaky psychiatrist, indeed, gave an official medical rounds talk–maybe even grand rounds–on Islam, Hasan did, in fact, go on to kill 13 men and women and wound another 28. Had two police not brought him down he would have gone on to shoot (how?) many others.

The information is piling up, and the public, as they learn of the ample evidence of Hasan’s jihadist predilections, will, I suspect, be demanding some answers. Stephen Hayes and Tom Joscelyn take us through chapter and verse. Part of the problem is eerily reminiscent of the pre-9/11 dilemma:

But the FBI did not know all that the Army knew. And the Army did not know all that the FBI knew. The participants in an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force discussed Hasan’s case briefly and concluded that it did not warrant an investigation. If they had performed even a cursory, unobtrusive examination of this man, his contacts, and his radical views, they would have quickly turned up a great deal of troubling information.

And then there is the connection to Anwar al-Awlaki, which as Hayes and Joscelyn note is troublesome in the extreme. (”A Muslim officer in the U.S. Army was seeking guidance –spiritual? academic? — from an openly pro-jihad cleric whose past was so troubling he had been investigated by the U.S. intelligence community on three separate occasions and whose words had inspired a plot to attack a U.S. Army installation.”) If, in fact, “too little information was shared and too little attention paid to a man whose words and actions demanded attention,” we have a serious lapse in national security, one that, unlike 9-11, cannot be excused by a “failure of imagination.” We know what terror looks like, and we know the identity of the enemy.

The question, however, is whether the will to ignore the obvious, the pressure of political correctness, and a lapse into a pre-9-11 mentality have overtaken us. It would seem a complete, independent, and public evaluation of all this is in order. Why, after all, should we trust the malefactors to investigate themselves? We didn’t after 9/11. There is no reason to do so in the case of the first major terror attack since 9/11.

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