An independent review of the FBI's handling of intelligence before the 2009 Fort Hood shooting massacre by Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan will offer 18 formal recommendations "for corrective and enhancing measures," Fox News reports.
Former FBI Director William Webster, who led the review, promised to have the report submitted by July 13. A redacted, public version should be released a short time later, he said In a letter to U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va.
Mueller appointed Webster to lead the review in December 2009, a month after Hasan opened fire at a Fort Hood processing center, killing 13 people and wounding 32 more. Hasan is scheduled to go on trial in August.
Wolf wrote to Webster June 27 seeking an update on the effort, and wondering why it was taking so long. The panel conducted 50 formal interviews, reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents and met with "interviewed all FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) personnel who were directly involved in the matter," Webster wrote. They also sought input from experts on terrorism and intelligence, information technology and Islamic radicalism.
A Senate Homeland Security Committee report issued last year slammed the Pentagon for failing to address Hasan's radical Islamic views in its own review of the deadly attack. Officials have been reluctant to call it a terrorist attack and the military's review avoided specific references to his religious beliefs.
"We are concerned that DoD's failure to address violent Islamist extremism by its name signals to the bureaucracy as a whole that the subject is taboo," the report said, "and raises the potential that DoD's actions to confront radicalization to violent Islamist extremism will be inefficient and ineffective."
Hasan had echanged emails with American-born al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki before the shooting spree, seeking approval for the attack. Awlaki encouraged him to do it, and later hailed Hasan as a hero. Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen last fall.
The FBI knew about some of that correspondence, but failed to share it with Army officials. According to the Fox report:
"If there was a single point of failure, Hasan's email contact with a known terrorist was never connected to his radical statements as an Army officer and psychiatrist. Hasan's statements so alarmed his fellow students at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., that some fled the classroom."
Wolf, who leads the House subcommittee responsible for the FBI's budget, argued for prompt disclosure of the 15-page report for Congress to study.
"I fear that now, as was then, the government is not doing enough to learn from past threats and attacks to prevent and prepare for future threats," he wrote. "People died in the attack on Fort Hood. We have to learn from this tragedy."