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Fort Hood Lawmaker Grills FBI Official: At What Point Is It ‘Islamic Terrorism’?

Report notes FBI staffers who first spotted Hasan discussed the political sensitivity of interviewing Muslims who visit extremist websites.

by
Bridget Johnson

Bio

August 2, 2012 - 6:48 pm
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“Was political correctness a reason why this lead was not aggressively pursued?” Wolf asked. “…I periodically have a number of FBI agents come up to me, as you know, my district is in Northern Virginia, will tell me that they believe there is a political correctness that is encroaching into the Department of Justice and the FBI.”

“The report did not find political correctness was in any way, shape, or form responsible for his lack of going forward with the interview,” Giuliano said.

Wolf responded that during the congressional recess he’d like to speak alone with the Washington FBI officials about the political correctness question.

“I don’t very much buy into the notion of political correctness,” Fattah said. “I think that we have an issue around constitutional correctness when you have an American citizen, the question of whether they can listen to or read something or to associate themselves in some grouping, it’s pretty clear in the Constitution that those things are protected.”

Carter said he was going to steer the FBI official to a line of questioning in line with the concerns posed to him by his constituents.

“We’re talking about people who were killed, many of whom had been deployed two, three, four times fighting in the war against terror, which until recently was the subject matter of why we went to war. It seems to have changed in this administration but in the previous administration, it was the war on terror,” the Texas congressman said. “They went to fight the war on terror that involved people of the Islamic community.”

“Now we’ve got them coming to me and saying, my husband went in harm’s way for this country three times or my son went in harm’s way for this country four times and he gets killed where he’s stationed by a member of his own military who begins his shooting career as a murderer by shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Carter continued. “And it gets investigated by the Department of Defense and they find it was a workforce violence incident.”

The victims’ families, he said, are just having to listen to excuses about why “procedure” didn’t work.

“I am not here to make excuses,” Giuliano said. “We have to be right every time, 100 percent of the time and when we’re not, the consequences are dire.”

Carter asked if those “dire consequences” meant that some heads will roll at the FBI. Giuliano said that the bureau is reviewing the report and any disciplinary action would be decided within 60 to 90 days.

“To the public, oh that’s a different statement. You said when we fail, there are dire consequences,” Carter said. “Of course, we know there are dire consequences, there’s a bunch of dead people stacked up over at Fort Hood right now that are dire consequences.”

Fort Hood’s representative on the Hill said he couldn’t understand why “two of the most important agencies of this government still haven’t defined what happened at Fort Hood by even mentioning that Islamic terrorism had anything to do with it.”

“If he yelled out ‘Jesus Christ is God,’ would they have said Christians were involved? I mean, at what point does it get to be Islamic terrorism? That’s the simple question. Answer that one,” Carter said.

Giuliano said there’s a difference between someone tied to a terrorist group, “which we could not tie Hasan to during our investigation, and somebody who appears to have been radicalized by that.”

As Wolf noted, Carter said, there’s nothing in the report to indicate that the killing spree of which Hasan stands accused “had anything to do with what we spent 10 years fighting a war about.”

“It dumbfounds me,” Carter said. “And you cannot explain it to people who lost their families and now are being treated with this, they were just casualties of the workforce?”

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Bridget Johnson is a career journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media.
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