Word: awlaki
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...mishandled information about Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who is charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 at Fort Hood in Texas, could be Webster's trickiest assignment yet. The Nov. 5 shootings have raised a host of nettlesome issues regarding Hasan and his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric in Yemen, and why the FBI decided not to raise the alarm about Hasan even though it had tracked his suspect communications. In the aftermath of the shootings, critics have raised questions not only about intelligence-sharing, but also about whether the U.S. Army psychiatrist successfully used...
...heart of the inquiry is the troublesome revelation that the FBI knew that Hasan, who became more religiously devout after his parents' deaths, corresponded with al-Awlaki, an American-born imam who led a northern Virginia mosque where two of the Sept. 11 hijackers worshipped. After al-Awlaki departed the U.S. in 2002, eventually ending up in Yemen, his sermons and teachings - delivered in English - apparently became a source of inspiration for the Fort Dix six and some of the young men who eventually left the U.S. to join al-Shabaab, the Islamist group in Somalia...
...senior counterterrorism official from the Bush Administration says the FBI was very aware of al-Awlaki's profile; Hasan's emails, even if they sounded like academic inquiries, should have "rung bells," he says. "You don't typically think of John Gotti as a guy you'd write a letter to saying, 'I'm very interested in organized crime and how it works.' " After the shootings, al-Awlaki cheered Hasan on his website for doing his jihadist duty - killing soldiers about to be deployed to kill Muslims: "He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction...
...Awlaki was not the only red flag. About six months ago, authorities discovered a Web posting in which the writer, "NidalHasan," compared suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save their colleagues. A senior Administration official tells TIME that Hasan had other foreign connections as well: "It is clear that he had contacts with individuals overseas who have espoused the use of violence like al-Awlaki. It is unclear whether or not it was anything more than just contacts, or if there was any type of operational engagement. It appears as though Major Hasan was inspired...
...Oval Office a half hour later. Reports were all over the place - how many shooters, how many dead. As the day went on, the principals from the White House and Pentagon pushed for clarity as to whether this was part of a broader plot. Obama knew about the al-Awlaki e-mails long before he went to bed that night. "We were looking to see if there might have been any code or anything embedded in that," an official says...