Spero Consulting

Tonight, we saw an ABC news story and an arti­cle in The Wall Street Journal that reported that the FBI and the Army knew that Army Major Nidal Hasan, the accused shooter at Fort Hood, had many con­tacts with rad­i­cal Islamic cleric and recruiter, Anwar al-​Awlaki.

Noth­ing was done about it. Accord­ing to the Jour­nal, “The com­mu­ni­ca­tions between the men appeared related to Maj. Hasan’s work at Wal­ter Reed Med­ical Cen­ter and his pur­suit of a master’s degree…”

So let’s try to under­stand this. It’s okay to be a U.S. Army offi­cer and con­tact a rad­i­cal cleric who tries to recruit for the jihad on his web site…if it’s for “edu­ca­tional” pur­poses. (We imag­ine that one “edu­ca­tional” pur­pose would be, say, “I want to learn more about the jihad and what I can do to help.”)

Geez, we recall when Pete Town­shend (and a few oth­ers) were caught with kiddie-​porn on their com­put­ers, and their defense was that they had it for “research” (read edu­ca­tional) pur­poses, only. Not very com­pelling there, either.

Think of the bil­lions of dol­lars and mil­lions (if not bil­lions of man-​hours) used to harass hon­est cit­i­zens at the nation’s air­ports. Folks for whom the prior prob­a­bil­ity that they are, in fact, ter­ror­ists is as close to zero as prac­ti­cally pos­si­ble. (We ask, how many zeros are to the right of that dec­i­mal point for you, dear reader?) Folks who have never con­tacted rad­i­cal cler­ics for “edu­ca­tional” rea­sons or any other rea­sons. In fact, folks who would pre­fer that the gov­ern­ment take actions to block or remove such sites – even if it means tak­ing down the power grid in Yemen. Folks like you and us and your grand­mother or your children’s grandmother.

As a cit­i­zen, Major Nidal has rights, but as an Army offi­cer, he doesn’t have the same free­doms as civil­ians, yet the FBI and Army are too emas­cu­lated and weak-​willed (and polit­i­cally cor­rect) to play the probabilities.

What’s the prob­a­bil­ity that some­one has ter­ror­is­tic or severe anti-​Western ten­den­cies GIVEN that they sought out and con­versed with a rad­i­cal Islamic cleric and jihad recruiter?

It seems to be quite a bit higher than the prob­a­bil­ity that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment can effec­tively man­age health care – by at least one order of magnitude.

While we’d like to close with the pre­vi­ous sen­tence – we think it’s kind of pithy – we must ask: how many other indi­vid­u­als like Major Nidal, have the agen­cies ignored, deemed harm­less, or not bother with? Won­der if any of them live near you, or us?