An American Lion

Clearly, having our government conduct surveillance upon us has descended into farce:

Finger-pointing erupted between federal agencies Tuesday over Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Hasan. Government officials said a Defense Department terrorism investigator looked into Hasan’s contacts with a radical imam months ago, but a military official denied prior knowledge of the Army psychiatrist’s contacts with any Muslim extremists.

The two government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case on the record, said the Washington-based joint terrorism task force overseen by the FBI was notified of communications between Hasan and a radical imam overseas, and the information was turned over to a Defense Criminal Investigative Service employee assigned to the task force. The communications were gathered by investigators beginning in December 2008 and continuing into early this year.

That Defense investigator wrote up an assessment of Hasan after reviewing the communications and the Army major’s personnel file, according to these officials. The assessment concluded Hasan did not merit further investigation - in large part because his communications with the imam were centered on a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the investigator determined that Hasan was in fact working on such a paper, the officials said.

The disclosure came as questions swirled about whether opportunities were missed to head off the massacre in which 13 died and 29 were wounded last Thursday - a familiar, early stage in the investigation of headline-grabbing crimes when public officials involved in a case often speak anonymously as they try to shift any blame to rivals in other agencies.

That’s nice. Thanks for taking the high road, fellows, and for leaking competing lies to the media so that you don’t lose your funding for the project you control that doesn’t do anything useful. I’m so glad that these agencies are unable to speak to one another. I’m so glad that their rank amateur incompetence has not only led to dead bodies but to bureaucratic infighting and a general disregard for basic common sense.

Who, in their right blessed mind, signed off on the promotion of a U.S. Army Captain to the rank of Major after it was learned that he was E-mailing a radical cleric? I don’t believe the counterclaims for a second—if the Army “didn’t know” that Major Hasan was being investigated for suspicion of being in touch with radicals, then either someone is lying or is incompetent or both. If the Army is claiming they didn’t know what was going on, then why weren’t they simply paying attention to the presentations that Major Hasan was giving?

It’s all well and good that our President can stand there and give a great speech. But why isn’t he telling us that he has fired the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the incompetence of his agency in dealing with Major Nidal Hasan? Who has taken the step of relieving the commander of the unit at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that failed to stop Major Hasan’s promotion and approved his Officer Evaluation Reports? Who has taken the step of relieving or reassigning the personnel who thought that Hasan wasn’t a threat worth pursuing after his contact with the radical cleric?

Business as usual. Give a speech, bury the dead, and hope no one notices our government is incapable of protecting us from anything. So, about that right to privacy…since you aren’t going to protect us, and since you won’t share information between agencies despite Federal laws, Federal mandates, agreed-upon efforts to coordinate counter-terrorism activities and basic common sense and since we have demanded that you stop playing games with lives and stop engaging in turf wars…hey, it’s our privacy, after all…may we have it back?