Teri Blumenfeld
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2013, pp. 13-18 (view PDF)
More than a decade after the deadliest attack on U.S. soil, the U.S.
administration seems no closer to identifying let alone repelling
Islamist terrorists in the homeland. The 9/11 committee
used the term "failure of imagination" to explain why the U.S. government was unable to prevent the catastrophic events of that day.
[1]
But although the enemy was identified at that time, the Federal
government and one of its most important branches, the FBI, have adopted
a
policy of scrubbing Islamism from public consciousness
[2] though since bin Laden's 2011 demise, "at least
nine publicly known
Islamist-inspired terror plots against the United States have been
foiled, bringing the total number of foiled plots as of April 2012, to
50."
[3]
In November 2009, U.S. Army major Nidal Hasan
(right) gunned down thirteen of his fellow servicemen at Fort Hood,
Texas. Despite clear links establishing his connection to radical cleric
Anwar al-Awlaki (left), the subsequent Webster report spoke only
vaguely about generic "violent radicalization" while president Obama
referred to the jihadist massacre as "workplace violence."
|
The Obama administration's response to the 2009 Fort Hood terror attack
by U.S. Army major Nidal Hasan offers a vivid illustration of this
practice. In August 2012, an independent commission charged with
reviewing the FBI's failure to prevent the attack issued its
report,
recommending eighteen changes in policies and operations. However, the
commission, headed by Judge William H. Webster, upheld the government's
policy of excluding Islamism from the findings, concluding that despite
the intelligence failure, FBI personnel had faithfully followed
protocols and procedure, and there occurred "no misconduct that would
warrant administrative or disciplinary action."
[4]
