Shortly after alleged gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood and killed 13 people, the Pentagon's top intelligence officer reportedly sent a classified report to the White House detailing a prior failure to connect the dots.
According to CBS News, the 18 e-mails Hasan exchanged with radical Muslim imam Anwar al-Awlaki leading up to the rampage that were being monitored by a wiretap were never seen by the terrorism task force that was determining whether the Army major posed a threat.
After the task force had concluded Hasan didn't pose a threat, it didn't request later information on his exchanges with Awlaki.
Because Hasan was a member of the military, the FBI showed the e-mails to a Pentagon investigator with the note "comm" written on it. The word reportedly was seen as meaning "communication" to the Pentagon official, but to the FBI it meant "commissioned officer."
Thus, no alert was raised in regard to Hasan's communications with Awlaki.
The incident at Fort Hood mirrors U.S intelligence agencies' failure to pull together fragments of data needed to foil the failed Christmas Day bomb plot on the Detroit-bound airliner.
Officials had received fragments of information as early as October about an alleged terror recruit they later learned was Nigerian suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
President Obama on Thursday called for intel agencies to do a better job of recognizing serious terror threats that coincided with the release of a declassified summary of a two-week review of the incident.
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