Did Imam's Posting Trigger Hasan's Gun Buy?
Just two weeks before Maj. Nidal Hasan purchased the weapon he allegedly used in the Fort Hood shooting, the radical imam with whom he had been communicating posted an incendiary message on the Internet vilifying Muslim soldiers who "follow orders" by fighting on behalf of the "enemies" of Islam.
On July 14, 2009, Anwar al-Awlaki posted a message titled "Fighting Against Government Armies in the Muslim World" on his blog. Although the post is aimed at the armies of U.S. allies, it excoriates individual soldiers who defend U.S. interests against the mujahedin in Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.
"The blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders whether the order is to kill Muslims as in Swat [northwest Pakistan], bomb Masjids [mosques] as with the Red Masjid [in Islamabad], or kill women and children as they do in Somalia, just for the sake of a miser salary," the message states. "This soldier is a heartless beast, bent on evil, who sells his religion for a few dollars."
The discovery of the July message Wednesday morning by the NEFA Foundation, a New York–based research group, is likely to fuel the controversy over whether the FBI missed important clues about Hasan before he allegedly went on his shooting rampage last Thursday. Senior investigators confirmed this week that starting in late December they had monitored between 10 and 20 communications between Hasan and Awlaki, an American-born imam now living in Yemen who had been investigated by the FBI for years because of his radical sermons and his association with two of the 9/11 hijackers.
But after conducting an "assessment" of Hasan, they had concluded earlier this year that the communications were benign and he did not pose a threat.
Most intriguing about the newly discovered Internet posting is the timing. It came just one week after Hasan was transferred by the Army from Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to Fort Hood in Texas in preparation for an overseas deployment.
And one week after the July 14 posting by Awlaki, Hasan walked into the Guns Galore gun shop in Killeen, Texas, and paid more than $1,000 for an FN Herstal 5.7 semiautomatic pistol, a gun that is known as a "cop killer" and has become a weapon of choice for Mexican drug cartels.
Evan Kohlmann, a counterterror researcher who works as a consultant to the NEFA Foundation and provided the Awlaki message to Declassified, acknowledged there is no way of knowing whether Hasan read the July 14 message. But he noted that it produced a "tremendous reaction" with "hundreds of comments" on Awlaki's Web site.
"This is the kind of thing that could push somebody over the edge," Kohlmann said, referring to the incendiary language in the message. "The timing looks to me like it's just before Hasan took concrete steps" toward the shooting.
After the Fort Hood shooting, Awlaki posted another message on his Web site calling Hasan a "hero."
Grief After a Rampage: See NEWSWEEK's of the tragedy at Fort Hood.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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