    [Senate Hearing 112-151]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                                            S. Hrg. 112-151

                     A TICKING TIME BOMB: COUNTERTERRORISM
                   LESSONS FROM THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S FAILURE
                        TO PREVENT THE FORT HOOD ATTACK

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                                  COMMITTEE ON
                   HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                                     of the

                          ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                               FEBRUARY 15, 2011

                                   __________

            Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov/

                           Printed for the use of the
            Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

                                    _____

                      U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
    66-620 PDF                WASHINGTON : 2011
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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    20402-0001

            COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                   JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
    CARL LEVIN, Michigan                 SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
    DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii              TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
    THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware           SCOTT P. BROWN, Massachusetts
    MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas              JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
    MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana          RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
    CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri           JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada
    JON TESTER, Montana                  ROB PORTMAN, Ohio
    MARK BEGICH, Alaska                  RAND PAUL, Kentucky

                      Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
         Gordon N. Lederman, Associate Staff Director and Chief Council
                    for National Security and Investigations
                           Charles F. Martel, Counsel
                  Seamus a. Hughes, Professional Staff Member
         Brandon L. Milhorn, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
                      Luke P. Bellocchi, Minority Counsel
                      Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
             Patricia R. Hogan, Publications Clerk and GPO Detailee
                        Laura W. Kilbride, Hearing Clerk

                                C O N T E N T S

                                     ------
    Opening statements:
                                                                       Page
        Senator Lieberman............................................     1
        Senator Collins..............................................     2
        Senator Johnson..............................................    21
    Prepared statements:
        Senator Lieberman............................................    27
        Senator Collins..............................................    29

                                   WITNESSES
                           Tuesday, February 15, 2011

    Hon. Charles E. Allen, Former Under Secretary of Homeland
      Security for Intelligence and Analysis and Chief Intelligence
      Officer........................................................     3
    General John M. Keane, USA, Retired, Former Vice Chief of Staff
      of the U.S. Army...............................................     5
    J. Philip Mudd, Senior Global Adviser, Oxford Analytica..........     8
    Samuel J. Rascoff, Assistant Professor of Law, New York
      University School of Law.......................................    12

                         Alphabetical List of Witnesses

    Allen, Hon. Charles E.:
        Testimony....................................................     3
        Prepared statement...........................................    32
    Keane, General John M.:
        Testimony....................................................     5
        Prepared statement...........................................    41
    Mudd, J. Philip:
        Testimony....................................................     8
        Prepared statement...........................................    46
    Rascoff, Samuel J.:
        Testimony....................................................    12
        Prepared statement...........................................    48

                                    APPENDIX

    ``A Ticking Time Bomb, Counterterrorism Lessons From the U.S.
      Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack,'' A
      Special Report by Joseph I. Lieberman, Chairman, and Susan M.
      Collins, Ranking Member, U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland
      Security and Governmental Affairs, February 2011...............    59
    American Civil Liberties Union, prepared statement...............   130
    Responses to post-hearing Questions for the Record from:
        Mr. Allen....................................................   136
        Mr. Keane....................................................   139
        Mr. Mudd.....................................................   141
        Mr. Rascoff..................................................   143

                     A TICKING TIME BOMB: COUNTERTERRORISM
                       LESSONS FROM THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S
                          FAILURE TO PREVENT THE FORT
                                  HOOD ATTACK

                                  ----------

                           TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2011

                                         U.S. Senate,
                           Committee on Homeland Security and
                                          Governmental Affairs,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:47 a.m., in
    room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph I.
    Lieberman, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
        Present: Senators Lieberman, Levin, Begich, Collins, Brown,
    and Johnson.

                OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN LIEBERMAN

        Chairman Lieberman. Two weeks ago, Senator Collins and I
    issued this report based on our bipartisan staff investigation.
    It was, as we have indicated, into the Fort Hood massacre that
    left 13 innocent people dead and 32 others, including Sergeant
    Lunsford, wounded.
        Our report--titled ``A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism
    Lessons from the U.S. Government's Failure to Prevent the Fort
    Hood Attack''--concluded, painfully, that the attack at Fort
    Hood was preventable. The Department of Defense (DOD) missed
    several opportunities to reprimand and discharge Army Major
    Nidal Hasan for his growing and surprisingly open embrace of
    violent Islamist extremism, and the Federal Bureau of
    Investigation (FBI) neglected to investigate him thoroughly
    after it learned that Hasan, a member of the U.S. Armed Forces,
    after all, was communicating with a suspected terrorist already
    the subject of a major FBI counterterrorism investigation.
        More broadly, our investigation uncovered a troubling lack
    of awareness among some U.S. Government officials about violent
    Islamist extremism, the ideology that inspires it, its
    manifestations, and how best we can prevent and confront it.
        Today we are going to hear reactions to our report's
    findings and recommendations and discuss how our government
    must proceed if it is to prevent future homegrown terrorism
    broadly and the loss of innocent American life at the hands of
    violent Islamist extremists.
        I want to particularly recognize, welcome, and, again,
    honor all those members of the victims' families, and Sergeant
    Lunsford, who are here today and also to welcome our panel of
    witnesses. They are really an extraordinary group of people
    with wide-ranging and long experience.
        Charlie Allen was the first Under Secretary of Homeland
    Security for Intelligence and Analysis and Chief Intelligence
    Officer and before that for a long time had been a top
    counterterrorism official at the Central Intelligence Agency
    (CIA).
        Phil Mudd is a former long-time CIA analyst and was the
    first Deputy Director for National Security at the FBI as post-
    September 11, 2001, made itself into the lead U.S. Government
    agency for counterterrorism purposes.
        We are really honored to have Jack Keane with us, retired
    Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and four-star general, to
    discuss the military's response to this challenge.
        And Samuel Rascoff, Assistant Professor of Law at the New
    York University School of Law and former director of the
    intelligence analysis unit of the New York Police Department
    (NYPD), will bring the other perspective of local government
    and academia to the discussion.
        Because we are starting late, I am going to ask that the
    rest of my statement be included in the record.
        And I will now call on Senator Collins.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COLLINS

        Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Let me begin my remarks by also expressing my personal
    thanks to the family members and victims who have traveled from
    afar to be with us today. As I told them in our meeting prior
    to this hearing, they were the ones who kept us going
    throughout this investigation, even though at times we met with
    obstacles and a lack of cooperation. And meeting with you today
    redoubles our determination to ensure that the recommendations
    in our report will become a reality.
        About a half a day, about 4 hours, that was the amount of
    time that the Washington Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF)
    spent determining whether a military officer in communication
    with a known terrorist suspect amounted to a national security
    threat. Underlying threat information was not shared with the
    Department of Defense. Additional investigative actions were
    not taken, even when the JTTF responsible for the lead called
    the investigation ``slim'' and pressed for more action.
        This hasty decision to close the investigation cost the
    government its last, best chance to identify the violent
    radicalization of Major Nidal Hasan, the last, best chance to
    potentially prevent the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood.
        But well before this failure by the FBI, the Department of
    Defense itself had enough information regarding Hasan's violent
    radicalization to have disciplined or discharged him under
    current personnel and extremism policies. Hasan's extremist
    actions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were well known to
    his supervisors and colleagues, and his poor medical
    performance was also evident. Yet the Department took no
    action--laying the foundation for the FBI's cursory
    investigation which relied, in part, on Hasan's inadequate and
    misleading officer evaluations.
        Our report's conclusion is alarming. It is a call to
    action. The Department of Defense and the FBI collectively had
    sufficient information to have detected Major Hasan's
    radicalization to violent Islamist extremism, but they failed
    to act effectively on the many red flags signaling that he had
    become a potential threat.
        I, too, am going to submit the rest of my statement for the
    record since we are starting late, but I just want to make four
    quick points.
        First, the Administration still is refusing to acknowledge
    that violent Islamist extremism is the ideology that fuels
    attacks.
        Second, the FBI cannot go it alone. Its Joint Terrorism
    Task Forces have been successful and deserve credit for
    thwarting plots against our country, but they risk becoming
    another intelligence stovepipe.
        Third, detecting and disrupting homegrown terrorism will
    require a sustained leadership effort from the Attorney
    General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of
    National Intelligence, and active coordination across Federal,
    State, and local lines.
        Fourth and finally, the U.S. Government must develop and
    implement an effective strategy to confront the violent
    Islamist ideology that fuels terrorism.
        Again, as I met with the families today, they renewed my
    personal commitment and I know that of the Chairman and all the
    Members of this Committee. They deserve no less than our
    steadfast commitment to achieving the goals that we have set
    out in our report. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Senator Collins.
        Now we will go to the witnesses. Mr. Allen, great to
    welcome you back. I think we are calling on you first, as we
    usually do, based on seniority. And may I say you look great. I
    have not seen you in a while, so welcome back.

     TESTIMONY OF HON. CHARLES E. ALLEN,\1\ FORMER UNDER SECRETARY
     OF HOMELAND SECURITY FOR INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYSIS AND CHIEF
                          INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

        Mr. Allen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member
    Collins. It is great to appear before this distinguished
    Committee again. I have a longer statement for the record that
    I would like to be entered into the record.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Allen appears in the Appendix on
    page 32.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Chairman Lieberman. Without objection, it will be.
        Mr. Allen. The focus today, of course, is on the murder of
    12 servicemen and one Department of Defense civilian at Fort
    Hood by Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major and a
    psychiatrist. But beyond that event, I think there is the
    broader issue of the potential growth of violent ideological
    Islamist extremism in our homeland, and Senator Collins just
    referenced that.
        I found the section of the Committee's special report on
    violent Islamist extremism to be in accord with views that I
    have held since 1998 when I was at the CIA working against al-
    Qaeda and the global spread of Islamist extremism, along with
    Mr. Mudd. It delineates the ideology of violent Islamist
    extremism--and that of al-Qaeda its affiliates and others--from
    the belief in the religion of Islam and its practice. And that
    is very important.
        I am concerned, however, by the details in the report on
    the deference given Major Hasan by his superiors at the
    Department of Defense as he repeatedly persisted in studying
    Islamist extremism in ways that suggested he endorsed under
    some circumstances violent acts, including suicide operations.
        As this Committee is well aware, the United States has
    successfully continued very relentless efforts under two
    Administrations to disrupt, dismantle, defeat, and destroy al-
    Qaeda, and it has been remarkably successful. The new factor,
    however, that has come to the fore over the last 2 years is a
    surge in homegrown extremism here in the United States. The
    growth of extremism, especially among young American Muslims,
    in 2009 and 2010 is very disturbing. According to a RAND
    Corporation study published in 2010, there were 46 publicly
    reported cases of radicalization and recruitment to jihadist
    terrorism between September 11, 2001, and December 31, 2009.
    But 13 of these cases occurred in 2009, up from an average of
    about four cases a year from 2002 to 2008. And the individuals
    charged with involvement in terrorism were primarily self-
    inspired, self-motivated. And with few exceptions, they were
    not directed by al-Qaeda ``central'' or by al-Qaeda in the
    Arabian Peninsula.
        One cannot overstate the power of the Internet in fueling
    the growth of this radicalization. It is the primary means by
    which al-Qaeda markets its messages to hundreds of Web sites,
    commanding Muslims to kill or support the killing of U.S.
    citizens to defend Islam, which we know is a false statement.
        Anwar al-Awlaki in his latest video, which I think was on
    November 9, 2010, had one simple message, and it was very
    direct: ``Kill Americans.''
        Turning to the Committee's report, I agree strongly with
    the Committee's views in praising the work of the military, the
    FBI, and intelligence agencies, in disrupting and preventing
    attacks. And I think the Committee is accurate in its judgment
    that there is a need for a more comprehensive and coordinated
    approach to countering radicalization and homegrown terrorism
    across all agencies, including Federal, State, and local. If we
    are going to keep the country safe, I think we have to have a
    unified intelligence effort.
        We have talked about an integrated national intelligence
    enterprise to deal with domestic terrorism, but I think we are
    far from one where we have firm resolution. There is no unified
    national intelligence collection plan or not even a set of
    recognized national intelligence requirements relating to
    domestic terrorism. There are fault lines across the Federal,
    State, and local governments and the information sharing and
    building of trust among counterterrorism authorities.
        For example, the FBI is the country's primary domestic
    intelligence agency that has the responsibility to prevent and
    investigate acts of terrorism. It is a radically different
    agency from what existed on September 11, 2001, it really has
    improved. It has established the Joint Terrorism Task Forces,
    over a hundred of those. It has established Field Intelligence
    Groups in each of the FBI's 56 field offices. But it is not
    clear to me that the analysts are as well integrated into FBI
    investigations and operations as they should be, and it is
    especially important that they are not integrated with special
    agents in pursuing leads where there may be suspicious activity
    but no immediate predicate for investigation.
        The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its
    intelligence arm has yet to realize its full potential at the
    State and local level. It must do more to enrich its
    relationship not only with the fusion centers but with local
    police departments. Local police departments are not yet fully
    utilized as part of the overall national intelligence effort,
    even though they are well positioned to combat homegrown
    terrorism. They know their neighborhoods, and they are very
    diverse.
        It seems to me the lessons from Fort Hood are pretty clear.
    DOD needs to have both a doctrine and strategy for dealing
    effectively with the potential for Islamist extremism within
    our military services, and I believe this can be done while
    ensuring that military personnel have full freedom of religion,
    regardless of faith.
        Both DOD and the FBI also had sufficient information
    between them, if it had been acted upon--to have taken actions
    to prevent the attack by Major Hasan. However, neither had a
    total view of the potential threat posed by Nidal Hasan. More
    importantly, the DOD officer assigned to the JTTF never had
    access to all of the sensitive information involving Major
    Hasan's communications with a ``suspected terrorist.''
        It is essential that personnel assigned to the JTTFs from
    other agencies, such as DOD, have ``systems high'' clearances
    if they are to perform their jobs. Failure to share information
    and excessive compartmentation have contributed to American
    casualties in the struggle against terrorism, there are some
    examples of that in the past.
        I think the FBI is on its way to transformation, changing
    the Bureau's culture. But I believe the transformation is
    incomplete. It needs to move even more to become an
    intelligence-driven organization from its case-driven model
    that it has prided itself on over the years. I also believe
    that the JTTFs decentralized model has to be re-examined to
    ensure that FBI Headquarters' counterterrorism leadership is
    more directly involved in potential terrorism leads that could
    pose risks and the need for more intelligence colleague.
        I look forward to your questions.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Mr. Allen, for an
    excellent opening statement.
        General Keane, a pleasure to welcome you back. Thank you
    for all your service to our country and for coming forward to
    talk about this current challenge.

      TESTIMONY OF GENERAL JOHN M. KEANE,\1\ USA, RETIRED, FORMER
                  VICE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE U.S. ARMY

        General Keane. Chairman Lieberman, Ranking Member Collins,
    and distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for
    inviting me to testify today about the most significant threat
    to the security of the American people that I have seen in my
    lifetime--radical, violent Islamist extremism. I commend this
    Committee and the leadership of Senators Lieberman and Collins
    for their ongoing work in identifying this dangerous ideology
    and developing ways to protect against it.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of General Keane appears in the Appendix
    on page 41.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        My heart goes out to the family members of our murdered
    soldiers and civilian, and those who are here today. I hope you
    can find some satisfaction in the excellent work done by this
    Committee.
        The most recent work of the Committee on this challenge to
    our national security is its investigative report on the Fort
    Hood massacre that took place on November 5, 2009. That report
    puts the key issue front and center and confirms what many of
    us feared after the attack. Self-radicalized violent Islamist
    extremists are not just here in America; they have penetrated
    the U.S. military, which is one of the last places you would
    expect to find people so violently opposed to this country and
    its citizens.
        I would like to discuss my two reactions to this much
    needed and comprehensive report. First, I am shocked and
    disappointed by what this report reveals about the failure of
    the Department of Defense to come to grips with violent
    Islamist extremism and the danger it presents to our troops.
    Second, I wholeheartedly endorse the report's recommendations
    for reform in DOD to better protect against this threat.
        I will start with my first reaction--just how unacceptable
    the Army's failure to deal properly with Hasan's radicalization
    to violent Islamist extremism was. I reach this conclusion with
    sadness. I was proud to serve in the Army, and while I did, I
    was involved in helping the Army devise policies to protect
    against racial extremism that turned deadly at Fort Bragg,
    North Carolina, where I commanded. And I know the military is
    full of people at all ranks who are dedicated to the protection
    of the men and women in service. But this time, some of those
    people--including Hasan's superiors and colleagues--failed to
    do what was needed to root out a dangerous extremist.
        I agree with the report's conclusion that Hasan's open
    displays of violent extremism was a violation of military rules
    calling for good order and discipline. A list of things Hasan
    said and did in that report, when you add them up, shows he was
    an extremist who had no place in our armed services.
        I want to caution here that I know that our military
    includes thousands of brave and patriotic Muslim Americans who
    serve this country with honor. Some have given their lives in
    service to our country. When Hasan concluded that Muslim
    Americans might commit fratricide, he was not talking about
    them, but he was giving a warning about himself. As the report
    states, Hasan's extremism was not a secret. The officer who
    assigned him to Fort Hood told commanders there, ``You're
    getting our worst.''
        What should have Hasan's military superiors done? They
    should have been able to put the information together and
    conclude that Hasan believed the same things that the violent
    Islamist extremist enemies of this country believe, and that
    meant he should have been out of the military.
        But instead of removing Hasan, his superiors promoted him,
    graduated him from his residency and fellowship, assigned him
    to Fort Hood, and even approved him for deployment to the
    conflict in Afghanistan. Instead of moving Hasan out, his Army
    commanders moved him up. This is exactly the opposite of what
    responsible officers should have done.
        The report describes a series of reasons given by the Army
    for failing to deal properly with Hasan. I do not find any of
    those reasons credible. A pair of related reasons is that some
    of Hasan's superiors believed his views were not problematic,
    and others actually believed he provided valuable insight into
    Islamist extremism. This was a terrible misjudgment because the
    truth was that Hasan's views were problematic precisely because
    he was an extremist. It is hard to understand why senior
    officers did not see that.
        So why did Hasan's superiors fail to take the action that
    was necessary? That brings me to my second reaction to the
    report, which is my agreement with the report's recommendations
    about changing military policies and training to identify the
    threat of violent Islamist extremism among service members and
    to require that it be reported and dealt with.
        When I testified at a hearing before this Committee at the
    beginning of the investigation, I said this: ``It should not be
    an act of moral courage for a soldier to identify a fellow
    soldier who is displaying extremist behavior; it should be an
    obligation.'' This is as true today as it was then.
    Unfortunately, the report reveals that the military to this day
    still does not have policies and training which identify what
    violent Islamist extremism is and what our men and women should
    do when they see it.
        I know a lot of good people in the military have reviewed
    the Fort Hood attack to determine lessons learned, and some of
    their work and recommendations do move us forward. But we have
    to directly address the threat we face exactly, and that threat
    is violent Islamist extremism. Over a year after the Fort Hood
    attack, this direct and honest step still has not been taken by
    the military. Instead, the military avoids labeling our enemy
    for what it is, rather subsuming it under ambiguous terms such
    as ``extremism'' or trying to call it something completely
    different such as ``workplace violence.'' That is not
    acceptable because it leaves our service members vulnerable to
    more attacks from these extremists.
        Clarity is all the more important here because of the
    complexity of dealing with someone like Hasan, who commingles
    dangerous extremism with religion. Unless service members
    clearly understand the difference between legitimate religious
    observance and dangerous extremism, everyone in the military is
    in an unfair position. The reason is that service members are
    understandably reluctant to interfere with the practice of
    religion and that they are, rightly, trained by the military to
    respect religious observance. But that should never mean that
    violent Islamist extremism should be tolerated. The Department
    of Defense's failure to identify the enemy clearly causes
    service members at all ranks to avoid dealing with extremists
    properly, just as they avoided the need to deal with Hasan.
        The lack of clarity is also deeply unfair to the thousands
    of Muslims who serve honorably in the U.S. military. If service
    members clearly understand the difference between their
    religion and the dangerous radicalism of violent Islamist
    extremism, the patriotic Muslims in our armed services will be
    protected against unwarranted suspicion. In fact, it was just
    that sort of awful, untrue stereotype about Muslim soldiers
    that Hasan believed and promoted in his statements. The best
    way to defeat that stereotype is to educate our service members
    about the difference between the legitimate, peaceful
    observance of Islam, which is respected and protected, and the
    violent Islamist extremism which should lead to reporting,
    discharge, and law enforcement intervention.
        I endorse the changes that this report recommends because
    they do what needs to be done to fix the problems I have
    described. They are necessary to make, and they are not hard to
    make.
        I know from experience that the changes this report
    recommends could be made and implemented in a month or two if
    DOD chose to do so. That sort of urgency is necessary because
    our men and women in the military are vulnerable to a known
    danger and because DOD has an equal responsibility to protect
    its thousands of brave and patriotic Muslim-American service
    members from unwarranted suspicion by colleagues who have never
    been trained about what violent Islamist extremism is and how
    it differs from the peaceful exercise of Islam.
        I welcome this Committee's hard work to protect them, and I
    hope that DOD will act immediately to follow the
    recommendations in this investigative report, and I look
    forward to your questions. Thank you.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, General Keane.
    Excellent statement, and it means a lot to our Committee to
    have your support of the recommendations and the findings.
        Next, Phil Mudd, we welcome you back, another familiar
    face. We thank you again for your service and welcome your
    statement now.

     TESTIMONY OF J. PHILIP MUDD,\1\ SENIOR GLOBAL ADVISER, OXFORD
                               ANALYTICA

        Mr. Mudd. Thanks for having me, Senator. I do not really
    have a statement. I just wanted to have a conversation with the
    Committee about what I think about this and--I have been out of
    the business for 10 months--what my friends talk about when
    they speak about this. There are 13 people are dead and we talk
    about this a lot.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Mudd appears in the Appendix on
    page 46.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        There has been a lot of complaining among my friends. They
    do not like the tone, they do not like the title. Others say we
    need a lot of accuracy in here, we ought to focus on the
    accuracy. I have heard other sides, including staff, say we did
    not get full cooperation.
        I would like to put that aside and say, Look, it is an
    honor to be here. I know families are behind me. Thirteen
    people are dead, and 32 are injured. I am not going to focus on
    what I heard in terms of bitching and moaning from my friends.
    I want to talk about what we should do.
        Chairman Lieberman. Great.
        Mr. Mudd. I think we should start by focusing on the
    problem we face in terms of threat, and this is a good time to
    do this because we are 10 years in. When I was sitting at the
    threat table in 2001, 2002, and 2003, you were talking about
    looking at a point target in a place like Pakistan and saying,
    do we understand the point target well enough tactically to
    figure out if they are going to send somebody to Chicago? That
    is Jose Padilla. So you could focus on an intelligence target
    overseas and in essence look for the point where that
    intelligence target was focusing in the United States.
        Flip that on its head right now and think now we have to
    look for people in the United States who might be motivated by
    people overseas, but in essence we are looking for a needle in
    a haystack because the overseas guys are not sending people
    here anymore. They are relying on the ideology of the
    revolution, to motivate someone here. So what we have to do is
    say, how do we get down from 20,000 people, or 50,000 or 1,000,
    to in the future find the Major Hasans? So that is the premise
    I am going at this with.
        What I would like to do is to offer some suggestions in
    seven or eight areas that relate to things like field
    operations, that relate to coordination among agencies, State
    and locals, and I have talked to some of them about this at the
    FBI, CIA, and DHS. But every one of the seven or eight comments
    I have relates to this question of how do you find people in
    the field when you cannot presume anymore that point targets
    overseas, that is, al-Qaeda leadership, will give you the clues
    you need to solve the problem.
        The fundamental transformation I am talking about is
    getting CIA intelligence or the National Security Agency (NSA)
    intelligence to penetrate al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan
    versus getting State and locals or a JTTF or a fusion center in
    Amarillo, Texas, to tell you something is wrong here that we
    would never have seen overseas.
        A couple of broad categories I mention: When I think about
    this as a manager, you think about how do people operate in the
    field; how do we train them; what kind of guidance do we give
    them; how does headquarters operate to drive them; and what
    kind of policy background you have in terms of training when
    they enter service--especially in dealing with this as a
    metastasized threat and in dealing with this after
    conversations with friends in the Middle East and Europe--who
    are, by the way, facing the same things and talking about the
    same problems.
        I want to end with a couple comments specifically about the
    Internet because I think that is the biggest problem we have
    here, both operationally and in terms of guidance and
    legislation.
        In terms of field operations, as I said, I want to step
    through seven or eight ideas. Each of these, I will offer a
    specific comment about a way ahead that you could look at over
    90 to 120 days with your staff. I do not want to just lay a
    problem at your doorstep. I want to give you a solution.
        We have a metastasized threat where you cannot just focus
    on a Federal group or a federally led group like a JTTF. You
    have to focus on State and locals. You have something like
    17,000 or 18,000 police departments. There is not a lot of
    staff on JTTFs. We need to understand how we can get
    information from these State and locals up.
        So point one, I think there needs, 10 years in, to be a
    conversation about coordination among JTTF, State and locals,
    and--we have not mentioned this yet--fusion centers. Fusion
    centers are out there. There are 70-plus. They operate
    differently. They are charged with looking for these needles in
    haystacks. I would argue more specifically that you talk to
    people like the International Association of Chiefs of Police
    (IACP), the major city chiefs, and talk to them in conjunction
    with DHS and the FBI and say if the threat is changing but we
    are still driving the leads down from Washington and operating
    in relatively small centers like JTTFs, do we need to change
    that concept and what are your ideas from the people who see
    this problem in the streets--that is, State and local
    enforcement.
        I would argue second that you have to think about staffing
    there. I know there are a lot of discussions on the Hill about
    budget cuts. You understand the linkage between cutting off
    staffing for cops and cops' willingness to participate in
    Federal task forces. That is sort of a one-to-one correlation.
    The cops I talk to understand budgetary issues, but they are
    saying with a lot of violent crime, it is going to be
    increasingly difficult for us to participate in these
    intelligence-sharing programs like fusion centers and JTTFs if
    we have fewer and fewer cops to go on the streets. Believe me,
    behind the scenes when we have a beer, they are not complaining
    about what you have to do here; they are just saying we live in
    a reality. And police chiefs are saying, ``I might have to pull
    back from task forces.''
        We also should look at joint training. CIA trains human
    intelligence (HUMINT) officers; FBI trains HUMINT officers; FBI
    trains investigators; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
    trains analysts; CIA trains analysts; FBI trains analysts;
    fusion centers train analysts. Unbelievable. I would argue that
    we take a city approach. You take a city like Houston, Dallas,
    or Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a good example because they have
    a terrific counterterrorism program in the police out there.
    And say, should we think about training in a different way--
    that is, hugely expensive. Bring people back to a training
    facility near Washington, put them together with a problem set
    of how do you find extremism--and have a standard process by
    which police, analysts, FBI agents, CIA officers, and DHS
    officers are sitting down saying, when we face a problem, here
    is how we are going to train to attack the problem and get out
    of this, having analysts and operations in an information-
    sharing world train separately. So that is the second or third
    thing I would ask the staff to do.
        Let me shift quickly to talk about things like ideology,
    which is a problem I talked about, again, in the Middle East
    and Europe. We have a problem of extremism. Extremism is not a
    Federal violation, but it is the precursor for what we saw that
    led to the murder of 13 people. I would argue that Members of
    the Committee might want to talk to other places who have
    longer experience dealing with hate speech, places like Western
    Europe--I am talking about the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedes,
    and the Brits. The Australians are having this problem. We have
    to think about not just why one person murdered 13 people. We
    have to think about how we take hate speech and indications of
    violence on the Internet and boil that down to find one person
    and what indicators we can use. I am not talking about
    psychology. I am literally talking about technical tools to
    boil that down. But part of that has to be comfort from this
    side of the street to say that is OK, because people like me
    are very nervous about this. They saw the PATRIOT Act debate
    last week. They see people saying you are getting too intrusive
    in our lives. And, meanwhile, they are getting the message to
    be more intrusive as you look on the Internet. Very problematic
    for a practitioner.
        I will close quickly, but a couple other things.
        First, as I close, a bit of an off-the-wall comment, but we
    are looking for needles in haystacks, and a lot of these are
    coming from new communities that are nervous about working with
    security services. I would bring in DHS and say when we are
    bringing new people in for things like swearing them in to this
    country, do we have a conversation with them about how to be
    comfortable with your national security apparatus; what numbers
    can you call; what protection you have when you call someone. I
    think we ought to have a quick conversation--this is sort of
    the royal ``we,'' but I am suggesting your staff look into
    this--about how we talk systematically to new immigrants about
    how they can help integrate in this society and prevent further
    isolation of their communities in the event there is another
    attack, because this is bad for all of us, and I think most of
    them would understand it is bad for their communities. They are
    just nervous about talking to the Federal Government.
        I think similarly we should have an imam training program.
    I know this is government intruding into religion, but we are
    behind the curve on this. Countries overseas are doing this. I
    am not suggesting that we train imams about how to teach people
    about religion. I am suggesting that, similar to what I am
    talking about with immigrants, we have a conversation with
    them--and people overseas have already done this--to say this
    is how we need help, this is the message you should give to a
    kid who is considering violence, this is who to call, this is
    what protections you have--because a lot of them will say, ``I
    am not going to call if the kid is just going to get picked
    up.''
        My last point is about the Internet. We need to go from an
    ocean to a drop of water, because the number of people who are
    involved in this Islamist violent revolution is in the tens or
    hundreds of thousands. So to find people like Hasan, you are
    going to go from 10,000 or 20,000 people to one. I would
    suggest we consider looking at the legislation and regulations
    that guide how people--people like in the jobs I used to have--
    look at the Internet and how they investigate potential violent
    activity on the Internet. Look at the laws and regulations, and
    then ask people on the other end, people like me, in a perfect
    world when you had no legislation, no regulations, what would
    you do? Characterize that air gap and say, are we comfortable
    giving people guidance to cover that air gap? Because I
    suspect--I am not sure about this--that you will find that air
    gap is wider than you think.
        But, again, it is an honor to be here. It is really an
    honor because I used to be here because of the position I held,
    and now you invited me because maybe I know something. And I
    know the families are behind me, and it is really a privilege,
    so thank you.
        Chairman Lieberman. Having heard your testimony, Mr. Mudd,
    we made the right move in inviting you because you clearly do
    know a lot. Your testimony was very helpful, and particularly
    the specific recommendations you made, which I would like to
    come back to.
        I do want to put an exclamation point around something you
    said, and it builds on the numbers that Mr. Allen and General
    Keane also talked about, which is that--and this is why we
    really ought to talk about this directly. When we talk about
    violent Islamist extremists, we are talking about a very small
    number of people in the Muslim-American community. I think Mr.
    Allen's numbers said something like 46 cases since September
    11, 2001, although the escalation was to 13 cases in 2009.
        Mr. Allen. In 2009.
        Chairman Lieberman. Yes, that was the number from September
    11, 2001, through 2009. So that is a very small number of
    cases.
        On the other hand, of course, it does not take too many
    people to do a terrible amount of damage, as we saw at Fort
    Hood, 13 dead, 32 injured, some quite seriously. So it puts our
    challenge in context, but I think it also ought to encourage us
    to just be very direct about who is the enemy and who is not
    the enemy, and to enlist, as I think you are suggesting,
    members of new American communities and the Muslim-American
    community to join us in this effort to find the drops of water
    in the ocean, if you will.
        Mr. Mudd. I know it is not time to respond, but I would
    quickly say my sense is most members of the community do not
    know, and I include both family and----
        Chairman Lieberman. Yes.
        Mr. Mudd. I watched hundreds of investigations,
    particularly at the Bureau, but a few like this at CIA. And I
    know there are a lot of questions about community participation
    and cooperation with law enforcement, and I think there is some
    fair criticism to be made. But I think mostly they do not know.
        Chairman Lieberman. Our final witness is Mr. Rascoff. You
    have been before us before--I guess you were before us when you
    were with the NYPD. Thanks from being here today.

    TESTIMONY OF SAMUEL J. RASCOFF,\1\ ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LAW,
                   NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

        Mr. Rascoff. Thank you, Chairman Lieberman, Ranking Member
    Senator Collins, and distinguished Members of the Committee. I
    am truly honored for the opportunity to testify today about
    aspects of the exceedingly important report that the Committee
    recently issued examining the failures that led to the Fort
    Hood tragedy and making structural recommendations to ensure
    that such an incident will not be repeated.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Rascoff appears in the Appendix
    on page 48.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Mr. Chairman, I ask that my written statement be entered
    into the record.
        Chairman Lieberman. Without objection.
        Mr. Rascoff. Thank you.
        And let me also say that I am humbled to be addressing you
    in the presence of a courageous survivor of the attack as well
    as relatives of the brave women and men who lost their lives on
    that truly awful day.
        My goal this morning is to elaborate on three findings in
    the report, with an eye to making constructive suggestions.
        First, I would like to say something about certain
    challenges to the achievement of meaningful collaboration or
    what I will call ``jointness'' on the Joint Terrorism Task
    Force.
        Second, I would like to comment about the proper role of
    the FBI as an intelligence agency in relation to domestic
    counterterrorism generally, and specifically as it pertains to
    the homegrown threat.
        And, third, I would like to offer some preliminary thoughts
    on the proper organization of American counter-radicalization
    and on some lessons learned from the British experiment, with
    similar strategies and programs.
        Let me just say at the outset that the issues that I am
    going to be talking about and that I have written about for the
    Committee all grow out of the work that I do as a law professor
    focused on issues of intelligence and counterterrorism, but
    certainly also are informed by my practical experience as the
    founding head of the NYPD's intelligence analysis arm.
        On the question of jointness in the JTTF, let me begin by
    saying what many of us already know, which is that the JTTF has
    clearly served as an indispensable facet of domestic
    counterterrorism from well before September 11, 2001. The JTTF
    recently marked its 30th birthday and, if anything, has only
    become that much more significant in the aftermath of September
    11, 2001. So any account of what we have done right in
    counterterrorism in this country over the last decade would
    have to assign a prominent role to the institution of the JTTF.
    And yet, as the report properly observes, there are aspects of
    the JTTF, and specifically with this question of jointness to
    which the JTTF naturally and justifiably aspires, that remain
    ill defined.
        What is the proper role of detailees from local police
    departments, let us say, or other Federal agencies on JTTFs?
    Are those detailees best thought of in the way of liaison
    between the FBI and the astonishing variety of institutional
    actors who have a role to play in counterterrorism?
        Perhaps the real significance of detailees is the different
    perspectives that they bring to bear on the work of the JTTF
    itself? Or for that matter, and for a host of reasons that I am
    happy to get into during the question-and-answer period, do
    detailees effectively end up becoming viewed by their FBI
    managers as only so many extra personnel to whom those
    habitually strapped leaders can turn to perform tasks that
    might otherwise have fallen to FBI special agents?
        In my view, the most significant contribution that the
    report makes in this area is in pointing out that the answers
    to many, if not all, of these critical questions remain
    elusive. On the whole, I think it is fair to say, JTTFs remain
    dominated by the strategic outlook of the FBI and only
    imperfectly function as clearinghouses for domestic
    counterterrorism information and for the disparate perspectives
    on terrorism that are brought by Federal and local agencies.
        On the question of intelligence and homegrown terrorism, I
    think this is, if anything, a more significant area in which
    jointness is lacking, and that is because on the JTTF, as part
    of the FBI's investigative work, the Bureau is playing at its
    core strength. When we turn to the intelligence mission, by
    contrast, and specifically to the enterprise of domain
    management--which is an innovation in the FBI that my colleague
    Mr. Mudd had an enormously important role in debuting--what we
    are really talking about is FBI agents understanding the
    environment in which they work.
        Now, to my mind, domain management represents a clear case
    where the Bureau and where the Federal Government more
    generally ought to be leveraging much more effectively the
    know-how of local police officers who, after all, know their
    terrain intimately, have lived and worked in their communities
    more or less their whole lives, and have a distinctive leg up,
    I would say, on their Federal counterparts when it comes to
    that kind of anthropological understanding of the world in
    which they operate.
        On counter-radicalization, I wholeheartedly endorse the
    report's conclusion that we need a national strategy. We need a
    national strategy that is headquartered in the White House;
    that is in a sense orchestrated by elements of Federal
    Government, such as the National Counterterrorism Center
    (NCTC)--and this is the nub--and a strategy that devolves most
    of the heavy lifting when it comes to the implementation of
    counter-radicalization to local actors. And when I say local
    actors, I mean to suggest police and other local officials, but
    even more so, local non-governmental entities. Why is that?
    Lessons learned from the United Kingdom and from other
    countries that have experimented with counter-radicalization
    suggest that effectiveness only comes when communities
    themselves become engaged with the enterprise of counter-
    radicalization. So if we are going to succeed and if we are
    going to avoid some of the intensely knotty political and, in
    some sense, policy issues that have dominated the conversation
    about counter-radicalization in the United Kingdom, I think we
    are going to need to lean heavily on our own communities, and
    specifically our Muslim communities, to play a key role in
    moving the agenda on counter-radicalization.
        Let me conclude by saying that the report admirably calls
    attention to a range of lessons that ought to be internalized
    from the Fort Hood tragedy. I am particularly encouraged by the
    report and by this Committee's ongoing involvement in issues
    relating to the design and implementation of a domestic
    counterterrorism architecture that is suited to the emerging
    threat environment.
        I look forward to answering your questions, and I thank you
    for your time.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Professor Rascoff.
    Since I first met you when you clerked here for Justice David
    Souter, I believe, and I just called you ``Sam,'' it is a
    pleasure for me now to refer to you as ``Professor.'' It is
    actually quite noteworthy in its way that you are a professor
    who has focused at a law school on these issues, and that is
    important as well.
        We will do 7-minute rounds of questions. Excellent opening
    statements and very helpful to us.
        General Keane, let me come back to ask you to speak just a
    little bit more about the perplexing part of the results of the
    investigation about the the army's handling of Major Hasan,
    which is, I kept asking myself as we went over the findings,
    why were his superiors not dealing directly with his open
    expressions of violent Islamist extremism? Put aside for a
    moment whether he was a good psychiatrist or some evidence that
    they were pushing him along and promoting him when he really
    was not that good. But was this some kind of exaggerated
    political correctness in the superiors? Was it that it was just
    easier to move him along rather than creating a bureaucratic
    problem? Or was it something else?
        General Keane. It has been my experience in dealing with
    racial extremism when I first confronted that as a result of
    the two murders at Fort Bragg that the normal thing that
    happens when people use speech that is so abhorrent to most of
    us, the natural thing is to pull away from it because you have
    great difficulty identifying with it in terms of your own
    values, and in this case even in terms of the military's
    values. And I saw that with racial skinheads. The tendency was
    for the soldiers to pull away from it, and in those cases, the
    chain of command failed to act on the hate speech and on
    behavior as well.
        I think much the same has taken place here. People have a
    tendency to pull away from it. They know they are hearing
    something that they do not agree with and do not identify with.
    And what is particularly problematic is this is a military
    organization, and we have responsibilities to act on behavior
    or conduct that is not in keeping with the good order and
    discipline of our organizations. And that is the thing that is
    most troublesome, responsible officers hearing that pulled away
    from it and decided not to confront it because they were
    uncomfortable and were giving up their responsibilities as
    officers to deal with this.
        I also think that Hasan, in the environment he was
    operating in, had certain tolerances and privileges that
    probably would not have existed if he was in a normal
    warfighting organization.
        Chairman Lieberman. How do you mean?
        General Keane. He was an officer, a doctor, and a
    psychiatrist. And I think that gave him certain tolerances that
    contributed to this. That does not excuse the officers in not
    confronting them.
        Chairman Lieberman. Right.
        General Keane. But I do think it probably contributed to a
    certain degree.
        Chairman Lieberman. I think you are right. If I am not
    mistaken, he was the only Muslim psychiatrist in the army. Is
    that correct?
        There was one other. So that in that sense, they may have
    wanted to defer to him as a resource, but obviously with tragic
    consequences.
        Incidentally, the families who are here quite rightly
    focused Senator Collins and me in our discussion before the
    hearing on people being held accountable for their behavior in
    these cases. And I know we have talked to people at the
    Department of Defense. They say they do not want to act on
    these cases until the legal proceedings against Hasan are over.
    But it is really important that the people who acted
    negligently--and I know we all have the clarity of hindsight
    here, but that they be held accountable. And we are going to
    stay on that until that happens.
        Let me ask you this question and maybe ask a few others to
    get involved in it. In this strange, to me, unwillingness to
    describe the enemy as what it is here, violent Islamist
    extremism, I mean, the 9/11 Commission Report, the Kean-
    Hamilton report, had a conclusion that really rings out so
    clearly. The enemy--I am paraphrasing, of course, here--is not
    just al-Qaeda, they said; and it is certainly not the religion
    of Islam. It is a politicized ideology, a corruption of the
    religion, which is violent Islamist extremism. I believe that
    is the literal word they used for it.
        I think that there are still some people in the Executive
    Branch of government who believe that--incidentally,
    notwithstanding the fact that we have been fighting the
    manifestations of that ideology at considerable loss of life
    and national treasure in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We
    refuse to call it that here. I think some people in the
    Administration feel that if we do so it will compromise our
    relationship with the broader Muslim world outside of America
    and, to some extent, with the Muslim-American community. And I
    wonder if you, General Keane, Mr. Allen, or any of the others
    want to comment on that conclusion.
        General Keane. Well, first of all, I find it outrageous
    that 10 years after September 11, 2001, we still have
    difficulty identifying this for what it is and are unwilling to
    name it. That is profoundly disappointing.
        And as a soldier, I mean, the first place you start with is
    who your enemy is.
        Chairman Lieberman. Right.
        General Keane. And what are their motivations and what are
    they trying to accomplish? And you have to come to grips with
    that if you are expecting in any way, shape, or form to be
    successful against them. So that is stunning in and of itself.
        The issue that we get into here because the ideologues have
    used religion to fuel their belief system and somehow we are
    unwilling to confront it because it is associated with a
    religion is such an insult to the Muslims who find this
    ideology abhorrent themselves. They do not identify with this.
    They are outraged by that ideology. It is against everything
    that they stand for, and it translated into this horrific
    behavior that we saw at Fort Hood. Muslims inside the military
    and Muslims outside of it do not identify with this. They want
    it to be separated from them.
        And coming to grips with what it is helps provide them the
    separation that they so desperately need. It helps to remove
    the veil of suspicion and mystery that may surround it. Helping
    to educate people about the ideology and how abhorrent it is
    and what it stands for is something that is certainly needed.
    And in this case in the military, I am absolutely convinced
    that training and education programs are necessary, must be
    mandated for the whole chain of command to participate in, much
    as we did with racial extremism. And I believe in my heart that
    will also find some protection for the Muslim soldiers who are
    in the military to avoid the stereotyping that grows out of
    this and the unwillingness of people to confront it.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks. My time is actually up. Mr.
    Allen.
        Mr. Allen. I would just like to say that I think Mr. Mudd
    hit it right. It is the ideology. You have it right, Mr.
    Chairman. And the Internet is fueling it, and when Mr. Mudd
    talks about not just dozens but hundreds, if not thousands, are
    listening to this extremist virulent message day after day
    after day, it is infecting a small segment of American-Muslim
    society. And for us not to call it what it is and deal with it
    directly I think only exacerbate long-term our problems here in
    the homeland.
        Chairman Lieberman. Agreed. Mr. Mudd.
        Mr. Mudd. Senator, let me be quite specific. It is the
    difference between what we do and what we say. We have a
    problem with violent Islamist ideology in this country. That is
    a problem. We should not say this, and I would discourage you
    from ever using the word ``terrorism'' or ``Islamist'' in a
    speech. Let me tell you why. My job is to kill the adversary
    ideologically. Operationally they are just trying to inspire
    people, their revolutionary movement. So operationally you can
    take people out of the streets. Ideologically you are hoping
    that the revolution dies over time because people start to say
    there is no message here, this is nihilistic, there is no
    future.
        Three years ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second in charge of
    al-Qaeda, had his one and only Internet interview, not live but
    he took questions. The first question he chose to respond to
    came from North Africa. It was from an engineer, I believe, or
    a teacher. And the question was about explain, Mr. Zawahiri,
    why you kill so many innocent Muslims.
        Now, why does he choose to take this question? Why does he
    choose--and, again, it was not live, so al-Qaeda put this one
    at the top of the hopper. If you look at research post-
    September 11, 2001, across the Islamic world--and Pew Research
    does some pretty good work--most of these countries--Jordan,
    Saudi Arabia, Yemen, North Africa, going into Southeast Asia--
    have experienced the murder of innocents by al-Qaeda. You
    remember the horrific murder at a wedding in Jordan a few years
    ago, just a horrible thing. And the murders that led, I think,
    to the uprising against incoming Islamists in Iraq, I do not
    think the surge was the only thing that resulted in some
    success. There were a bunch of Iraqis saying, ``Why are they
    killing us? We may not like the Americans, but we sure as heck
    do not like some Sunni coming from Yemen shooting us up.''
        I think what Zawahiri is realizing is that people who he
    needs to recruit are losing interest in the movement not only
    because they do not see a future, but because too many locals
    have died. They cannot defend the accusation of murder in their
    own communities. They can defend being terrorists.
        So to close this circle, as someone who wants to kill the
    ideology, I think we ought to call them what they hate to be
    called. They liked to be called terrorists. They liked to be
    called Islamist radicals and revolutionaries. They hate to be
    called murderers. And that is what they are.
        Chairman Lieberman. I am unconvinced. I am going to call
    them all of those things because I think that is what they are.
    They are violent Islamist extremists and they are murderers and
    they are terrorists.
        Mr. Mudd. No, I agree that is what they are. I am just
    saying don't give them what they want. Let us fight about
    this--no, I am just kidding. [Laughter.]
        Chairman Lieberman. Senator Collins.
        Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That was an
    extraordinarily interesting exchange that you just had with Mr.
    Mudd. From my perspective, particularly when we are dealing
    with the military, the refusal to distinguish violent Islamist
    extremism from the peaceful, protected exercise of the Muslim
    religion sends exactly the wrong message because it implies
    that they cannot be distinguished. And it does lead to
    suspicion being cast upon peaceful, patriotic, law-abiding,
    courageous Muslim members of our armed forces.
        So I see it a little bit differently because I think the
    Administration needs to be clear about who our enemy is as much
    as who it is not in order to protect the vast majority of
    peaceful Muslims. And that is why I think defining for our
    military exactly the way the general did, when confronted with
    the white supremacists at Fort Bragg, is very helpful in
    allaying misplaced suspicion. But your point is a fascinating
    one, nonetheless, and I appreciate your making it.
        I want to talk about the Joint Terrorism Task Forces. This
    model was created to ensure that information was shared, and I
    remember when the JTTFs were first created, I was very upset
    that there was not one in Portland, Maine, and I went to the
    FBI and I said, ``We have to have one in Portland, Maine.''
    After all, two of the terrorists began their journey of death
    and destruction on September 11, 2001, from Portland, Maine.
    And, interestingly--and to get back to a point that two of our
    witnesses made--at first the police chief in Portland did not
    want to participate because he did not want to devote an
    officer full time to a JTTF and lose that officer from the
    street.
        I want to get back to that point, but to me, the most
    perplexing aspect of this case is that the army was never
    notified about Hasan's communications with a known terrorist
    suspect, a known murderer and planner. That to me is just
    inconceivable. After all, think about the name of the task
    force. It is the Joint Task Force. Both those words--all three
    of those words imply a sharing of information and personnel.
    And yet the information was not communicated to the army.
        First let me start with the general. If that information
    had been communicated to the army, to Hasan's superiors, given
    all else they knew, do you think action would have been taken?
        General Keane. It is probably likely that something would
    have been done because if that came through intelligence
    circles, then into the Criminal Investigation Division, they
    would come down and start talking to the chain of command and
    saying, ``Look, we have information on this major who is
    dealing with an extremist. What have you got on this guy?'' And
    they would start having a conversation saying, Oh, yes, we have
    this, this, this, and that. I think that probably would have
    been a call to some kind of action on the part of the chain of
    command. Particularly from that external source, it would have
    been enough motivation to get Major Hason's superiors over
    their reluctance to confront what they were facing. I think it
    is likely that something would have been done.
        Senator Collins. Mr. Allen, when we talked to the FBI about
    why that information was not shared, at first they said there
    were legal impediments. Then later they said they were worried
    about compromising the integrity of their investigation of the
    suspect in Yemen. Then they said that they were concerned that
    the ``least intrusive means'' language was somehow a barrier to
    sharing that information.
        Were there means by which the FBI could have passed on the
    information about Major Hasan to the military, to DOD, without
    revealing the source of the threat information?
        Mr. Allen. In my view, yes. Pursuing a suspected terrorist
    abroad, there are a lot of ways to do that and there is a lot
    of information. Clearly sources and methods on how this
    information involving Major Hasan was collected is very
    crucial. But in my view, that information should have been
    absolutely made available in its fullest, as required, to the
    appropriate authorities who have security clearances at the
    level required within the Department of Defense.
        This was not the first time we have let compartmentation,
    restricted handling as we called it at the CIA, result in
    casualties or contribute to casualties. And we, in my view,
    cannot afford to do this. The JTTF model, in my view, needs to
    be looked at again. It may not be the right model for the 21st
    Century and where we are today with the growth of extremism
    here in our country.
        So I think your point is well taken. My opinion is that
    this should not have been a problem, and an individual
    representing the Department of Defense--and I spent some years
    in the Office of the Secretary of Defense so I know what it is
    like--should have had the system high clearances and accesses
    so that this could have been pursued appropriately with
    intelligence and security authorities within the Department of
    the Army.
        Senator Collins. Thank you.
        Mr. Mudd, I was intrigued by your discussion of where do we
    go from here because that is really important to be our focus.
    Should we rethink the very structure of the JTTFs? You talked
    about having people trained together. I thought that was an
    excellent idea. But do we have this backwards? I mean, perhaps
    should it be that we are embedding FBI agents in the fusion
    centers more or with big-city police departments? Do we have
    the structure right? And, Mr. Rascoff, I am going to ask you
    the same question.
        Mr. Mudd. Mr. Rascoff, please just say what I say, OK? And
    then we will be OK. [Laughter.]
        I would ask the question a bit differently, if I could.
    There is a difference between a success in investigative
    activity out of a relatively small Joint Task Force, and I
    think anybody in the national security arena, if they had seen
    this picture 10 years ago, if they said the biggest tragedy we
    will face--I know it is brutal, but there are 13 people dead,
    people in this country would have said, ``You are nuts.'' So
    investigatively I think many people would say this has been
    successful when we have a point target that comes into the
    sites, ensuring that point target--that is, a case--does not
    explode something in a shopping mall.
        The question we have, to get back to where I started, is:
    How do you take the mass of a revolutionary movement in this
    country, a bunch of people, angry kids in cities like we saw
    here with the Virginian kids going to train in Pakistan. We
    have seen it up and down the East Coast and the West Coast. I
    think the question should be not whether we reconsider the
    JTTFs. It is a good investigative organ. I think we ought to
    agnostically go and talk to the International Association of
    Chiefs of Police, fusion centers, and say: Forget about
    investigations. If we are trying to sort through the massive
    data--it might be organized crime data because that is a big
    problem or child porn data, which is the most troubling thing I
    saw at the FBI. How do we go and not just investigate--JTTFs
    are pretty good at that--but collectively sort through this and
    train to sort through this and get around now an apparatus
    where you have fusion centers that all have their own
    approaches, you have JTTFs, and you have major city departments
    that have their own capabilities that are most remarkable,
    which is at NYPD. I would get away from critiquing the JTTFs, I
    would say, and just agnostically and say how do we hunt needles
    in haystacks and how do we do it more efficiently.
        Senator Collins. Thank you. Mr. Rascoff.
        Mr. Rascoff. I would tend to agree that the conversation
    ought to----
        Senator Collins. Did you have any choice? [Laughter.]
        Mr. Rascoff. I would tend to agree that we ought to be
    thinking not just about tweaks to the institution of the JTTF,
    but Senator Collins, following your question, we ought to be
    thinking more comprehensively about the possibility of needing
    new kinds of institutions and new models for marrying up
    Federal and local know-how in this area. And it occurs to me
    that one kind of union that we ought to be thinking seriously
    about is a union between analysts within the FBI and seasoned
    veteran local law enforcement officials. What particular form
    that union takes, I do not know. I could imagine it being
    lodged within the JTTF. I could imagine it taking a new form
    altogether. But I think the concept that is important is
    somehow fusing the knowledge that is reposed within our local
    police departments already--we do not have to re-create that
    knowledge--and making sure that the FBI has the benefit of that
    knowledge by virtue of its kind of analytic talent.
        Senator Collins. I know my time has expired. Just one final
    comment. We still have a lot of cultural barriers to overcome
    here, and even if we change the structure, if we do not change
    the willingness to disseminate and analyze information and
    continue the work that Director Robert Mueller is doing in
    transforming the FBI, then there is this tendency to still just
    keep the information closely held. And that was one of the
    problems here. Thank you.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thank you, Senator Collins.
        It is a pleasure for the first time call on Senator Johnson
    for questioning.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHNSON

        Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator
    Collins. I certainly appreciate your earlier warm welcome, and
    I just want to let you know I realize how important the work is
    of this Committee--so I requested to be on this Committee. The
    defense of our homeland is a top priority of our Nation, so I
    look forward to working with you.
        I would like to offer my condolences to the victims and the
    families of the victims. I hope we all understand that the men
    and women that step up to the plate and defend our Nation are
    the finest among us. And, again, I am eternally grateful.
        General Keane, I would like to start the questioning with
    you. First of all, thank you for your service, sir. You
    mentioned in your earlier testimony that it would be an act of
    moral courage to step forward. Can you explain what you meant
    by that?
        General Keane. Well, what I was saying is that, in the
    absence of clear policy guidance about this ideology and what
    it stands for, and the fact that it is associated with a
    religion, people draw away from it. What we need is policy
    guidance that removes the fact that you have to have an act of
    moral courage to do something about it. A soldier who sees this
    kind of ideology manifesting itself in speech, who is informed,
    trained, and educated on it, has an obligation to report it.
    That should be unequivocal. That is not true today. There is no
    guidance like that today. What the soldier does know and what
    all leaders know is that anything against the good order and
    discipline of an organization, whether it is misbehavior,
    conduct, speech, etc., something should be done about that.
        But because of this ideology and the complexity of it, we
    need education and training on it, just as we did on something
    in this country that was known for hundreds of years dealing
    with race and racial extremism. We published a pamphlet in the
    1990s on that subject because we were invaded by skinheads
    inside the military who were using the military for their own
    purposes to gain training, etc. And we had never confronted
    that before specifically. And we conducted training throughout
    the entire chain of command, from soldier to general, on what
    this racial extremism was, what its manifestation was, and what
    we would do about it. And anybody who saw it or heard it had an
    obligation to report it. That is what I mean. Take that burden
    off of the soldier, the sergeant, or the officer. Make it an
    obligation to report it and it is a duty to report it, and give
    them the tools to understand it.
        Senator Johnson. You said the officers were probably
    uncomfortable. Was there something more going on there, though?
    Was there a fear of reprisal and harm to their future careers?
    Is there that thing going through the military?
        General Keane. I would suspect that the association of
    Islamist extremism with a religion is part of the problem, and
    that is why the education and training is necessary to clearly
    delineate what it is, and that we are separating the ideology
    from this great religion of the world, and unburdening the
    people in terms of the confrontation in dealing with it. I
    think that is certainly part of the issue here in terms--you
    have to scratch your head and say why, after repeated
    occurrences of this kind of expression, something was not done
    about it.
        Understand this, Senator. This is the U.S. military, we
    trump people's rights when they take the oath to the
    Constitution. You do not have the right to free speech. You do
    not have the right to speak against the chain of command. You
    do not have the right to speak against the President of the
    United States. We can take action against that. You do not have
    the right to privacy. You do not have the right to assemble
    with groups of other people when you feel like it. Those things
    are denied service people because what comes first is the
    mission and the good order and discipline of an organization to
    be able to perform effectively, to be able to accomplish that
    mission. So everybody who has taken an oath understands that.
    And yet we are still unwilling to confront that behavior and
    that speech.
        Senator Johnson. Have there been military careers ruined
    because people step forward and complain against somebody that
    it might be politically incorrect to complain about?
        General Keane. I have not seen it. I mean, in the
    organizations that I have been associated with all of my life,
    if we have somebody that does not reflect the values and
    character of the organization, we do something about it and
    counsel them, if we can. If you cannot correct that behavior,
    you are probably going to separate that person. That is the
    reality of it.
        Senator Johnson. You can see I am just puzzled why nobody
    reported it.
        Mr. Mudd, I was very interested in your comment about the
    Internet and the gap--I believe what you were talking about is
    the gap between what you would like to do and what you are
    allowed to do. Can you speak to that and tell me what you mean?
        Mr. Mudd. Sure. I would characterize it maybe not ``like
    to'' but ``could do.'' Again, I talk to a lot of security
    service colleagues around the world, and a lot are more
    aggressive than we are. The Internet is sort of a stateless
    entity, but we are probably more conservative than most
    security organizations in how we deal with it.
        What I am saying is if you are looking at a situation like
    radicalization on the Internet, you find a note of
    radicalization--clearly we have that out of the Arabian
    Peninsula in this case. You might say to yourself, OK, I want
    to conduct activity to look for words of violence to sort
    through these tens of thousands of people who might be in
    contact with this individual, and then start to neck it down. I
    am most interested in people who are also pinging other known
    Web sites and the frequency with which they are pinging those
    Web sites. All these are indicators. You might say I want to
    know people who travel overseas, in particular to places I am
    worried about. Let me name Pakistan and Yemen as two places I
    would be deeply concerned about.
        I mean, I could go on and on about it, but the point is
    think about what I just said. That is a good way to boil down
    an ocean over time to a cup and then to a drop. None of those
    is a Federal violation, and some are directly involved in free
    speech to conduct preventive intelligence operations in the
    United States.
        Let me close with one point. I was re-reading this morning
    the Church Committee reports from the 1970s. They were very
    critical of the domestic intelligence architecture for being
    preventive and looking at things that were not Federal
    violations. So you are talking about why the military might be
    a little nervous. I am telling you, the people who live in my
    business know where we are going to be in a year when we go
    down this road. We are going to be in front of another
    committee.
        I will close on a personal note. I was involved at CIA
    operations between 2002 and 2005 that were supported by the
    Department of Justice, briefed to the Congress, and told by the
    White House this is the policy of the United States; and I lost
    a job over it because I could not get in front of this
    Committee for a confirmation hearing. That is the way this town
    works. And, by the way, my life is better because of it.
    [Laughter.]
        But my point to illustrate this personally is that this
    town changes frequently. Unless you provide guidance, people
    are going to say, ``I ain't getting kicked a second time by the
    mule, because the first time I learned my lesson.''
        Senator Johnson. Is it guidance or is it legislation that
    is required?
        Mr. Mudd. That is a good question. I do not know. I am not
    a believer in overlegislating, so I would probably say get the
    work done on the analysis and see whether guidance is clear
    enough. If there is something in black and white on a piece of
    paper that is going to give people a level of comfort that they
    are not going to get attacked in a year or two because they
    made a mistake--and there are going to be mistakes, because you
    are going to go from 10,000 to one, and the 200, when you are
    getting near the end of that neck, you are going to say, I have
    a right to get on that Web site. I want to see through a
    Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request why you are looking
    at me, and I have a lawyer now.
        Senator Johnson. Thank you.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Senator Johnson. Excellent
    questions.
        There is a vote going off in about 5 minutes. Maybe we each
    can ask one question. At least I have one I would like to ask,
    which is: One of the big takeaways from the report, apart from
    the infuriating specifics, was this question of how do we
    develop a broader counter-homegrown radicalization strategy to
    prevent the needles from appearing in the haystack? Or if they
    do, how do we find them before they hurt somebody? And this
    obviously involves law enforcement and intelligence, but
    presumably goes beyond that. There is not an easy way at this
    point in our governmental apparatus to organize this. I just
    wanted to quickly invite any of you, do you have any thoughts
    about how we might achieve the establishment of this kind of
    counter-radicalization strategy in our country? Mr. Allen.
        Mr. Allen. Yes, Mr. Chairman, and I think this is extremely
    hard and is going to take time. But I think we have to begin.
    We formed a Director of National Intelligence in the
    Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004
    (IRTPA). You all made further legislation, the 9/11 Commission
    Recommendations Implementation Act. There is a lot there that
    can and should be done, starting at the very local level and
    involving Federal, State, and local.
        We do not have, as I said in my written statement, a
    national intelligence collection plan that relates to domestic
    terrorism.
        Chairman Lieberman. A very important point.
        Mr. Allen. We do not have the minimal essential needs on
    what we should be collecting within the law and authorities. I
    started an experiment over at Homeland Security as the Under
    Secretary--and Mr. Mudd may be right; he was better off not to
    spend 3 years doing what I tried to do--to develop the minimal
    essential requirements. We did a prototype, went out and talked
    to five fusion centers and with local police, and we developed
    a beginning set of what really do you want, not what comes down
    but what as a partner do we require with local law enforcement,
    with the fusion centers, and with the Joint Terrorism Task
    Forces. So there has to be a unified approach.
        There are a lot of authorities there. What I would like to
    see from the Administration and from the Director of National
    Intelligence, as well as the Department of Homeland Security
    and, of course, the Department of Justice, all involved in
    building a unified intelligence architecture for domestic
    terrorism. We are not there. We have pieces of it, but it is
    not unified. I meet with informed law enforcement officers,
    former FBI officials, with the informal group that is led by a
    RAND Corporation specialist, and we have talked about this at
    length. And I believe your Committee is well aware of this.
        But we are in the early stages of this. We need to move on.
    There is a sense of urgency, it seems to me, given the fact
    that we are talking about not a handful but perhaps dozens of
    young people who could be influenced--Americans, American born
    or naturalized Americans, legally permitted Americans--who are
    going to engage in extremism and terrorist acts if we do not
    start working this as a unified approach in a domestic
    intelligence enterprise. And, very regrettably, we are not
    nearly where we should be.
        Chairman Lieberman. I want to yield to Senator Collins in a
    minute. Mr. Rascoff, do you have a thought?
        Mr. Rascoff. What I would like to add to Mr. Allen's
    observation, Mr. Chairman, is this: I think we ought to be
    thinking about two groups of institutional actors that
    historically have not really played a role in the national
    security business. I think under the banner of a kind of whole-
    of-government approach, we ought to be thinking about Federal
    agencies that are not really part of our national security
    team, departments like the Department of Education, which has
    recently begun to kind of dip its toe in the water in the area
    of counter-radicalization. The Department of Education and
    other welfare-state type agencies will have a critical role to
    play.
        The second group I would like to mention are grass-roots
    organizations, local schools, local religious organizations.
    These sorts of non-governmental organizations who are close to
    the ground, I think, are going to have a critical role to play.
    So counter-radicalization has to come from a White House
    strategy. There has to be leadership from the top. But I think
    we need to see a new range of institutional actors in Federal
    Government and local actors, specifically local non-
    governmental actors, getting into the business.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks. Very helpful. Let me yield to
    Senator Collins.
        Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Senator Brown was hoping to return and obviously has not
    been able to and I am sure will be submitting some questions
    for the record. But I just want the General, in particular, to
    know that he intended to ask about officer performance
    evaluations and to express his concern, which I also share,
    that it seems inconceivable to us that Major Hasan received
    these glowing performance evaluations, which the FBI relied on
    in part to terminate its review, despite his troubling and
    erratic personal behavior, but also evidence that he was not a
    very good physician. As you quoted one of his superior officers
    as saying to the people at Fort Hood, ``You are getting our
    worst.''
        And that whole area I believe that our Committee or the
    Armed Services Committee does need to pursue. And I suspect
    that there is a problem with grade inflation, for lack of a
    better term, in these evaluations, because I know personally
    that whenever we have a detailee from the military and it comes
    to the end of that person's time with us, my staff always says
    that I have to give them the highest evaluations, or it will
    hurt their career, even if they were not as good as previous
    officers.
        So I think there is something wrong with the evaluation
    system if it allowed Major Hasan to be promoted time and time
    again in the face of increasingly erratic and troubling
    behavior and also poor performance. So on behalf of Senator
    Brown and myself, I wanted to express those views.
        Let me just end by thanking all of you for being here
    today. I told the Chairman that I thought that this was the
    best possible panel that we could have had, and that each of
    you added so much. You all have served in public life and have
    done so much to help secure our country. I am grateful for
    that. And, again, I want to close by thanking the family
    members and the sergeant and his wife for being here. You are
    why we pursued this investigation, and I want to once again
    assure you that we realize that our job is not finished.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Senator Collins.
    Senator Johnson.
        Senator Johnson. Just a final thought. As the new kid on
    the block here, I just wanted to say this was extremely
    helpful, very informative, and I just want to thank all four of
    you for your service. And, again, the victims and their
    families, thank you.
        Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Senator. I would just echo what
    Senator Collins has said. You have been a really excellent
    panel, both insightful and you have made some specific
    recommendations, which we will follow up on.
        The bottom line here is that the results of our
    investigation were both deeply troubling and really
    infuriating. And Senator Collins and I are intent that this
    report not just stay on the shelf. The fascinating thing to us
    was that the key Federal agencies involved, about whom we were
    critical in the report, essentially said when the report was
    issued, that the report makes some good points and that they
    are working on it.
        Sometimes that is the pathway to nothing else happening,
    and this is just too important, as the testimony of the four of
    you has made clear. So we are going to stay on this until we
    are sure that the awful gaps that have been revealed in policy
    and behavior in the report are closed and that the problems
    that resulted are, to the best of our ability, solved.
        The record of the hearing will remain open for 15 days for
    additional questions and answers. Again, I thank the four
    witnesses. I thank the families. We are going to have you back.
    Your reward for coming--your punishment for coming today is
    that we are going to invite you back and have the honor of
    listening to your testimony on this matter.
        With that, the hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:12 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

                                A P P E N D I X

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