[House Report 111-402]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


111th Congress                                                   Report
 2d Session               HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES              111-402

=======================================================================
 
RESOLUTION OF INQUIRY REQUESTING THE PRESIDENT TO TRANSMIT TO THE HOUSE 
  OF REPRESENTATIVES ALL DOCUMENTS IN THE POSSESSION OF THE PRESIDENT 
  RELATING TO THE INVENTORY AND REVIEW OF INTELLIGENCE RELATED TO THE 
     SHOOTING AT FORT HOOD, TEXAS, DESCRIBED BY THE PRESIDENT IN A 
                   MEMORANDUM DATED NOVEMBER 10, 2009

                                _______
                                

  January 27, 2010.--Referred to the House Calendar and ordered to be 
                                printed

                                _______
                                

    Mr. Reyes, from the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 
                        submitted the following

                             ADVERSE REPORT

                             together with

                             MINORITY VIEWS

                       [To accompany H. Res. 978]

    The Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to whom was 
referred the resolution (H. Res. 978) requesting the President 
to transmit to the House of Representatives all documents in 
the possession of the President relating to the inventory and 
review of intelligence related to the shooting at Fort Hood, 
Texas, described by the President in a memorandum dated 
November 10, 2009, having considered the same, report 
unfavorably thereon without amendment and recommend that the 
resolution not be agreed to.

                                PURPOSE

    H. Res. 978 requests that the President submit to the House 
of Representatives all documents in the possession of the 
President relating to the inventory and review of intelligence 
related to the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, described by the 
President in a memorandum dated November 10, 2009.

                               BACKGROUND

    On November 10, 2009, President Barack Obama ordered an 
inventory of all information held by the U.S. Government 
regarding U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who has been 
charged with 13 specifications of premeditated murder and 32 
counts of attempted premeditated murder under the Uniform Code 
of Military Justice.
    President Obama also directed a review of how that 
information was handled, shared, and acted upon within and 
across departments and agencies. The President's national 
security advisors delivered a report summarizing the inventory 
and review to the President on November 30, 2009.

                       SCOPE OF COMMITTEE REVIEW

    No hearings were held in the Committee on H. Res. 978.

                           OVERSIGHT FINDINGS

    In compliance with clause 3(c)(1) of rule XIII of the Rules 
of the House of Representatives, the Committee advises that the 
findings and recommendations of the Committee are incorporated 
in the descriptive portion of this report.

                GENERAL PERFORMANCE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

    Clause 3(c)(4) of rule XIII of the Rules of the House of 
Representatives does not apply, as H. Res. 978 does not 
authorize funding.

                   CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY STATEMENT

    Clause 3(d)(1) of rule XIII of the House of Representatives 
does not apply, as H. Res. 978 is not a bill or a joint 
resolution that may be enacted into law.

              COMMITTEE CONSIDERATION AND ROLL CALL VOTES

    On January 20, 2010, the Committee met in open session to 
consider H. Res. 978.
    The Committee voted to report the resolution adversely by a 
record vote of 8 ayes and 5 noes.
    Voting aye: Mr. Reyes, Mr. Hastings, Ms. Eshoo, Mr. Holt, 
Mr. Thompson, Ms. Schakowsky, Mr. Langevin, Mr. Boren.
    Voting no: Mr. Gallegly, Mr. Thornberry, Mrs. Myrick, Mr. 
Miller, Mr. Conaway.

                      SECTION-BY-SECTION ANALYSIS

    This resolution requests that the President submit to the 
House of Representatives all documents in the possession of the 
President relating to the inventory and review of intelligence 
related to the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, described by the 
President in a memorandum dated November 10, 2009.

                STATEMENT OF FEDERAL MANDATES STATEMENT

    H. Res. 978 includes no Federal mandates.

                  STATEMENT ON CONGRESSIONAL EARMARKS

    Clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of the House of 
Representatives does not apply, as H. Res. 978 is not a bill or 
a joint resolution.

                  CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE ESTIMATE

    In compliance with clause 3(d)(2) of rule XIII of the Rules 
of the House of Representatives, the Committee estimates that 
implementing the resolution would not result in any significant 
costs. The Congressional Budget Office did not provide a cost 
estimate for the resolution.

         CHANGES IN EXISTING LAW MADE BY THE BILL, AS REPORTED

    H. Res. 978 makes no changes to existing law.

                             MINORITY VIEWS

    We are dismayed that the Committee has once again refused 
to conduct urgent and bipartisan oversight of what appear to be 
significant issues in the Intelligence Community. We have 
pressed since the Fort Hood incident for more information, and 
even though a second attack raising almost identical issues has 
occurred in the interim we have still received virtually no 
meaningful information. Since the Administration to date has 
shared only a two-page unclassified report that virtually 
ignores what appear to be the key intelligence issues, we 
believe that this resolution continues to be needed to 
facilitate meaningful oversight to help protect against future 
attacks.
    Since November 2009, the United States has suffered two 
significant jihadist-connected terrorist attacks--the November 
5, 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, and the failed 
Christmas, 2009 bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight bound 
for Detroit, Michigan. Two days after the Fort Hood incident, 
Republican members of the Committee wrote to the Directors of 
key intelligence agencies to express concern that preliminary 
information had suggested the possibility that serious issues 
existed with respect to the performance of the intelligence 
community, and asked for all relevant documents and materials 
to be preserved to facilitate ``significant and serious 
oversight activity by the Committee.''
    The urgency of conducting vigorous oversight to attempt to 
immediately fix deficiencies in our nation's intelligence 
collection and analysis in order to try to prevent future 
attacks should have been obvious and noncontroversial. This is 
not a partisan objective, but an imperative command of our duty 
to protect the American people. The Committee should have 
worked immediately and collectively on a bipartisan basis with 
senior Administration officials and the leadership of the 
Intelligence Community to identify and fix the shortcomings 
highlighted by the Fort Hood incident. These included what 
apparently were serious failures to apprehend and follow up on 
the significance of intelligence that had been collected, 
serious failures in sharing information, serious failures in 
analyzing disparate intelligence, and serious failures to 
comprehend the threat caused by radicalized Americans.
    Instead of such a bipartisan effort, the Administration 
announced on November 10 that it had chosen to conduct a 
unilateral and wholly internal review of the matter. 
Accordingly, Republican members of the Committee wrote to the 
Speaker of the House on November 17 to request vigorous 
bipartisan oversight of the matter in light of ``significant 
intelligence and intelligence sharing failures that must be 
reviewed and addressed immediately to ensure that the American 
people receive the fullest protection against potential 
attacks''. We received no response to our outreach, and were 
disappointed that our efforts to conduct meaningful, 
substantive oversight on this matter were ignored on a partisan 
basis.
    At the November 30, 2009 deadline for the completion of the 
Administration's review of intelligence related to the Fort 
Hood shootings, we again made requests on November 30 and 
December 3 for briefings so we could immediately get to work on 
intelligence community performance issues ``that must be 
addressed immediately to safeguard the American people.'' In 
his December 3 letter, Ranking Member Hoekstra pointed out 
``Given what we already know about the attack, we need to 
prevent its reoccurrence. We cannot waste more time. We must 
immediately begin a healthy dialogue between the Executive and 
Legislative Branches in order to investigate the intelligence-
related matters surrounding the attack.'' Again, this 
proposition should not have been either partisan or 
controversial. Again, our request was met by silence. The 
Committee was not and still has not been briefed on the results 
of the intelligence review, and it appears that even the 
President may not have been fully briefed on the review until 
weeks later.\1\
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    \1\A New York Times Magazine article after the attempted Christmas 
Day attack stated: ``Notwithstanding Janet Napolitano's statement last 
month that `the system worked,' Obama suspected that it had not. While 
on vacation he was given an 80-page review of the Fort Hood shooting, 
looking at how information about Hasan was not well circulated within 
the federal government.'' Inside Obama's War on Terrorism, New York 
Times Magazine, January 17, 2010.
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    On December 16, 2009, Ranking Member Hoekstra introduced H. 
Res. 978 in an effort to obtain documents and materials related 
to the Fort Hood intelligence review so that the Committee 
could conduct independent oversight of the performance issues 
in the Intelligence Community that had been brought to light in 
the Fort Hood attack.
    Nine days later, on Christmas Day, the United States 
suffered a second attack by al-Qaeda connected terrorist Abdul 
Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to destroy Northwest Flight 
253 and the 289 people on board with an explosive device. It 
immediately became apparent that the failures that had come to 
light at Fort Hood had almost catastrophically happened again--
failure to understand the importance of critical intelligence, 
failure to follow up on that intelligence, failure to share 
that intelligence, and failure to comprehend the threats posed 
by radicalization. The Christmas attack also further 
highlighted the failure of the Intelligence Community to 
effectively follow up on the threat posed by radical jihadist 
cleric Anwar al-Alwaki.
    While it is impossible to say definitively whether more 
urgent and effective followup on the intelligence flaws 
identified in connection with the Fort Hood matter would have 
prevented the Christmas attack, it is clear that the Committee 
and the Administration should have acted more urgently as we 
sought in the wake of Fort Hood and still must act immediately 
to conduct vigorous and independent review of these issues so 
that these problems can be fixed fully and immediately.
    The limited information that has been made available to us 
on the Executive Branch reviews that have been conducted on 
these matters gives us little confidence that the flaws have 
been fully addressed. On January 15, 2010, six weeks after its 
conclusion, the Administration finally provided the Committee 
with some information on the outcome of the Fort Hood 
intelligence review--a two page, unclassified, document sent 
via email that failed entirely to address the most significant 
concerns that have arisen in the wake of the two most recent 
attacks. Given the seriousness of the issues at stake for 
national security, this document is shocking in its utter lack 
of substance and failure to grasp the nature or urgency of the 
issues at stake. It is clearly insufficient. Moreover, the 
White House review of matters relating to the Christmas bombing 
attempt could not be fully independent or objective inasmuch as 
it was led by the same person who originally was responsible 
for some of the potentially flawed practices at the National 
Counterterorrism Center.
    The Majority once again has turned down a clear and 
necessary opportunity to fill a critical void. The Chairman's 
objection that this resolution might require the production of 
too many documents from the Intelligence Community (which have 
already been preserved and presumably examined in the Executive 
Branch review) only highlights what we believe is the 
fundamental lack of independent oversight being conducted by 
this Committee. It is unfortunate that the Majority apparently 
is willing to cede its oversight responsibility to the 
Executive Branch and apparently views this issue as a matter of 
artisan political discourse rather than as an urgent 
legislative responsibility.\2\ This is not an issue of partisan 
politics. It is an issue of national security, and we will 
continue to press for aggressive and substantive oversight to 
address these critical issues.
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    \2\``Democrats Seek Cover on Security,'' Roll Call, January 14, 
2010 at 3. (``House Democratic leaders are looking to President Barack 
Obama to show that the party in power is staying on offense when it 
comes to national security. . . . '').
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                                   Pete Hoekstra.
                                   Elton Gallegly.
                                   Mac Thornberry.
                                   Mike Rogers.
                                   Sue Myrick.
                                   Roy Blunt.
                                   Jeff Miller.
                                   K. Michael Conaway.
                                   Peter T. King.

                                  
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