[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\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\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. . . . '').
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pete Hoekstra.
Elton Gallegly.
Mac Thornberry.
Mike Rogers.
Sue Myrick.
Roy Blunt.
Jeff Miller.
K. Michael Conaway.
Peter T. King.