Exclusive: Outside Review of Massacre at Fort Hood to Be Filed Soon, Calling for Change at FBI
By Catherine Herridge
The final independent report on the 2009 Fort Hood massacre will include 18 formal recommendations for change at the FBI, Fox News has learned.
In a July 3 letter to Republican Rep. Frank Wolf, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees FBI funding, Judge William Webster, who led the independent review, said it would be on FBI Director Robert Mueller's desk no later than July 13.
"The Final Report will exceed 150 single-spaced pages in length and include eighteen (18) formal recommendations for corrective and enhancing measures on matters ranging from FBI policies and operations to information systems infrastructure, review protocols and training."
Mueller tasked the now 88-year-old Webster, a former director of the FBI and CIA, with the review in December 2009. Characterizing his task as a “complex and lengthy assignment,” Webster wrote that his teams focused on the FBI and its more than a hundred Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) and how they “handled and acted on counterterrorism intelligence before and after the shootings ... and the FBI’s remedial measures in the aftermath of Fort Hood.”
A five-month Fox News investigation, which aired on the ongoing series “Fox Files,” showed that the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki used more than 60 email accounts while under FBI surveillance to connect with his followers, including the accused Fort Hood shooter, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan. Hasan faces a military trial on charges of murdering 13 and wounding more than 32 when he opened fire on the Texas base Nov. 5, 2009.
The information about Hasan’s contact with al-Awlaki, who was killed Sept. 30, 2011, in a CIA-led operation in Yemen, was never shared by the JTTF in Washington, D.C., with army investigators.
