On Dec. 17, 2008, a U.S. Army psychiatrist opened the “Contact the Sheikh” form on Anwar al-Aulaqi’s website and asked whether Muslim soldiers who killed fellow soldiers in the name of Islam could be considered martyrs. The message carried his name and his personal AOL address. Within two days, an FBI analyst and agent in San Diego had read it, flagged it and passed it to the Defense Department officers on their task force.
Nearly eleven months later, on Nov. 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire in the deployment center at Fort Hood, Texas, and killed 13 people. Last week the Army set his execution by firing squad for Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, according to an order signed Oct. 6 by acting Army Secretary Adam Telle, Task & Purpose reported. It would be the first execution carried out by the U.S. military since 1961.
The story most people remember from 2009 is that the FBI ignored the warning signs. The government’s own reviews tell a more specific story, and in some ways a more uncomfortable one. The FBI did not ignore Hasan. It flagged him in days. Then the case fell between two field offices, a database the investigators didn’t know how to search, and a four-hour review that closed it. We read the unclassified Webster Commission report, the FBI’s commissioned review released in July 2012, alongside the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s 2011 report, “A Ticking Time Bomb.”
San Diego saw him first
Aulaqi was the target of a major FBI investigation run by the San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Bureau was collecting his email. (How it did so is still blacked out in the report.) Hasan’s first message landed in that collection. The San Diego agent marked it a “Product of Interest,” traced the IP address to Reston, Virginia, and emailed it to three Defense Department officers on the task force. The agent asked them whether the writer was in the military.
The first check came back negative. Then, on Jan. 7, 2009, a Defense Criminal Investigative Service agent on the task force found an active-duty Army officer named Nidal Malik Hasan at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. His personnel record listed him as a “Comm Officer.” The agent read that as communications officer. It meant commissioned officer.
That misreading shaped everything after it. Believing Hasan might have access to intelligence message traffic, the San Diego agent decided not to issue a formal intelligence report that the wider community, including the military, would see. He sent a lead to the FBI’s Washington Field Office instead, with the full text of both messages and a careful line: the contact “would be of concern if the writer is actually the individual identified above.” He made it a Routine, Discretionary Action lead. Under FBI policy, that let the receiving office decide what, if anything, to do.
Four hours on May 27
The Washington supervisor didn’t assign the lead until Feb. 25, nearly two months later. The commission said the delay may have been caused partly by the office’s focus on threats around the 2008 election and the inauguration. He gave it to a Defense Criminal Investigative Service agent with one instruction, to do an “assessment,” and no deadline. Informal FBI practice gave Routine leads 90 days. The agent first read the lead on May 27, 2009, the 90th day.
What followed took about four hours, according to the commission. The agent checked Hasan’s military status and clearance, ran his phone number and email address through FBI case systems, and asked a Pentagon analyst for his electronic personnel file. That file ran about 65 pages and was almost uniformly glowing. One evaluation said Hasan’s research on Islam and military service had “extraordinary potential to inform national policy and military strategy.” The agent concluded the messages were research. He and his supervisor decided against interviewing Hasan or contacting his commanders. They worried that an interview could expose the Aulaqi investigation, and that it would harm Hasan’s career. Their written response said Hasan’s messages were “to date, unanswered.”
That wasn’t true, and nobody in Washington checked. The agent never searched the system that held the intercepted emails. He told the commission he didn’t know it existed. By May 27, Hasan had sent Aulaqi far more than two messages, and Aulaqi had written back twice.
The personnel file had gaps too. The local files at Walter Reed, which the agent couldn’t see, showed that Hasan’s program directors ranked him in the bottom 25 percent. He had been placed on probation and remediation, and a May 2007 memo faulted his professionalism. The Senate committee found the Army had enough information about Hasan’s views to discipline or discharge him. At the committee’s February 2011 hearing, Sen. Susan Collins said his “inadequate and misleading” evaluations helped lay the foundation for the FBI’s cursory review.
The pushback that stopped at a phone call
San Diego read Washington’s answer around June 11 and called it “slim.” One task force officer found it so strange that he suspected Hasan was a confidential source for the Washington office. Rather than call his FBI counterpart, the San Diego agent had a Defense Department officer phone the Washington agent. That officer recalled being told, in substance, that Washington doesn’t interview every Muslim man who visits extremist websites, and that the subject was “politically sensitive.” The commission is careful to say that line is his recollection, paraphrased, not a quotation. San Diego dropped it. Policy said the receiving office decides.
Hasan sent his last message to Aulaqi on June 16, 2009. The FBI took no further action on him until the shooting.
Eighteen messages, two offices, one search box
The commission’s count is 18 communications between Hasan and Aulaqi from December 2008 through June 2009. The San Diego agent and analyst reviewed every one as part of their Aulaqi workload, which passed 20,000 documents by June. The commission found they did not connect those messages to the lead they had sent. The system had no way to link a new message to an earlier one, so investigators tracked names by memory, notes or spreadsheets. The analyst never added Hasan to his.
The search tool made it worse. The commissioners ran a “full text” search for Hasan’s email address and got back nine of the 18 communications, even though the address appeared in every one. Only a different kind of search, by participant, returned all of them.
| Date | What happened | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Dec. 17, 2008 | Hasan’s first message to Aulaqi is collected and marked “Product of Interest” | San Diego |
| Jan. 7, 2009 | Hasan identified at Walter Reed; lead sent to Washington as Routine, Discretionary Action | San Diego |
| Feb. 19, 2009 | Aulaqi replies to Hasan for the first time | Collected in San Diego |
| Feb. 25, 2009 | Lead assigned, with no deadline | Washington |
| May 27, 2009 | Four-hour assessment; no interview; lead closed | Washington |
| June 11-15, 2009 | San Diego calls the review “slim” and raises it by phone, then drops it | Both |
| June 16, 2009 | Hasan’s last message to Aulaqi | Collected in San Diego |
| Nov. 5, 2009 | Hasan kills 13 people at Fort Hood | Texas |
What the commission would and wouldn’t conclude
Judge William Webster, a former director of both the FBI and the CIA, led the review. The commission found that the decision not to interview Hasan “was flawed.” It said pretext interviews are routine FBI work and suggested ones that would have been easy to use, such as asking Hasan about radicalization or inviting him to lecture on his research. It also found that the FBI’s “least intrusive means” rule did not bar further inquiry, and that San Diego’s doubts should have pushed Washington toward an interview.
It stopped short of two things. It declined to speculate about whether different decisions would have prevented the shooting. And it found that everyone who handled the Hasan information made mistakes but acted with good intent, with no misconduct warranting discipline. Its 18 recommendations went to policy, technology and training.
The Senate committee went further. Its report concluded the attack was preventable. Collins called the four-hour review the government’s “last, best chance” to identify Hasan’s radicalization.
The commission also tested a claim that surfaced later. In 2011, an FBI subject said Aulaqi told him he had given Hasan permission for the attack. The commission found no evidence of that, and noted that Aulaqi never answered Hasan’s first question, the one about soldiers who kill soldiers.
Primary source: Final Report of the William H. Webster Commission on the FBI, Counterterrorism Intelligence, and the Events at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009 (unclassified version, July 2012). Full context: Senate hearing record, “A Ticking Time Bomb” (Feb. 15, 2011), with the committee’s special report as an appendix.
Sources
- Webster Commission final report, unclassified version (July 19, 2012), Internet Archive copy
- FBI, “Judge Webster Delivers Webster Commission Report on Fort Hood” (July 19, 2012)
- U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, hearing S. Hrg. 112-151, “A Ticking Time Bomb” (Feb. 15, 2011)
- Task & Purpose, “Army sets execution date for Nidal Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood” (Oct. 7, 2026)
- KUTV, “Fort Hood shooter to face firing squad Dec. 3 after execution date is set” (Oct. 2026)