By Daniel Dombey in Washington
Published: January 15 2010 21:42 | Last updated: January 15 2010 21:42
US military and counter-intelligence establishments are ill-equipped to deal with domestic extremist threats, Robert Gates, US defence secretary, said on Friday in comments that highlighted American fears about home-grown terrorism.
He was speaking after the conclusion of an internal defence department review into the November shootings at the Fort Hood army base in Texas. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an army psychiatrist, has been accused of killing 13 people.
“It is clear that as a department we have not done enough to adapt to the evolving domestic internal security threat to American troops and military facilities that has emerged over the past decade,” Mr Gates said at the Pentagon.
“In this area, as in so many others, this department is burdened by 20th-century processes and attitudes, mostly rooted in the cold war. Our counterintelligence procedures are mostly designed to combat an external threat such as a foreign intelligence service.”
Concerns about US intelligence gathering have intensified since the Fort Hood killings, chiefly because of the failed Christmas day aircraft attack in Detroit and the murder of seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan by a Jordanian triple agent.
The Obama administration has declined to characterise the Fort Hood deaths as terrorism – in contrast with its description of the Detroit and Afghan episodes – in spite of criticism from US conservatives.
But concerns about extremism in the US have also been fanned by several other cases, including the detention of five Virginia-based students in Pakistan and the indictment of David Headley, a Chicago native, on charges of carrying out surveillance work for the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
“We are fortunate that we faced only one incident at one location,” said the report. “We cannot assume that this will remain the case in the future.” It added thatThe report said policies did not give commanders authority to intervene when personnel “make contact or establish relationships with persons or entities that promote self-radicalisation”.
Mr Gates said he was acting on the report’s call for Major Hasan’s supervisors to be held accountable for their failings.
In the aftermath of the shootings it has emerged that Major Hasan’s colleagues had been alarmed by his previous behaviour and that the authorities had intercepted e-mails in which he discussed killing US soldiers with Anwar al-Alaki, a radical cleric in Yemen. But no action was taken.